As someone who has routinely criticised Hollywood’s appropriation of other cultures, especially Japan’s, Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs ought to yank my chain. It’s a quintessentially Andersonian tale, told with all the quirks and quips and symmetrical compositions we’ve come to expect. This time the setting is Japan – a fictional future Japan, where abandoned dogs are quarantined on an island rubbish dump.
But get this: all the dogs are voiced by well-known white, American actors, speaking English. These are Japanese dogs – why are they speaking English? Is English “dog language” here? The Japanese human characters do speak Japanese, and are voiced by Japanese actors, but there are no subtitles. Some of it is translated by interpreters but much of it we don’t understand at all. What’s more, there’s an American exchange student in the story, with freckles and a huge bob of white hair, voiced by Greta Gerwig (in English). She turns out to be something of a “white saviour” who mobilises the passive Japanese populace to rebel and put things right.
Another alarm bell: Anderson’s alternative Japan also ticks off a great many tourist cliches. There is sushi, sumo wrestlers, cherry blossoms, taiko drummers. When there’s an explosion at one point, it’s a mushroom cloud – a reminder that Japan suffered a nuclear attack, from a film-maker from the country that attacked them? Really?
And what to make of the fact that its cast includes alumni of famous Asian whitewashing scandals past? Tilda Swinton, AKA the race-lifted Ancient One from Marvel’s Doctor Strange movie; Scarlett Johansson, recently of the whitewashed Hollywood remake of anime classic Ghost in the Shell; and Bill Murray, Johansson’s co-star in Lost in Translation – a movie that found comedy in Japanese people being shorter than westerners and less able to pronounce their ‘r’s. And just to rub our noses in it, there’s a cameo from Fisher Stevens, the American who browned up to play an Indian character in Short Circuit.
Anderson has a track record in this kind of cultural Pinterestism, and it has backfired before. In his 2007 Indian odyssey The Darjeeling Limited, India is merely the mood board; the story focuses on three privileged American brothers (one of those was Jason Schwartzman, who co-wrote both Darjeeling and Dogs with Anderson, along with Roman Coppola). In one misjudged scene, the funeral of an Indian boy they failed to save from drowning serves as a moment of healing between the brothers. They stroll through the picturesque grief in an extended slo-mo tracking shot backed by the Kinks, then the poor kid’s family are forgotten and the narrative rolls on.
Some critics are barking “appropriation!” on Twitter and online, but where Ghost in the Shell and Doctor Strange (and there are many more) took a Japanese story and cut-and-pasted in white people, here Anderson engages with Japanese culture and references on an almost scholarly level, while the cast is filled with Japanese names, from Ken Watanabe to Yôjirô Noda, lead singer of Radwimps to, er, Yoko Ono.
Isle of Dogs is a movie that seems custom-made to set off appropriation dog whistles but, for all its questionable moves, the result is a story that’s one of a kind. If we police boundaries too strictly, we’re stifling the possibility of cross-fertilisation and invention. If you do it well enough, it’s not appropriation, it’s conversation.
Isle of Dogs is in cinemas from Friday 30 March
