Post by sublime92 on Mar 29, 2018 17:45:32 GMT
Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs is wading into a world that didn’t exist when he started making his stop-motion fable about a Japanese boy lost on a completely canine island. Even two years ago, when Travis Knight’s Kubo and the Two Strings hit theaters, the conversation there was about whitewashing, about populating an inherently Japanese story with an overwhelmingly white voice cast. But few of the people who came for Kubo didn’t take issue with the fact that the story was being told by an almost entirely non-Japanese creative team. (You have to scroll a bit on Kubo’s IMDb page before you get to John Aoshima, the head of story.)
But as traditionally marginalized audiences begin to find their collective voice, things that used to fly … don’t. In Isle of Dogs, Anderson sets his boy-and-his-pooch story in the fictional island of Megasaki, where a nation’s dogs have been exiled, left to fend for themselves. The conceit of this film is that all of the dogs speak English, and are voiced by actors like Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Liev Schreiber, Bryan Cranston and Scarlett Johansson. The overwhelming majority of the human characters are Japanese and they all speak in Japanese, which is conveyed to an English-speaking audience through subtitles or a translator or, sometimes, not translated at all.
Cinema is an empathy-injection mechanism. It maneuvers us, emotionally, so we can care about people who don’t exist, who we have never and will never meet. The issue that surfaces in Isle of Dogs is whom are we being asked to empathize with?
We empathize with those we can understand. Literally. By placing the Japanese characters behind a wall of language, Isle of Dogs is placing its empathetic weight on the canine characters. Which are all voiced by white actors.
So when film critics like The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang or culture writers like Mashable’s Angie Han wonder why Isle of Dogs needed to be set in Japan at all, as it doesn’t really ask us to care about Japanese people, they have a point. This is a story that could’ve been set in Iowa for all it cares about the humans. As much as it seems that Anderson does have a real fondness for Japan — and the story is co-credited to Japanese actor Kunichi Nomura — he treats the culture a bit like wallpaper, set behind his drama as opposed to an integral part of the drama itself.
The question of who gets to make what art is a thorny one. Are we allowed, as artists, to tell stories that move us, or are we supposed to pass some kind of test to be allowed to tell those stories? And who is grading that test? If I’m, say, a Mexican filmmaker who loves giant robots and giant monsters, do I have to present myself to an anime gatekeeper for permission? If I’m a Scottish filmmaker who desperately wants to devote years of his life to tell a romance set in Mumbai during a run on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, can I just do it … and later win an Oscar for it?
Isn’t the beauty of art that it affects us profoundly and deeply, becoming a part of who we are in the world? And if that’s so, how can anyone be barred from making the art that moves them?
But as traditionally marginalized audiences begin to find their collective voice, things that used to fly … don’t. In Isle of Dogs, Anderson sets his boy-and-his-pooch story in the fictional island of Megasaki, where a nation’s dogs have been exiled, left to fend for themselves. The conceit of this film is that all of the dogs speak English, and are voiced by actors like Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Liev Schreiber, Bryan Cranston and Scarlett Johansson. The overwhelming majority of the human characters are Japanese and they all speak in Japanese, which is conveyed to an English-speaking audience through subtitles or a translator or, sometimes, not translated at all.
Cinema is an empathy-injection mechanism. It maneuvers us, emotionally, so we can care about people who don’t exist, who we have never and will never meet. The issue that surfaces in Isle of Dogs is whom are we being asked to empathize with?
We empathize with those we can understand. Literally. By placing the Japanese characters behind a wall of language, Isle of Dogs is placing its empathetic weight on the canine characters. Which are all voiced by white actors.
So when film critics like The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang or culture writers like Mashable’s Angie Han wonder why Isle of Dogs needed to be set in Japan at all, as it doesn’t really ask us to care about Japanese people, they have a point. This is a story that could’ve been set in Iowa for all it cares about the humans. As much as it seems that Anderson does have a real fondness for Japan — and the story is co-credited to Japanese actor Kunichi Nomura — he treats the culture a bit like wallpaper, set behind his drama as opposed to an integral part of the drama itself.
The question of who gets to make what art is a thorny one. Are we allowed, as artists, to tell stories that move us, or are we supposed to pass some kind of test to be allowed to tell those stories? And who is grading that test? If I’m, say, a Mexican filmmaker who loves giant robots and giant monsters, do I have to present myself to an anime gatekeeper for permission? If I’m a Scottish filmmaker who desperately wants to devote years of his life to tell a romance set in Mumbai during a run on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, can I just do it … and later win an Oscar for it?
Isn’t the beauty of art that it affects us profoundly and deeply, becoming a part of who we are in the world? And if that’s so, how can anyone be barred from making the art that moves them?
