Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Isle of Dogs
2018 · Wes Anderson · Isle of Dogs on Sightlines
Watch the fur.
Not the symmetry, not the plot. The fur. On Chief, on Rex, on every stray on the heap, it seethes — it ripples and reseats itself frame by frame, as though each dog were standing in a small private wind that isn't in the scene. Anderson could have fixed that. He didn't. To advance a puppet one twenty-fourth of a second, an animator has to touch it, and touching it disturbs the pile of the fur. He kept the disturbance. He kept the visible seams on the puppets too, and the cotton balls doing the work of smoke and snow — the 'Animagic' texture he took straight from the Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Every frame of Isle of Dogs carries the fingerprint of whoever made it.
That is stranger than it sounds, and it is where Deleuze starts earning his keep.
Deleuze opens his cinema books with a claim about what the camera did to movement. Before film, art rendered motion through poses: the discus-thrower at maximum torsion, the climax chosen because it was the significant moment. He calls these privileged instants. Cinema broke the habit. A camera samples the world mechanically, at equal intervals, with no opinion about whether anything is happening in a given exposure. Those are any-instants-whatever, and they are the ground of everything he calls the movement-image. Motion stops being a passage between poses and becomes a continuum that a machine can slice anywhere.
Stop-motion runs that engine backwards. Every frame here is a privileged instant. Someone chose the angle of Chief's ear, sculpted it, took exactly one picture, then did it again. Twenty-four such decisions a second, and out the other end comes ordinary continuous movement: a dog trots, a boy limps, a wave curls in the shape Hokusai gave it. The film manufactures any-instants-whatever out of nothing but poses. It builds by hand the thing the camera stumbles into by design. And the boiling fur is the place where you can watch the assembly happening. Live action buries its instants inside the emulsion; Anderson's dogs are visibly made of theirs. The root of that craft runs back to 1912 and The Cameraman's Revenge, the founding puppet film, whose performances were posed one frame at a time on the armatures of dead insects. A century later the technique hasn't changed. Anderson just refused to hide it.
His other signature is the frame itself, and Deleuze has a precise word for that too. The cadre, the closed set: everything inside the shot treated as a system, saturated with information, composed rather than caught. Anderson's staging is planimetric — figures squared to the lens at right angles, the camera snapping ninety degrees rather than drifting — a toolkit he assembled on Fantastic Mr. Fox and sharpens here. What he does with it on Trash Island is the joke of the movie. The dioramas are sorted refuse. Bottles with bottles, bones with bones, the whole heap racked into compartments like Cornell boxes. Garbage is the one substance defined by not being sorted. Anderson gives it a grammar anyway, and the compulsion says something about the civilization that produced the island: Megasaki throws things away in categories.
That civilization is what Deleuze calls a synsign — an encompassing situation so total that it presses on everyone inside it and calls out for an act. A dynastic mayor, a canine flu, a propaganda apparatus, an island. From it comes the great classical shape of narrative cinema, the large form: the situation compresses, someone acts, the situation is transformed. Deleuze treated Kurosawa as the master of that shape, and Isle of Dogs pays the debt openly. The dog pack is staged as a ronin ensemble, flattened by telephoto into a frieze, cut along the axis on the same line the way Seven Samurai cuts; even the muddy civic geometry of Megasaki is village geometry borrowed from Kurosawa. What's rare is that Anderson means it. The large form mostly survives now as franchise machinery. Here it's carried by a twelve-year-old who flies himself out to find his bodyguard-dog, and it holds, because the situation really is global and the act really does change it.
