Author | One brother
Produced by | One Piece Movie
Little one picks up the cat, one brother sucks the dog.
As far as pets are concerned, the value worldviews of Brother One and One seem to be diametrically opposed.
Because working together can't be too stiff on the surface, the two of us will invariably lead the topic to the movie.
But as typical literary youth, one of the few things that Xiao Yi and Yi Ge have in common is that they both like a movie god, Wes Anderson.
For the audience, there is only one word to describe his work - beauty.
The beauty of the all-round three hundred and sixty degrees without dead angles, the beauty to the suffocation, the beauty to the stunning.
To this end, he also has two well-known nicknames - the master of aesthetics, the magic of symmetrical composition.
Of the nine feature-length works he has directed so far, the bold use of color and his distinct personal aesthetic style are impressive.
Put it this way, you only need to glance at a movie to know if it is from him.
In "Crossing Darjeeling", he used yellow, green and blue to create a retro style full of oil paintings.
In "Moonrise Kingdom", yellow-green and light pink convey warmth and comfort to the vision,
The ink painting-like charm in "The Great Fox Daddy" fills people with colors,
There is also the "Budapest Hotel" that he has to mention, the pink of the screen, giving the movie a fairy tale world girlish feeling -
In his own words, his films simply "move the real world five degrees."
Not to mention five degrees, it is simply subversive.
The new film "Isle of Dogs" is the same.
But Brother Yi is not trying to talk about composition today, I want to say that the success of Wes Anderson's work is actually more dependent on his other unknown personality - more real.
His more realism not only forced himself to die, but also forced the crew to die.
In the case of The Grand Budapest Hotel, there is a shot of Gustav's lover, Madame D, dying, through an obituary.
Do you know where this full-letter obituaries came about? Wes Anderson wrote it himself.
Not only obituaries, but all the contents of the whole newspaper are his own handwriting, from the cover to the inside page, from the headline to the middle seam... Just the "choose the right font" project took him many months.
The final effect is this —
The crew was not spared, and all the prop designers of Wes Anderson should be glad that they can live to this day.
There is a red MENDL'S cake box with a small cake in it, which is not a fake prop, which was personally customized for the film by the well-known dim sum designer Grossman:
In order to achieve good results, the dim sum chef made - 1000.
Lawyer Wilmer had a cat in his arms and fell to his death.
With Anderson's urine nature, should a cute cat be killed as a corpse? Don't be afraid, this corpse is a fake cat, carefully crafted by prop maker Miller, and the materials include cardboard and fur.
Why not use a real cat? He is not upset about the cat, but he will dislike the wrong position of the cat's corpse, one will dislike the blood splash too little, and the other will spit on the size of the cat.
Even with the use of fake cats, the prop master has repeatedly modified it many times.
The shot above is only a short second in the movie.
More seriously, it is definitely a disadvantage for Anderson's colleagues, but for our audience, it is a rare blessing.
This gospel is also perfectly demonstrated in his new film "Isle of Dogs".
If I remember correctly, this should be Wes Anderson's first film released in China, coinciding with the Year of the Dog, plus Brother Yi is a die-hard fan and has to watch.
Let's start by reading a few numbers:
Isle of Dogs is a stop-motion animated film that lasts 101 minutes, employs 27 animators and 10 assistants, sets up 240 sets, produces 1,097 puppet props, shoots 3 minutes a week, and takes more than 4 years to shoot.
Anderson's demands on film quality have reached the point of paranoia and obsessive-compulsiveness.
This time, it was the voice actor who planted the heel.
Unlike other stop-motion animations that "make the picture first and then dubb" is that "Inuyasha" first records the voice actors, and then creates the mouth shape of the puppet in each frame based on the pronunciation and mouth shape of the voice.
Why is it so troublesome? There is only one reason: realism.
Stop-motion animation does not have the blessing of ordinary animation "motion capture" technology, so it is closest to the "motion capture" effect to match the picture according to the real performance of the voice actors.
So it's not so surprising when you see the amazing presentation of the film, when you learn that the Berlin Film Festival opened with an animated film (Isle of Dogs) for the first time in its history.
Not to mention that it accounts for half of the film festival's dubbing lineup – Edward Norton, "Old White" Brian Cranston, Widow Sister, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray...
Not including Takayuki Yamada, Ryuhei Matsuda, and the scientist passerby played by Shota Matsuda...
Finish making, tell the story.
(There are spoilers in the following, read with caution~)
Wes Anderson's films are always about searching and growing up, and are full of warmth and reconciliation, evoking the audience's childhood memories of innocence and beauty.
But "Isle of Dogs" is a less "Wes Anderson" movie.
In this movie, brother Yi's first feeling after watching it turned out to be that it was not suitable for children.
In fact, the film itself is also a seemingly warm and healing story, set in the future Japanese society 20 years later.
In the fictional city of "Hitachi", the number of dogs has surged and canine flu has been rampant.
Mayor Kobayashi signed a mayoral decree to exile all the dogs to a "garbage island", and the name of the island became "Inuyasha".
Five main dogs, five dogs named Rex, King, Duke, Boss and Chief, live here. They wandered in groups, relying on the garbage mountain to find food to survive.
One day, a young boy named Atali crashed a plane on the Isle of Dogs, and the five main dogs rescued him.
