Author: Piya Sinha-Roy / Source: EW.com
To read more about Isle of Dogs, pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly on stands Friday, or buy it here now. Don’t forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.
Welcome to the Isle of Dogs, another adventure from the detail-oriented mind of Wes Anderson, where scrappy, diseased canines are exiled to a faraway island by order of a menacing politician, Mayor Kobayashi of Megasaki City, who commits election fraud, eliminates his opponents, and schemes to exterminate all dogs to meet his controlling ends.
If the plot sounds like an allegory of real-life politics on immigration, it’s because, as Anderson explains, real-life issues infiltrated the conception of his film. “The world changed quickly and harshly,” says the filmmaker, who spoke to EW on the phone from his adoptive hometown of Paris. “We kept seeing our movie on the front pages of newspapers — not just in America but all over the place.”
In the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki, 20 years in the future, Kobayashi has banned the snout-fever-ridden dog population to the aptly named Trash Island. The mayor’s lonely 12-year-old ward, Atari (Koyu Rankin), crashes a small plane onto Trash Island and searches for his beloved mutt Spots, aided by a ragtag pack of dogs. Crafting stop-motion animation comes down to the minute details, Anderson says.
More than 2,200 puppets and 250 sets were built in different scales for Isle of Dogs. Production designers Adam Stockhausen and Paul Harrod said the film’s aesthetic is the 1963 vision of a futuristic Japan, drawing from the urban architecture, advertising, and graphic design of 1960s Japan as well as old Japanese woodblock prints and tapestries. Trash Island alone, Stockhausen explained, was delineated into different zones that each had different landscapes and attributes, from a black sand beach to…
The post Wes Anderson explains why he went to Japan for Isle of Dogs appeared first on FeedBox.