Design­ing Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs

I’ve lived in Lon­don for about 13 years, work­ing at var­i­ous agen­cies and also free­lance doing a lot of brand­ing and graph­ic iden­ti­ty. I got the call from Wes’ pro­duc­er because they need­ed a Japan­ese-speak­ing design­er. So I went in for a tri­al and did two weeks design­ing sake bot­tles and var­i­ous bits. At that point I had no idea of the amount of work that would be involved – I began work­ing on Isle of Dogs in Novem­ber 2015 and fin­ished in Jan­u­ary this year.

I nev­er count­ed but in terms of the over­all num­ber of indi­vid­ual pieces we made for the film, I’d say it was well into the thou­sands. Some sets alone had two hun­dred pieces. We were giv­en a wealth of ref­er­ence images from the pro­duc­tion design­er and the art direc­tor; con­cept draw­ings and stills pho­tographs from old Japan­ese films – a lot of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Yasu­jirō Ozu.

There were a lot of ref­er­ences from the Shōwa peri­od and some from the post­war era too, but most of the images were from the ​’60s and ​’70s, which is the peri­od Wes instinc­tive­ly grav­i­tat­ed towards. But the time peri­od is so ambigu­ous – it’s set 20 years in the future, but we don’t know from when. That gave us the free­dom to cre­ate a look that wasn’t chained to one par­tic­u­lar time period.

The set-up comes from a scene in Kurosawa’s High and Low. Our whisky is based on the famous Sun­to­ry brand, but because brand names (even made-up ones) come with legal headaches, for things like this we often used gener­ic names like ​“whisky”, ​“bak­ery”, ​“soda”, etc. We also had to change the famous tor­toise-shell pat­tern on the bot­tle to diamonds.

Wes already had a pret­ty good idea of how he want­ed the bis­cuits to look, includ­ing the shape and tex­ture. After we had done the dog­gy chop graph­ics, we used sim­i­lar visu­al ele­ments for the box­es of pup­py snaps.

This is one of the first things I worked on dur­ing my tri­al in the art depart­ment They appear mul­ti­ple times in the movie – the dog hov­el, the noo­dle bar and the sake bar. We gave the sake dog-relat­ed names, like Hachiko (the famous shi­ba-dog whose stat­ue guards Shibuya Cross­ing) and Chūken, which means ​“loy­al dog”. None of this is trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish, so it’s a bit of an east­er egg.

The car­ton of milk that Atari uses as a pil­low on the first night he and Chief are sep­a­rat­ed from the pack. For let­ter­ing ref­er­ence we looked at the bot­tle caps on Japan­ese milk bot­tles from the 1960s.