“He’s extremely specific,” composer Alexandre Desplat explained in an interview several years ago about his working relationship with Wes Anderson. “Every single shot, every single line, every single camera move, and every single moment of music is precisely designed by Wes.” This will come as no surprise to followers of Anderson’s work. Indeed, a thorough, painstaking, sometimes fussy attention to detail has always been the defining feature of the director’s craft—the widely imitated, much-parodied hallmark of his unmistakable style. One can be certain that Anderson carefully oversaw the composition of Desplat’s score for his new film, Isle of Dogs. How could it be otherwise? Sound, for him, is not extraneous or incidental. It’s an integral component of his artistic vision.
Isle of Dogs concerns the efforts of a plucky 12-year-old boy, Atari (Koyu Rankin), to retrieve his beloved “short-haired Oceanic speckle-eared sport hound,” Spots (Liev Schreiber), from an offshore island dump outside the fictional near-future Japanese metropolis of Megasaki City, whose despotic mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) has banished canines from city grounds after an outbreak of infectious snout fever. In short, it’s a classic Anderson romp. A marvel of intricate stop-motion animation, the film astonishes with every frame: each tuft of fur and thread of fabric, each morsel of food and scrap of garbage, looks handcrafted, color-coordinated, and meticulously arranged. A miniature bento box prepared with patience is so richly detailed it seems edible. A kidney transplant performed in full looks so real you can hardly help but squirm.
Anderson may be a brazen aesthete, but he isn’t superficial. And so while Isle of Dogs is about the rousing exploits of man’s best friend, it’s also about companionship, fraternity, and such old-fashioned virtues as working together to overcome adversity and practicing empathy in times of bitter strife. The music reflects these themes. Desplat’s score, in its synthesis of contrasting styles, embodies the film’s spirit of teamwork, of cherishing rather than fearing difference. The eastern instrumentation appropriate to the setting—the taiko drumming arrangements by Kaoru Watanabe that bookend the film in particular—is complemented by Desplat’s own sensibility, which is rooted in the Hollywood tradition. But what derives expressly from Japan has not been co-opted irresponsibly. Desplat pays homage with earnest fascination and respect.
This is not so much Japanese music, to put it another way, as a westerner’s idea of Japanese music. Desplat’s score draws on the conventions and cliches of a broadly exported popular culture, creating something that will ring true to American ears raised on anime, Studio Ghibli, and old Akira Kurosawa movies caught on TV. This is in keeping with the film’s somewhat controversial conception of Japan—not as an authentic country, but a fantasyland devised by an admiring outsider. In the Anderson diorama, the most sensible tribute to Kurosawa is the appearance of music from both Seven Samurai (“Kanbei & Katsushiro—Kikuchiyo’s Mambo”) and the more obscure but equally superb Drunken Angel (“Kosame No Oka”). And when all else fails, he can always cue more taiko drumming. The instrument runs through the picture like a kind of shorthand.
Conspicuous contrasts abound. Most notable, perhaps, is the interpolation of Prokofiev’s decidedly un-Japanese orchestral suite Lieutenant Kijé, which seems to have been used only to emphasize the wilful incongruity: Anderson wants to make clear that he’s not interested in consistency or verisimilitude. At times, the orchestra seems to veer suddenly from a Japanese motif to a blatantly American flourish, and sometimes back again. Those saxophones and clarinets tend to flair up with the jazzy verve of one of Henry Mancini’s scores for Blake Edwards, as on the irrepressibly buoyant “Second Crash-Landing + Bath House + Beach Attack” (an accurate title that encapsulates well the energy of the movie). The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s sweet, understated “I Won’t Hurt You,” meanwhile, returns Anderson squarely to his wheelhouse of pleasant mixtape-ready deep cuts from post-war American rock bands.
“Technique can only go a small way toward explaining the effect of a film as intricate and vivid as this,” the critic Dave Kehr wrote of Rushmore in the late 1990s, “with its simultaneous sobriety and eccentricity, its love of grand gestures and its respect for the tiniest fluctuations of emotions, its underlying sadness and great, bursting hopefulness.” This, Kehr felt, was “the stuff of poetry,” and Anderson’s poetic streak has only become more pronounced since then. Isle of Dogs is a film and a soundtrack of grand gestures and tiny fluctuations, of sadness and hope. It affects the mournful quality of Japanese theatre, then zips into the mid-century L.A. exuberance of giddy brass and woodwinds and drums. What’s most evident throughout is the warmth and thoughtfulness behind it all.
