In honour of _Isle of Dogs_, a haiku: A film about dogs Played and directed by gods Don't eat yellow snow Beauty, poetry, and charm. _Isle of Dogs_ is Wes Anderson at his best.

It's a typical quirky Wes Anderson film. It looks great and has a good score. The story is heartwarming. I love the way all the dogs interacted with each other. The dialogue is fun and snappy. I thought it was interesting to have the humans speaking their native language. I'm not sure why Wes Anderson felt the need to make this set in Japan but I did enjoy the aesthetic he used for the culture.

This movie, as I was expecting from director Wes Anderson, is visually stunning. The artistic choices worked really great for me. The stop-motion is absolutely flawless, one of the best I've ever seen. The dedication to such a labor-intensive craft, that will look like CGI to many people, is admirable. Huge props to the animators! The story, on the other hand, didn't excite me as I had hoped. While the premise was very interesting, I felt that the story could have take a better direction, narratively speaking. Some side plots felt useless and should have been skipped, while others could've been expanded a little bit more. The other dogs in the pack could have used some more lines, especially considering the A class actors that voiced them. I really liked the idea of making the dogs speak English while the humans spoke undubbed Japanese. It really forced the viewer to sympathize more with the dogs, making the human world distant and cold (specially for people, like me, who are not adept to japanese culture). I definitely did not like the deus ex machina at the end. The situation should have been resolved more elegantly. In the end, it's a movie that could have been perfect, but the unremarkable(to me) development of the story keeps from being a truly masterpiece. Thankfully, Anderson's stylistic choices were spot on, appealing and just quirky enough. The jokes all work really well ( [spoiler] the recurring "rumor" gag was really funny [/spoiler]). The film flow quite well, with just the right runtime. 8/10 P.S.: go watch the "making of" of the sushi scene. Truly a gargantuan work for one of the best looking food scene in animation history.

Wes Anderson goes back to stop-motion puppets, using the same team he last employed in The Fantastic Mr. Fox. As with any Anderson film, it's meticulously composed and ornately decorative, peppered with spots of dry humor and awkward bits of stumbling dialog. It treasures the in-between moments and personal spoils, often at the expense of greater rewards. Sufficiently quirky and offbeat, but I had trouble getting emotionally attached, which is odd as that's usually one of the director's greatest strengths. Everyone's just so damned somber and drawn all the time. Understandable, given they've been exiled to a landfill island and slated for extinction, but still. Give us a little flavor when you're fighting robot canines or riding a suspended mine car through a raging inferno. A fun concept and another visual showpiece for the highlight reel, but in the end it's rather dull and monotonous.

Isle of Dogs is one of the most visually impressive animated films ever made. The stop-motion animation is extraordinary, and the amount of detail packed into every scene is staggering. Unfortunately, the style is often the star of the show. The first 20 minutes are absolutely fantastic, but the longer it runs, the more its charm wears off, and the story isn't compelling enough to take its place.