Wes Anderson is one of the directors who is best at balancing authorship and popular aesthetics, and he once again proves with his new work "Isle of Dogs" that form and technology are only means, and aesthetics and taste are the charm of a director.
If you want to find the person who best combines the Hollywood business model with art films among the new generation of directors, Wes Anderson is a well-deserved model of success. The last feature film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, won him several awards, including Oscars, the Berlin Film Festival and the British Academy Film Awards, and not long ago, the new film "Isle of Dogs" premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, and Wes Anderson started his "new season" with a Silver Bear trophy for Best Director.
<h1>Ukiyo-e style</h1>
Isle of Dogs is Wes Anderson's second stop-motion animation work, which is more critically realistic than its predecessor, The Great Fox Daddy.
The story takes place in the future City of Nagasaki in Japan, where a canine flu has thrown the entire city into a panic. The mayor of Kobayashi, who is in charge of the district, issued an emergency quarantine operation, demanding the immediate expulsion of dogs and the exile of all dogs in the city, including domestic dogs, to deserted garbage islands. In search of his dog, the mayor's 12-year-old nephew, Masaharu Kobayashi, secretly flew a small plane to the garbage island and embarked on his own adventure. During this dangerous journey, Masaharu Kobayashi meets a group of exiled dogs, who unite with the dogs, expose the conspiracy of mayor Kobayashi, and defend the city's equality and freedom.
The biggest attraction of the film is the director's presentation of Japanese style and Japanese culture. From "Crossing Darjeeling" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel" to "Isle of Dogs", Wes Anderson has always been interested in presenting exotic cultures and spaces. A large part of this preference stems from his fandom complex, and great films from all over the world are the muse that inspired him, and he always wants to use the creative reasons to gain insight into the film locations he loves and present them again from his own perspective.
Stills from "The Grand Budapest Hotel"
"Crossing Darjeeling" is an Indian love inspired by Satyajit Rey, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is a tribute to Hollywood films set in Central Europe, and "Isle of Dogs" is inspired by Japanese film masters such as Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki.
"The setting in Japan is entirely because of Japanese movies. We loved Japan and wanted to be inspired by Japanese movies, so we ended up merging this movie about dogs with a Japanese movie. Wes Anderson said that in addition to his selfishness as a fan, the sense of loneliness and order of life shown in "Isle of Dogs" seems to be particularly suitable for display in Japanese culture.
In the interview, Wes Anderson mentioned that the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and his films are the most important reference for the aesthetics of "Isle of Dogs", and this influence does not lie in a specific film scene or plot, but in Kurosawa's films.
The overall temperament of the film comes from Akira Kurosawa, and the space and architectural design are inspired by another Japanese film master, Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu's depictions of the postwar Japanese family are precise and delicate, and most of those family stories take place in traditional Japanese architecture, and he knows that cramped spaces and traditional etiquette subtly affect Japanese family relationships.
The relationship between space and people in Ozu's lens has influenced many film directors. The relationship between people and people in "Isle of Dogs", the relationship between people and dogs, the establishment of these emotional tones depends heavily on spatial shaping. In this regard, art director Paul Harold even felt that Wes Anderson was not borrowing from Ozu, but that they already had a lot of similarities. In an interview, Harold once said: "Architecturally, I must say that Ozu has the greatest influence on the setting of this film. I'm not the first to say that Ozu and Wes have similarities: precision, the use of symmetry, and the structured layout of the characters. ”
In addition to film, works of art are also important tools for Wes Anderson to construct Japanese aesthetics. The 19th-century Edo period ukiyo-e painters Hiroseki Ando and Katsushika Hokusai provided him with artistic references that included color, line, and overall cultural atmosphere.