But a second regime runs underneath, and it's the one that gives the film its smell. Deleuze's impulse-image describes a world where the social surface — the derived milieu — turns out to be a crust over an originary world of raw drive: appetite, waste, a slope that only runs downhill. Megasaki is the crust. Trash Island is what's under it, and Anderson found it by reading Kurosawa's postwar films for their filth rather than their heroism. Drunken Angel built itself around a festering sump. Stray Dog is a procedural about contagion and moral rot with a dog in the title. Both are in these mounds, rendered in miniature you could pick up in your hand. Exile returns the dogs to appetite; they fight over scraps, and the fights come out as a rolling cartoon dust-cloud with legs poking out. Funny, and also exactly Deleuze's dividual — separate bodies collapsed into a single affective unit. That is what a decree of banishment does. It turns individuals into a category. The film draws the category as a cloud. And when Anderson wants appetite handled with total control instead, he gives you the sushi sequence: a chef parting a fish cut by cut, each piece lifted and set down, food broken into part-objects and charged far past proportion. Deleuze's word for objects like that is fetish.
Then there's the thing you notice in the first minute. The humans speak Japanese and it isn't subtitled. The dogs speak flat American English. Deleuze has a name for an image that has lost its ordinary sensory-motor obviousness and has to be deciphered instead — the lectosign, the readable image. That's what the human scenes become. You stop listening for information and start reading: posture, framing, the tilt of a bureaucrat's head, what the composition is telling you. The device works beautifully. It also chooses. Making the dogs legible and the citizens opaque is precisely the mechanism that pins your sympathy to the exiled, and it is fair to say — people did say it — that a film using Japan as an aesthetic playground shouldn't be the one deciding who gets to be understood. Both things are true at once. Carry the objection into the film rather than around it; the film is more interesting with it inside.
What did this do to the art? It took stop-motion, which had spent a century as a medium of the miniature and the domestic, and gave it civic scale: a thousand puppets, a city, a harbor, a bureaucracy, a propaganda machine. Berlin gave Anderson the Silver Bear for direction and Desplat's taiko score gave the thing its pulse. But the durable argument is quieter. In a decade when animation was defined by smoothing — cleaner surfaces, more samples, less hand — Anderson left the seams up and insisted that a made image should look made.
So watch it again, and watch the fur. Every ripple is a person who touched that dog. Then sit with the question the film keeps just outside the frame: who in Megasaki is permitted to be understood, and what would this movie feel like if the translation ran the other way?
Concepts in play
- privileged-instants — Stop-motion's single-frame performance craft — every exposure a hand-posed, chosen attitude, the technique whose deep root the dossier traces to The Cameraman's Revenge (1912) and its dead-insect armatures.
- any-instant-whatever — Twenty-four hand-posed frames a second produce ordinary continuous motion; the visibly rippling fur puppets are where the mechanical sampling shows its handmade seam.
- the closed set (cadre) — Planimetric right-angle staging inherited from Fantastic Mr. Fox, and the trash-heap dioramas of sorted refuse arranged like Cornell boxes — the frame as an information-dense composed system.
- action-image-large-form — A global situation (canine flu, mayoral decree, mass exile) compresses until a twelve-year-old flies a plane into it to retrieve his bodyguard-dog; the Seven Samurai debt in ensemble staging and axial cutting carries the shape.
- the encompasser — Megasaki as a total dynastic-propaganda milieu — the brooding mid-century Kurosawa cityscape and its muddy civic geometry — pressing on every character and calling out for an act.
- derived-milieu — Megasaki's civic order, which sorts and disposes in categories, sits as the surface over the island it produced.
- originary-world — Trash Island as a savage world of appetite and waste beneath the city, built from Drunken Angel's festering garbage-sump and Stray Dog's contagious urban moral rot.
- entropy / degradation — Exiled dogs scrapping over scraps on tactile mounds of miniature refuse — an irreversible downhill run from pets to strays to carcasses.
- dividual — Every fight rendered as a single rolling cartoon dust-cloud with legs poking out — separate bodies collapsed into one affective unit, the visual form of mass banishment.
- fetish — The sushi sequence: fish parted in one hypnotic cut-by-cut passage, each part-object lifted out and placed with surgical charge.
- the readable image — Japanese characters speak untranslated Japanese while the dogs speak deadpan American English; the human scenes stop being heard and have to be read off posture and composition.