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Its a series of moving paintings,tableaux vivants, a goofy dog comedy, a grim totalitarian allegory.
Watch: How to Make Your Own Wes Anderson Soundtrack
Its the damnedest thing.
Greta Gerwig supplies the voice of a human American teenager, Courtney B. Vance a presumably non-canine modern narrator.
Japanese characters speak in Japanese, sans subtitles.
An intertitle calls this section,The Search for Spots.
(Leonard Nimoy, RIP.)
Or perhaps theyre just dogs it works either way.
Whats foremost this beingun film de Wes isle mise-en-scene.
Perfection, too, is stop-motions artificiality.
You dont want fluidity, seamlessness.
You want to see behavior broken down into its essential components.
Never mind the Oscars.
(The production design is by Paul Harrod and Adam Stockhausen, the art direction by Curt Enderle.
Its not on the breathtaking level of the visuals what could be?
but its superb in its own right, its one-liners not just clever (Stop licking your wounds!)
but redolent of loneliness and an exiles abiding incomprehension.
But that would be, in this context, unkind.
To be a sentient being stuck in a Wes Anderson frame would be daunting.
Perhaps thats how he feels.
Isle of Dogswas nominated for two Oscars in 2019, including Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score.
