erejones:

In Defence of Wes Anderson’s ‘Isle of Dogs’

Much has been said about Wes Anderson’s film ‘Isle of Dogs’. Much of it – deservingly – has been glowing praise of a sensitive and quietly brilliant film. But this film is more controversial than most.

A quick Google search will reveal that many cinema-goers accuse Anderson’s latest picture of cultural appropriation. A weighty term, certainly. The director has yet to respond, so I’ll try my best to fight his corner in this respect. Before even reading its content (so I’m told), a good historian will analyse the context of any given source. I think that’s what we must consider when dealing with this (or indeed with any) film. ‘Isle of Dogs’ is an American film directed by an American. ‘Why should American perspectives be the default?’ asks one commenter. I’d agree as a general rule that too much Americanisation can’t be a good thing, but I’m afraid this film has every right to be American by default.

Anderson, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t actually speak Japanese, doesn’t hold citizenship and has never lived there. As such, in making a film about Japan, he is an outsider looking in. For some observers, perhaps this already sets the alarm bells ringing. It shouldn’t. For centuries, writers and artists have looked beyond their shores for inspiration – aesthetic and literary. Shakespeare used his understanding of the cities of Venice and Verona (in spite, we believe, of never having been) as the bustling and confluent backdrops to ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ respectively. Edward Thomas, an English poet in the early half of the Twentieth Century, used the traditions and lyricisms of Wales (my country) as a recurring guide of sorts in his now sadly overlooked poetry. His contemporary, Alun Lewis, did the same upon military deployment to Burma and India. Forgive me but I fail to see how this is any different from Anderson’s film: either none of this is cultural appropriation or all of it is – but if so, I’ve heard no complaints on the part of these writers. I think we can criticise Shakespeare and Lewis for not always being completely accurate or entirely sensitive in their writing but to burden them with the term ‘cultural appropriation’ would be a lacklustre and clumsy use of that term. I can’t believe we live in a world so globalised and so free – but yet I read in the ‘Hollywood Reporter’ the story sub-headline ‘Who gets to make what art?’. And I can’t believe the answers should be anything other than ‘everyone’ and ‘everything’.

The film reviewer for the Express couldn’t understand why the film had to be set in Japan anyway. This is quite a silly question, because you could surely ask this of any film. With a little thought, any film’s rough plot can be transcribed onto any location. To think of but one example, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ could have easily been the tale of a council estate resident from the town where I live in the South Wales Valleys. The real question ought to be: what is the added value of setting this film here? Anderson is an aesthete, so the way a film looks is hugely important to him. ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ uses the landscapes and coastline of New England to create an organic and bracing backdrop to the story of the two young sweethearts. Similarly, ‘Isle of Dogs’, Anderson uses a melange of Japanese cultural treasures to provide a rich world in which the story is able to develop. Take the taiko drummers, for example, who are used both on and off screen in Desplat’s soundtrack to evoke a deep and pounding grandness from which the film only benefits. But also, in a highly politically aware film, the viewer is led to think contextually about the politics of modern Japan and what it might represent. Seeing KOBAYASHI’s name and tensed, solemn face displayed as a massive poster behind the podium in the town hall recalls both Orson Wells’ ‘Citizen Kane’, a politically timely polemic, and a night I spent in Japan in October late last year watching the election coverage at a bar. It was unnerving at worst to see Abe’s ruling party sweep the results. I later spoke to a friend who lectures in Japan having grown up in Wales who reiterated his worry that Japan was a one-party state with Abe at its authoritarian helm. This is one of many themes that Anderson returns to in ‘Isle if Dogs’. Are we supposed to see Kobayashi’s monumental electoral success coupled with his thuggish, corrupt brand of politics and populist, anti-acadaemia streak as a not-so-subtle reference to Abe’s grasp over his country in 2018? I think that’s for the viewer to decide, but most importantly, I think Anderson as an artist has every right to make these comparisons. Crucially, he has the same right to make them if he is born in Houston, or Huddersfield, or Hamburg, or Hiroshima.

I think there’s an irony in criticising the film for having a foreign supporting character as the sole ‘white saviour’ when that simply isn’t the case, whilst instead the greatest theme of this movie is that cooperation is the most important thing in voicing political, fact-based dissent. It is a powerful thing that Atari, the protagonist, works with both an American foreign exchange student (if unwittingly) and the principally oppressed group of canines to stand up to Kobayashi as a collaborative force. The only American character reminds us that this American film can, with all due attention to cultural sensitivities, both love Japan (as Anderson clearly does) and criticise it in equal measure. Through this character, Anderson reminds us that there is no geographical or political limit to our impact on the world in 2018. And I know that if we weren’t able to write about anything beyond the garden fence, we’d be bored as hell.