GeekNights Wednesday - Isle of Dogs

Tonight on a special GeekNights Rymily Review, Rym and Emily consider Wes Anderson's new Isle of Dogs. It's thoroughly enjoyable, gritty and beautiful, but has a number of problems.

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Stop motion in the vein of Kubo, Isle of Dogs, Anomalisa, etc… really freaks me out. There is some serious uncanny valley for me with those, not only from the animation itself but also the lighting. Its so… flat and depressing looking.

It’s a technical limitation. You have to be careful with light when doing stop-motion. Too much can cause the clay to melt.

Something seems wrong with the iTunes feed. Not sure if it’s my download since I haven’t checked other sources. But it keeps starting like two minutes in it seems.

I think that’s how the podcast starts. I downloaded the MP3 from this website and there was no intro.

We don’t do specials much anymore, but for a long time, we skipped the opening music whenever we put one up.

Enjoyed Isle of Dogs a lot. I went in guarded (specifically regarding the foreign exchange student) but my hesitance was overpowered by how well the film nails every shot in every scene. Tracy’s role in the story is tertiary to Atari and the dogs, which I was not expecting; it didn’t have an impact on my enjoyment of the film. I’m glad people are talking about it, but I wouldn’t warn anyone away from the movie.

Someone clearly made a very detailed story bible about Trash Island and Megasaki City, and I’m pretty sure it reads like an RPG sourcebook.

Edit: My primary criticism (which I talked to Anthony about right after we left the theater) is that there’s too many threads to fit comfortably in 100 minutes. Nutmeg and Peppermint don’t get to do much. Major Domo and Mayor Kobayashi’s relationship to the old cat-loving dynasty isn’t clear (the heightened realism present in everything had me wondering if they somehow had feline blood in their lineage).

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Isle of Dogs is getting a manga.

Why would a cat-loving, dog-genociding dictator give his nephew a guard dog in the first place?

Dogs are more effective as guard animals than cats?

He made the dog a cyborg. It was a tool: not a companion.

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If we are avoiding the instincts and duties of an actual dog, then why not just use a cat-cyborg? Or just a proto-type of the dog-robots. He clearly wasn’t a full cyborg since he still got sick from the dog flu. He could even just hire a human servant to protect Atari since he’s that powerful and corrupt to do so. Your dog-killing group shouldn’t maybe hire a dog for someone to grow an attachment to.