Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs gets a delightful… | Little White Lies

Trailers

Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs gets a delight­ful first trailer

21 Sep 2017

Words by Emily Bray

The director’s Japan-set stop-motion fea­ture fol­lows a young boy search­ing for his dog.

Wes Anderson’s newest film Isle of Dogs sees the writer/​director return to the medi­um of stop-motion ani­ma­tion for the first time since 2009’s Fan­tas­tic Mr Fox. Lit­tle is known about the plot of this canine caper, oth­er than it’s set in Japan 20 years in future and fol­lows a young boy’s quest to retrieve his miss­ing dog.

Anderson’s past films have been quite unkind to our fur­ry four-legged friends, rack­ing up a num­ber of casu­al­ties: Snoopy the Fox Ter­ri­er in Moon­rise King­dom was hit by a stray arrow; Spitz the Bea­gle in Fan­tas­tic Mr Fox ate poi­so­nous blue­ber­ries; and Buck­ley the Bea­gle in The Roy­al Tenen­baums was struck by a car.

Per­haps this film is Anderson’s way of redeem­ing him­self to the canine com­mu­ni­ty? The first teas­er poster for the film also fea­tured a pile of plane debris and some­one dressed in a pilot suit com­plete with para­chute, allud­ing to some sort of crash land­ing – let’s just hope it wasn’t on top of a dog.

Ander­son has divulged that the film is heav­i­ly influ­enced by Japan­ese screen­writer and direc­tor Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, as well as the Rankin-Bass stop-motion Christ­mas spe­cials. Edward Nor­ton fea­tures in the lead role as a dog called Rex, while fel­low Wes reg­u­lars Til­da Switon, Jeff Gold­blum and Bill Mur­ray also make an appear­ance along­side Scar­lett Johans­son, Bryan Cranston and Yoko Ono.

Tonal­ly ambigu­ous, we don’t yet know whether Isle of Dogs will be child friend­ly, but if its US release date (420) is any­thing to go by, then our guess is prob­a­bly not…

Isle of Dogs is set for release in the UK on 30 March, 2018.

Two illustrated book covers depicting a smiling Black man wearing a hat and tie, with a city skyline in the background

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