"Canis Island" tells the story of an outbreak of canine influenza in a fictional future Japanese city of Megasaki. Domestic dogs were isolated and abandoned by humans and exiled to a garbage island. Five leading dogs met here and helped a Japanese boy find his The story of the pet dog Spots. The structure of the story is simple, the pace is fast, the visual information is rich, both aesthetically and plotly, this is again a typical Wes Anderson film .
Let's start with the shortcomings. Like many comedy films, this film has an engaging process and a slightly lackluster ending. Since the character structure of the boy Atari and the American exchange student Tracy is a little hollow, the complicated plot of the dog Spots in the later period also has some load on the main line. At the end, the chaotic climax of the harmony between the human and the dog and the overthrow of the coup seems to be a squib, which is completely expected. Among them, the rules and regulations are a little less unrestrained .
"Isle of Dogs" is Wes Anderson's second stop-motion animation after "Fantastic Daddy Fox." Stop-motion animation is not made by CGI, but actually uses puppets to pose the movement and expression changes of characters frame by frame . This handcrafted cartoon uses many unexpected everyday materials. The smoke of the manga-style fights in the film is made of cotton. The changes of human lips are the result of alternating stitching models of different mouths. The sea water is processed by the computer after the food fresh film, and the micro scene modeling that can tell the story is very family-oriented.
However, "Canis Island" can not be regarded as a complete children's cartoon. As a PG-13 level, the film not only has too realistic bloody elements, such as bitten off dog ears, dog corpses, chefs cutting raw fish and other scenes, but also The main thing is that the subject is too gloomy and sluggish . Disease-ridden environments, rotting food, hungry and thin dogs, etc., accentuate their filthiness in contrast to the tasteful contrast to Japanese culture in human civilization. The compositional aesthetics of the film reveal a touch of gloom from beginning to end . Whether it is the decay and desolation of the garbage island adapted from Ukiyo-e, or the abandoned and outdated industrial area, almost everything on the island reveals incompetence and malaise. The dystopian ecology under the political conspiracy shown by Trash Island is far from the selection of mainstream American cartoons. It has a strong early Japanese animation style, such as "Akira" and other cartoons with the thinking of scientific and technological environmental civilization. Isle of Dogs is one such film, and it's by no means another Disney-style American animation . What distinguishes this film from American popular cartoons is not its political element, but its sultry style, which may be a compliment to Anderson's minimalist director.
Many Anderson fans are immersed in and chasing after the balance of composition and the comfort of color in Anderson's work, often ignoring its mastery of rhythm. Most of Wes Anderson's films rely heavily on rhythm to tell a story, and this one is no exception . Drum beats, frame movement, and dialogue pauses are the three dimensions that support the progress of the story. To put it bluntly, it is to use the audio-visual rhythm to drive the rhythm of thinking to tell the story .
For example, when a group of people were discussing the topic of food during the trip, the frame left Chief and focused on the conversation of the rest of the canine members. Chief was excluded, so there were two pictures on the left and one on the right, and Chief's picture existed outside the picture. It draws our attention all the time. When the discussion is over, Chief pauses and says that he has not always been a stray dog. The camera returns to Chief again. At this time, Chief becomes out of the discussion and gets attention. Surrounded by Chief, the temporary disappearance brought a sense of jumping in character transformation . This kind of rhythm change benefits from the movement of the frame and the pause of the dialogue. There are countless examples of this in the film, and most of them are accompanied by the promotion of drum music, and the change of the characters' line of sight/dialogue and the frame. This multi-element rhythm and march is Anderson's best narrative method , not only replacing the traditional camera editing method, but also more suitable for shooting under the micro-scenario model, and also firmly grasps our audio-visual attention.
Anderson admitted in the interview that the inspiration for the story's background in Japan came from his love for masters such as Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki , and aesthetically referenced and shared the 19th century ukiyo-e woodblock print artists Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige. work. The image construction of Mayor Kobayashi in the film is also based on Toshiro Mifune on the Japanese screen, although many of the homeless characters in Toshiro Mifune's works are more like Chief as a stray dog who refuses to obey discipline and ignores power. In conclusion, it is the tragic themes that are most inspired by the Japanese films (mainly Akira Kurosawa) for Anderson . Whether it's "Canis Island"'s tribute to the tragic soundtracks in Kurosawa's films "Seven Samurai" and "The Drunken Angel", or the previously discussed sluggish style, chaotic endings and stimulating material beyond the scope of children's audiences, etc. The implementation and persistence of Anderson's new film has the withering beauty of the hard-line Japanese that has been passed down .
To extend the discussion a step further, you must know that the "sorrow" in Akira Kurosawa's films is very similar to some of Shakespeare's works, and the relationship between the two is also a popular topic of film studies. For example, the plot theme of Hamlet's revenge for his father is borrowed from "Sweet Dreams of the Evil Man", and the tragedy of the division of the family property of the three sons in "Ran" is also derived from "King Lear". In fact, there are many traces of Shakespeare in Kurosawa's works, which are bleak and tragic. Like Shakespeare-influenced Akira Kurosawa, Wes Anderson's stop-motion comedy incorporates a tragic style that spans Eastern and Western cultures . It can be said that with the inspiration given by Akira Kurosawa, Anderson created the tragic and comical, miraculously vivid and non-child-oriented animated drama "Canis Island". Is it possible to have a bold and interesting guess: Maybe the source of the sadness and beauty of "Canis Island" really passed from Shakespeare's pen to Anderson's hands through Akira Kurosawa's film?
—FIN—
Original statement: This article was originally written by "Liu Zhengyi", a film critic of Shadow Eater. For reprints, please contact Shadow Eater. Welcome to the public account of "Shadow Eater"~
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