Isle of Dogs - 犬之岛

Those who have been reading my blog may remember I mentioned briefly about winning 4 movies premier tickets for the movie "Isle of Dogs" from an Instagram contest

Basically the contest is to post a picture of your dogs, then in the caption say why you and your dogs are inseparable 

So in the very morning, I help my dog put on his handsomest shirt and have him stand in the garden for me to do some photo shooting 

I think he was enormously uninterested in what I was doing haha

I had been waiting for the movie since it came out on 23th March, so naturally I was excited

Ying Sun turned down my invitation, so I ended up asking Nellie and Weng Yeow to go with me since Nellie expressed her interest in the film

To be honest, I want to write this blog in Chinese because I am feeling very groggy this morning and I am not sure I can convey my thought about the movie accurately in English

But I try to maintain a 1 to 1 ratio of English to Chinese post in my blog for whatever stupid reason haha

So Isle of Dogs, a very casual Movie Review !! 

First of all, VISUALLY STUNNING, SO FREAKING BEAUTIFUL 

If you are someone who is unaware of the art of Stop Motion, then you may not appreciate it that much

Ugly looking, was also my impression of most stop motion movie before I learned how they are made

Anyway, even among all the stop motion movie, Isle of Dogs' visual is for me the pinnacle of them all

When I was watching the movie, I couldn't help but to be amazed at the effort went into each scene

Story wise, Nellie and Weng Yeow are of the opinion that there is no underlying message in the film or the message is too childish and does not hold in adult's world (I forgot the specifics)

Anyway I did some research online, found that it is mostly about standing up against tyranny, anti racism etc.

To be honest, I rarely dig into the underlying message of any film because admittedly I am quite a casual movie goer

I can be content with a good story, good acting, and good cinematography :)

There is one thing I only realized after watching some movie review about the movie

Chris Stuckmann opined that having no sub for the Japanese language was a weird choice because most of the time we follow the little boy Atari who speaks Japanese to the dog

BUT, credit to Wes Anderson's fucking brilliant idea, it was all to make you watch the movie in the dogs' perspective

From a dog perspective, we don't speak and understand human language (Japanese), and therefore we deduced what he is saying from gesture, tone, and some simple English 

There was a scene, after the fight with Robot dogs and human, Atari was tending to the wounds of the dogs

In that scene, he said some simple English "Sitto"(meaning sit), and the dogs immediately understand he said sit, and therefore they obey eagerly and sit hahaha

I felt like it cleverly depict the quintessential human-dog interaction as this is the first thing we teach our dog

I am still quite sorry that Ying Sun said she is uninterested after watching the trailer for 10 seconds, because seriously the movie is a feast to the eyes

All of the setting, and characters are handmade, moved frame by frame to make them seem as if they are moving

A lot of creativity went into creating a certain scene, I enjoyed watching the making the movie as much as the movie itself

And also of course, the brilliant director who has amassed numerous fans all over the world for being one of a kind in the movie industry, Wed Anderson
Looking forward to his next movie