The Films of Wes Anderson: Isle of Dogs
Anderson’s second animated film may be his worst feature
It seems that I was at least partially right in my general distaste for Anderson over the last few years. Having gotten to his work from the 2010s, it begins to lose a lot of the power that he had worked so hard to maintain in the 1990s and 2000s. His plots become overwhelming, his characters become increasingly hazy and lacklustre and the style, though still interesting, stops growing as much.
Isle of Dogs is, certainly, the worst of Anderson’s films to date. Its plot is borderline incoherent, jumping frantically back and forth chronologically searching for semblances of structure and meagre points of interest that, often, are barely maintained. The dialogue can be mildly funny — though this is also Anderson’s least comedic film, too — but much of the plotting is hasty and jolting. There is no smoothness, no refined definition.
This lack of definition is also applicable, for the first time in Anderson’s career up to this point, to his characters. As has been mentioned often throughout this Anderson retrospective, his biggest strengths are in how he writes his characters and chooses the best performers to play them. Here, the characters are poorly written enough that the actors, though doing their best, feel under-written and…