In Xiqi, mayor Kobayashi is doing whatever it takes to eliminate all dogs, and international student Tracy, as a dog lover, is also plotting a dog uprising.
On the surface, "Isle of Dogs" adheres to Anderson's personal style, continues a warm growth story through a two-line narrative, and ushers in a happy ending at the end.
But in the eyes of Brother Yi, what the film wants to express is contrary to its beauty.
Anderson seems to want to tell us the ugliest and darkest things in the world through the beauty of "Isle of Dogs".
War bears the brunt of it.
The superficial metaphor should be seen by many viewers, the long mirror display of the street scene appears more than once in the movie, and there is a red dome building in the dark gray city that is particularly eye-catching.
Its architectural style is almost exactly the same as that of the atomic bomb dome in Hiroshima City.
The Atomic Bomb Dome, the remains of the Hiroshima atomic bombing building that survived the vertical fall from above, has been listed as a World Heritage Site in 1996 and is considered a symbol of permanent peace in the world.
After the plane piloted by the little boy crashed, it crashed on the island of dogs, and a mushroom cloud rose.
The first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the United States in 1945 was called "little boy."
Linked to the similarity of the names of Hitzaki and another nuclear-bombed Nagasaki city, Anderson almost put the metaphor of war on the table.
The decadent apocalyptic atmosphere on the garbage island is also very different from the romantic and feminine set of the past.
In the setting of Isle of Dogs, in the ancient Kobayashi era, the image of "dogs" was not exactly "animal", but only another race like humans, or an "enemy".
After a long history, dogs ushered in the flourishing of the race, although attached to humans, but made the human community uneasy.
As a result, The mayor of Hitzaki, Kobayashi, spread the plague in a "poisoning" way, created panic, and launched a populist campaign to isolate all dogs.
Does this "nonsense" approach look very familiar? Yes, a familiarity with history reveals that many wars are fought by the strong in a similar way, looking for a head-on invasion of the weak.
In "Isle of Dogs", the exterminated dogs use "mustard gas", is it to remind people of the "mustard gas" used by the Japanese invasion of China?
What if dogs were replaced by Jews or Armenians or even the citizens of Nanjing in 1937?
Think about it.
Next, there's power.
Mayor Kobayashi's storyline couldn't be more straightforward. He engages in a cult of personality, creates panic because of his own likes and dislikes, and vainly attempts to exterminate the canine race, he excludes dissidents by assassination, and fools the public with rumors, which is a commentary on the word "might" in the film.
In addition to this bright line, the formal democracy between dogs and dogs also has the shadow of power and bullying behind it.
When Attalee falls on the Isle of Dogs, Rex takes the other three dogs to swear allegiance, and The Chief flatly refuses.
After the decision, it is basically the "say aye" small gang with Rex as the core to decide, the so-called vote is just a formality, and the chief who really has a spirit of resistance has no qualifications to make a decision.
The previous power relationship between people and dogs makes the audience feel even more uncomfortable: the little boy Attally seems to be the savior of the dogs, but he is actually the invisible powerhouse above their heads.
When the four dogs of Rex were loyal to him, Atta used the radio to play militaristic music and then spoke a sentence of Japanese, because there was no translation, probably most of the audience did not know what was said, and Brother Ichiko knew a little Japanese and happened to know:
"From now on, you will be my dog."
When you hear this sentence, Brother Yi's whole person is not good, and it is difficult for you to imagine such words coming out of the mouth of a fourteen-year-old child.
In the flashback paragraph, many viewers were moved by a shot -
I was not moved in the slightest, was this not the moment when Attali announced, as a mighty man, that I had absolute control over you?
A large part of the so-called human-dog feelings and growth are based on giving orders and carrying out orders, and the Chief, as the only rebel, has also chosen to obey after being coerced and seduced by bubble baths and dog crispness.
It seems that only by clinging to the power can the value of the weak be reflected.
The emotional relationship of the dog piece, from a relative to a master and servant. This is also where Anderson's old spicy: it seems warm, but it is actually cold.
People to people, too.
At the end of the film, Attalee ascends to the throne and Kobayashi loses power. The whole city went from hating dogs to loving dogs overnight, and Attalee could single-handedly legislate to protect dogs.
He is actually not fundamentally different from Xiaolin.
In this respect, Isle of Dogs is not as warm and healing as most critics claim, but a complete tragedy.
Many viewers use "tiger head and snake tail" to describe "Isle of Dogs", and Brother Yi thinks that the ending is very good.
The "hero" ordered the family to be placed under house arrest under the dog temple, eating three meals a day, and could not see the warmth and joy of the family.
Kobayashi's conscience found a change in his original intentions and donated a kidney to Atali.
Do you think that in Wes Anderson's films, the change in character motivation will be as easy as drinking cold water?
Have you forgotten the two evil gasps that Kobayashi gave the audience away?
I prefer to believe that the transformation of Kobayashi at the end is actually pretended, and there is a blank space of infinite contemplation and extreme fear after that.
I have to admit that because of the change in story style and too many metaphors, "Isle of Dogs" seems less "Wes Anderson", but "Isle of Dogs" is still one of the best films of the year - it uses the greatest childishness to bring out the heaviest social problems.
Dare to jump out of the comfort zone and explore the broader humanistic space of the film, such Wes Anderson is worthy of fans to like, to follow, and even to believe.