Isle of Dogs

The only thing that struck me throughout this roughly animated dog film was that how different and often strangely compelling the movie is. Though in the animation segment, it comes across as the first draft of drawings by a Disney or Marvel artist, without any fine-tuning, just thoughts around the characters, the story compels you inexorably.

Set on a cold Japanese island, where dog hating is an administrative compulsion, propelled by mean extermination scientists, wicked gangsters, dog haters and an army of canine saturators, the poor animals are incarcerated on a cold trash island from where there is only one escape and that’s slow, horrible, dog-flu infected death.

A teen Samaritan, indeed, turns up on the grim island in search of his bodyguard dog Spots, but a lot has happened in the interregnum which unfolds with a lot of twists and turns even as the mayoral army and “dogs you can’t smell” run in hot pursuit to annihilate the entire population and the boy in tow.

Isle of Dogs is a differently enabled, differently sketched, differently told and differently shown canine film which brings out all the emotions in favour of the four-legged besieged population which is systematically been hunted down to no particular reason other than a centuries old revenge plan by a Japanese clan. It is quite a special film for dog lovers. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 8 July, 2018