Isle of Dogs.

Wes Anderson might be the most divisive director making movies in English today, as his fans love his work, and everyone else hears his twee dialogue and heads for the exits. He’s been on a critical roll lately, with The Fantastic Mr. Fox (good, but not very faithful to the wonderful book by Roald Dahl), Moonrise Kingdom, and the Oscar-nominated Grand Budapest Hotel. I had only seen two complete Anderson films, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Bottle Rocket (somewhat annoying), and turned off Rushmore (insufferable) after about 20 minutes. So when I tell you Isle of Dogs, Anderson’s new, animated film from an original script, is excellent, perhaps it means a little more than when an Anderson fanboy critic says the same. It’s just great, no qualifier needed.

Isle of Dogs gives us an alternate-history Japan, ruled by the Kobayashi clan, which hates dogs based on a centuries-old grievance. The current Mayor of the city of Megasaki, also a Kobayashi, comes up with a scheme to banish all dogs from the city to Trash Island, while scapegoating the dogs for numerous public health problems and overcrowding. Trash Island becomes a concentration camp, looking more like one as the scheme and the film progress, with dogs organizing themselves into packs and fighting over scraps of food.

Atari, the 12-year-old ward of the Mayor, who is his distant uncle, hijacks a tiny plane and flies to Trash Island to find his dog, Spots, the first canine exiled to the island. He lands near one group of five dogs who, despite not understanding Japanese, figure out why he’s there and resolve to help him – especially since he is the only owner who has tried to come rescue his lost pet. This leads them on a quest the length of the island, all the while the Mayor and his henchman Domo try to recapture him and advance their plans to eliminate all of the dogs forever. At the same time, an American exchange student named Tracy Walker, boasting a comically round head of curly blonde hair, leads her Japanese classmates in starting a pro-dog resistance movement, during which she develops a crush on Atari, who has become a folk hero to dog lovers in Japan.

Anderson’s conceit here is to have all of the human characters other than Tracy speak Japanese, with translations appearing in subtitles as needed, while the dogs’ barks are ‘translated’ into English by the voice actors (or magic, I’m not sure which). This lets Anderson set a movie in Japan while using most of his favorite actors, and this one has a whopper of a cast – Bryan Cranston, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johanssen, Jeff Goldblum (playing himself in dog form), Tilda Swinton (as a pug, which just made me laugh every time she spoke), F. Murray Abraham, Bob Balaban, Yoko Ono, Fisher Stevens, and, as “Mute Poodle,” Anjelica Huston, with narration by Courtney B. Vance. It’s also lighter on the twee-talk than the other Anderson films I’ve seen, perhaps because the script is credited to four writers, and I can only assume someone in the room pointed out, “You know, nobody talks like this in the real world, Wes. This is why everyone thinks you’re a fuckin’ weirdo.”

The story is totally over the top, so if you have problems with absurd plots in animated films – the octopus driving the truck in Finding Dory or the baggage-cart sequence at the end of Toy Story 2 come to mind – you may find suspending your disbelief hard here. Anderson et al compensate by populating the island with so many unique and surprisingly well-defined characters (given how little dialogue some of them get) that I found it easy to just roll with the story, even when Atari and the dogs built a fleet of boats to get themselves back to the mainland for the final confrontation. But there really isn’t any avoiding the fact that Kobayashi and his group are Nazis, the dogs are Jews being rounded up and sent to concentration camps to suffer and die, and oh by the way doesn’t this resemble stuff happening in the United States right now?

Like The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs — say that out loud, if you haven’t caught the pun — is a stop-motion animated film, and the animation quality here shows a marked improvement from the preceding film. Several sequences are just visually enchanting, like the preparation of a bento box of sushi, or Atari giving the dog Chief a bath. The use of what looks like cotton batting to depict fight scenes is a great touch, and the details on Trash Island, while occasionally a bit gross, are meticulous and often look surprisingly real.

There has been much debate over whether Anderson is appropriating Japanese culture, or doing it well enough to get away with it, in this film, a debate in which I feel unqualified to participate, so I will merely link to film critic Justin Chang’s piece on the topic and walk away. Anderson puts numerous works of Japanese art in the background of the film, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai (several times, with dogs added) and Evening Bell by Hiroshige, both major figures in the Edo period of Japanese art; he based Megasaki city’s design on metabolist architecture from the Japanese architect Tanga; and he makes use of classical Japanese drumming several times as part of the score. (It’s much better than the mumblemopey song “I Won’t Hurt You” that besets the film like a frightened skunk in two different scenes.) There’s a clear affinity for Japanese art and culture, but whether it is done in a sensitive or appropriate manner here is not really for me to say.

I took my daughter, who is nearly 12, to see this, since she loved Mr. Fox and does indeed love dogs (and all animals, as far as I can tell). She thought much of the movie was sad, and had a hard time seeing references to dogs that died off screen. There’s also one death of a human in the film, and a lot of tears from human and dog characters. Her final verdict was that it was good, but she preferred Mr. Fox, which isn’t so graphic and which keeps dark elements in the dialogue rather than in the imagery. It’s animated, but it’s not a kids’ movie. We both laughed quite a bit, although I think I laughed more than she did, perhaps because I caught more of the subtle jokes about dog behavior and a few references she didn’t catch. (Yoko Ono’s character name is one; don’t look it up till you see the film.) With The Incredibles 2 coming out in two months, we might actually have a real fight for the title of best animated film this year.