Back in 2009, Wes Anderson took what seemed an odd-left turn, artistically speaking, by releasing Fantastic Mr. Fox – not only an adaptation of another author’s work (his first), but a PG-rated family movie, its cast of critters rendered in stop-motion animation. Yet as strange as the project initially sounded, he ended up creating a movie that not only combined and streamlined his recurring thematic concerns, but set them in a world he was able to create entirely from scratch. This admirer deemed it “the quintessential Wes Anderson movie,” and I’ll stand by that appraisal.
It’s been nearly a decade, but Mr. Anderson has finally made another stop-motion movie (not to complain; the process is, by its very nature, time consuming). It’s called Isle of Dogs, set on, well, an island of dogs, somewhere off the coast of Japan, and concerns that children’s-story standby of a boy searching for his dog. And here, happily, is its trailer:
The voice cast consists of the usual combination of Anderson regulars (Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Fisher Stevens, Bob Balaban, F. Murray Abraham, and, of course, Bill Murray) and newbies (Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, Liev Schreiber, Greta Gerwig, Courtney B. Vance, Yoko Ono). And yes, it’s hard not to notice that there aren’t many Asian actors voicing this Japan-set tale, and I’m sure we’ll have a whole conversation about that when it comes out in March. Also, we have to wait until March?