I’ll say it: I’m a Wes Anderson fan. I still love The Royal Tenenbaums, sorry not sorry. I thought Moonrise Kingdom was a beautiful gem of a film. I flat-out adored The Grand Budapest Hotel. I never saw The Darjeeling Limited, which is probably a good thing since I hear that film was problematic AF. I can recognize Wes Anderson as a brilliant filmmaker making these delightfully weird films AND I can recognize that Wes Anderson has some issues with culture appropriation, using people of color as props, and playing into racial (and racist) stereotypes about Asian people. Well, Wes has a new movie – Isle of Dogs. As we discussed last year when the first poster came out, the film is set in Japan, and yet almost all of the actors doing voice work in the film are white Americans. These white Americans voice the dogs on-screen. I said I would wait to find out just how problematic it really is. So now that critics are screening Isle of Dogs, what’s the reaction?

Wes Anderson’s new film Isle of Dogs is generating controversy for its depiction of Japanese culture, ahead of its theatrical release on Friday. Written and directed by Anderson, the stop-motion film is set in a dystopian future Japan where dogs have been sequestered to a remote island due to an outbreak of “canine flu,” and the plot centers on one boy’s mission to find his own lost pup. Murmurs of cultural appropriation and insensitivity have followed the film since its award-winning premiere at the Berlin Film Festival last month, and now as its official release nears, criticisms are becoming more widespread.

Among the elements of the film sparking controversy are Anderson’s decision to have the dogs speak English while the residents of Megasaki City speak native Japanese; the fact that the vast majority of the voice cast is not East Asian; and, as Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang puts it in his review of the film, the fact of a “white American filmmaker’s highly selective, idiosyncratic rendering of an East Asian society.”

Isle of Dogs remains a well-received film, with its Rotten Tomatoes score above 90%; EW’s own Leah Greenblatt praised the movie’s “endearing, complicated humanity.” Neither a representative for Anderson nor the film’s distributor, Fox Searchlight, provided immediate comment on the controversy. Speaking to EW recently about the inspiration for the film, though not about the controversy specifically, Anderson said, “The movie is a fantasy, and I would never suggest that this is an accurate depiction of any particular Japan. This is definitely a reimagining of Japan through my experience of Japanese cinema.”

Stephen Gong, the executive director of the Center for Asian American Media, said in a statement to EW about the controversy, “This film is part of a larger oeuvre that includes films like The Darjeeling Unlimited that uses ‘exotic’ people and locations as window dressings. Anderson’s aesthetic hasn’t evolved despite the larger conversations sweeping the industry. This is just one example of why there still needs to be more films directed by women, people of color, and people from other marginalized communities.”

[From EW]

From what I saw, The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang got the ball rolling last week when he published this review/commentary piece about what is so problematic and insensitive about the film. Chang actually liked the film and had a lot of praise for many parts of the film, but Chang points out the levels of marginalization in the language issues, like having the “Japanese characters” speak Japanese and yet the Japanese dogs all speak with American-accented English. Chang also has a problem with one of the central plot points which casts the Japanese population as largely “passive” and in need of leadership from a white foreign exchange student.

So is it possible to enjoy the film with all of Wes Anderson’s weird brilliance, or should we avoid it? I don’t have the answer. I think the conversation is important though, because maybe someday soon Wes Anderson will understand why some of his urges are problematic and he’ll try to be better.

Photos courtesy of ‘Isle of Dogs’.