All bark and no bite | 28 March 2018

The latest film from Wes Anderson is a doggy animation set in a fantasy Japan and as there was a screening in London earlier this week for owners and their dogs I took my own dog, Monty. He said he liked it. It was ‘good’, he said. I did not especially trust his opinion so investigated further. As good as, say, drinking from the toilet? ‘No,’ he said, ‘not as good as that, obvs.’ As good as this tennis ball here? ‘No’, he said, ‘because a tennis ball is always AMAZING!’ As good as cheese? ‘Nothing is as good as cheese. Fair play, you caught me out there.’ You didn’t find, I continued, that while the animation was compelling the story was not, and as with so much of Wes Anderson’s work (Fantastic Mr Fox, Grand Budapest Hotel) it offers a feast for the eyes but little for the heart? And didn’t you sleep through most of it anyhow? ‘But I woke up to slurp my genitals! At least twice!’ he protested. And I had to give him that. Still, I think you can see why no dog has yet to be offered a column in Sight & Sound, even though it would likely make the magazine a livelier read.

Isle of Dogs is visually exquisite, truly. Anderson has used stop-motion animation and the detail is phenomenal. The dogs are wonderfully rendered. You can see every pore on every nose and every strand of fur and every flea scuttling through that fur. In fact, everything is wonderfully rendered, including the hot drinks with steam rising, created by tiny wisps of cotton wool. Every frame is packed to the hilt, so in this respect you could look at it for ever and to hell with slurping your genitals. (I didn’t slurp them once.)