The first trailer for Wes Anderson’s long awaited stop motion film, Isle of Dogs, has been released.
The film, set in a dystopian future Japan, is one where all dogs have been outlawed to an island of garbage after an outbreak of canine flu. It follows a twelve year old boy named Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin) as he attempts to retrieve his lost pup, Spots, with the help of a gang of local dogs.
The stop-motion animation techniques are the same as Anderson used in his 2009 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. The cast also features many of Anderson’s regular collaborators, such as Edward Norton, Bill Murray, and Tilda Swinton, as well as Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, and Yoko Ono.
Anderson has said that this new film is heavily influenced by the films of Seven Samurai and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and the film’s crew contains a number of Japanese artists and musicians such as Jen Watanabe and Mari Natsuki. However, it has already faced some backlash for white-washing the majority of the cast, especially as two of its members- Johansson and Swinton, have been at the centre of recent white washing debates.
Isle of Dogs is released on 30th March 2018. Watch the trailer below:
