“Isle of Dogs” tells the story of Atari Kobayashi, 12-year-old ward to corrupt Mayor Kobayashi. Set in the Japanese Archipelago, twenty years in the future when canine-saturation has reached epidemic proportions and an outbreak of Snout-Fever rips through the city of Megasaki. Dog-Flu threatens to cross the species threshold and enter the human disease pool. Mayor Kobayashi of Uni Prefecture calls for a hasty quarantine: the expulsion and containment of all breeds, both stray and domesticated. By official decree, Trash Island becomes an exile colony - The Isle of Dogs.
Six months later, a tiny, single-engine, miniature airplane crash-lands onto the teeming waste-land. A pack of five starving but fierce abandoned dogs scrambles to the wreckage and discovers a twelve-year-old pilot staggering from the burning fuselage. Atari, orphan-ward to Mayor Kobayashi. With the assistance of his new canine friends, Atari begins a search for his lost dog, Spots -- and, in the process, exposes a conspiracy that threatens to destroy all the dogs of Megasaki City forever.
The movie is writer/director Wes Anderson’s 9th feature film and his second stop-motion animated film, “Isle of Dogs” is a grand adventure set in a near-future Japan in the grips of a canine crisis and mass anti-dog hysteria. Here, in a far-flung floating junktopia known only as Trash Island, a scrappy pack of exiled dogs who’ve banded together to survive makes an amazing discovery: the crash-landing of a little human pilot who will take them on a life-changing journey.
“We wanted to do something sort of futuristic. We wanted a pack of alpha dogs who were all the leader. And we wanted to live in a land of garbage,” says Anderson. “The Japanese setting came entirely because of Japanese cinema. We love Japan, and we wanted to do something that was really inspired by Japanese movies, so we ended up mixing the dog movie and Japan movie together.”