It can be seen from the Presentation of the Central European style in "The Grand Budapest Hotel" that simply copying a regional vision and culture does not satisfy Wes Anderson, and he must integrate personal taste and aesthetic on this basis. In this regard, Erica Dorn, the art designer of Isle of Dogs, has the most to say, the designer who grew up in Japan knows About Japan and knows Wes Anderson better. "The world in Isle of Dogs is an alternative real world. It looks and feels like Japan, but it's a slightly dreamy version, or a more Wes Anderson version. Dorne said.
<h1>Fun and aesthetic</h1>
As the art designer Dorne said, Wes Anderson's vision of Japan is not really Japan, just like the "Budapest Hotel" of that year, the audience can easily discern the regional and cultural background of the film from the visual elements, but there is always a sense of illusion that haunts the mind, which is the sense of alienation that Wes Anderson strongly controls.
"Isle of Dogs" is not only stylistically inseparable from Japanese culture, but the director also creates a sense of alienation between the film and the audience with a unique form of presentation. At the beginning of the film, a note appears on the screen: the dog bark has been translated into English. "Isle of Dogs" is mainly from the perspective of dogs, so the dialogue between dogs is presented in English dialogue. People are reduced to supporting characters in the movie, they don't speak English, they only speak Japanese. This design is on the one hand a need for a sense of form, and on the other hand, the estrangement of language can increase the communication barrier between the two species.
As a visually clean director, Wes Anderson didn't want to use subtitles to interfere with the composition and distract the audience, so he made a bold attempt to do so, and all the Japanese in the film did not have English subtitles, but used simultaneous interpretation, translation, and illustration to convey the information in the Japanese lines. This complex and dull form actually makes the film more humorous.
If you look back at Wes Anderson's films, although the stories are different, the loneliness of the marginal characters, the incomprehension and nostalgia between people are the themes that are always explored in his films.
The same is true in Isle of Dogs. As the nephew of the most privileged mayor and the adopted son, Kobayashi's only friend and relative is a watchdog. As the protagonists of the movie, the dogs' life situation is either bleak to the end, or in a kind of nostalgia for the good old days. Monarchs, bosses, kings, dukes, four domineering but wandering dogs on the garbage island have all had a good life, a balanced diet, regular grooming and annual physical examinations, and the love of their owners, these comfortable and decent days are the old times they often miss. The other dog, the "head", is an outlier, a stray dog that has developed a cautious, aggressive and sensitive personality in the midst of years of upheaval. Almost all of these dogs' identities and experiences can be found in human society, and this correspondence makes the themes of power violence and racial relations that the film wants to reflect on more realistic mapping.
Isle of Dogs is presented in a stop-motion animation format, so all the characters in the film have to be modeled for live-action shooting. When designing these dog characters, Wes Anderson didn't think of them as animals. He never asked the puppeteers for a specific dog form. Rather than make "A Golden Labrador," he prefers them to make "A Sad Dog."
The characters in Wes Anderson's films have always had a mysterious, neurotic, and even eerie quality, and in order to make the characters in Isle of Dogs more visually distinctive, he and the puppet production department improved the material. Wes Anderson wanted the characters in the film, especially the 12-year-old Masaharu Kobayashi, to have an ethereal temperament, using translucent resin as the material for the character's face, and when the sun shines on it, there is a texture of blood flow. Another human protagonist, exchange student Tracy also has distinctive characteristics, the 320 freckles on her face are made one by one, the position and size are clearly defined, every time the upper muscles are moved, the puppet team has to readjust the position of the freckles, and the image of a girl who is both youthful and energetic and has a sense of justice is more vivid under the background of the small freckles.
Many people who claim to have obsessive-compulsive disorder like to watch Wes Anderson's films because of the strong sense of order and symmetrical aesthetics in the films, and these simple, regular pictures make them feel comfortable. Much of the shots in Isle of Dogs follow this aesthetic bent, but the film has the element that challenges Wes Anderson's sense of order the most—garbage.
Many people sweat for Wes Anderson, but after watching the movie, everyone found that in the obsessive-compulsive director's films, garbage is also orderly, tires, wine bottles, metal, ordinary household garbage... All the garbage was clearly sorted, and the dog cages thrown to the island were neatly arranged.
He found the most reasonable basis for this obsessive-compulsive disorder: this is a story that takes place in Japan.
<h1>Wes Anderson: Life and art are the elixir of cinema</h1>
Triptych Life Weekly: Whether it's "The Grand Budapest Hotel," "Crossing Darjeeling, or the isle of Dogs, you seem to be particularly interested in stories that take place in exotic places." What is the relationship between this cultural background and the story of your film?
Wes Anderson: The films you mentioned are all related to different countries and different cultures, and I have some selfish intentions, that is, to use movies to understand the cultures of other countries and regions. Of course, this also has to do with my interest in films from many countries and regions. "Crossing Darjeeling" was influenced by Satyajit Rey (Indian film director and screenwriter who won the Oscar lifetime achievement award), in addition, Jean Renoir once shot "The Great River" in India, that film influenced Satyajit Rey, and later deeply influenced me. Hollywood's classic Central European films were the biggest inspiration for me to create The Grand Budapest Hotel. As for the current "Isle of Dogs", this may be thanks to Miyazaki Hayao. Compared with Japan, Japanese movies have a greater influence on "Isle of Dogs" and me personally.
Triptych Life Weekly: "Isle of Dogs" has a very rich Japanese culture, in addition to Japanese movies, what aspects do you start from to build the Japanese style of the whole movie?
Wes Anderson: To make an animated film like this, we really have to try to build every part of it, every detail, from the characters to the grass and trees, the sky, the water... If it can't be done, it's not a movie. It's a huge challenge, but it's also a great opportunity for us to find inspiration and present a unique aesthetic.
Everything in my films is modeled after things in life and art, and they either come from real people or from movies or paintings. When preparing for this film, we talked about Akira Kurosawa's films, such as his "Sleepy Man", "Drunken Angels", and "Heaven and Hell", which showed the city and urban life in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. We also studied Miyazaki's films and inner thoughts, especially his reflections on man and nature in his films.
Throughout the preparation process, I was most pleasantly surprised by the work of two Japanese ukiyo-e painters, Katsushige Hokusai and Hiroshige Ando, I don't know which part of the film they specifically influenced, but we always hung their paintings on the wall. At that time, we went to the museum, first to see hokusai's exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, and then to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to check the collection of materials, where there are a large number of works of the two painters, and they also provided us with some printed copies of the works of the two painters. We observe and study these works in our own way and draw unexpected inspiration from them. As a simple example, if we want to show rain in a scene, we will refer to how the rain is shown in Hokusai's paintings. Similar references and references are very many in "Isle of Dogs".
Triptych Life Weekly: "Isle of Dogs" is made from the perspective of dogs, "Dog Language" is also the official language of the film that has been translated into English, and the Japanese spoken by many people in the movie has not been translated, and there have been some controversies about this part of the foreign media before, why choose this way?
Wes Anderson: We made it clear from the beginning that the people in the film were going to speak their lines in Japanese, but we wanted the audience to focus on the visuals, not the subtitles, so most of the Japanese in our movie didn't have subtitles. To do this, we designed a complex system to interpret and interpret the differences in these languages. We wanted the film to be released wherever it was released, with dogs speaking English and the humans in the film speaking the local language of the place of distribution. At the end of the day, we want to set up a human-to-dog communication barrier in Isle of Dogs, and for the audience, they only need to know some key information points in unfamiliar language, and as for what the scientists say, most of them are meaningless and do not affect the audience's understanding of the movie.
Triptych Life Weekly: Your films have always had a very unique spatial aesthetic, and the spatial design in The Grand Budapest Hotel is also reflected in the Prada Foundation café. Will there be more similar cross-border attempts in the future?
Wes Anderson: At first I was just embarrassed, I didn't expect the effect to be so good, and the final product was exactly the same as I thought. I think that's a great idea.
(Image from the Internet)