Isle of Dogs (犬ヶ島, Inu ga Shima) is a 2018 adult stop-motion animated science fiction comedy-drama film written, produced, and directed by Wes Anderson, narrated by Courtney B. Vance, and starring an ensemble cast that consists of Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Kunichi Nomura, Tilda Swinton, Ken Watanabe, Akira Ito, Greta Gerwig, Akira Takayama, Frances McDormand, F. Murray Abraham, Yojiro Noda, Fisher Stevens, Mari Natsuki, Nijiro Murakami, Yoko Ono, Harvey Keitel, and Frank Wood.

A U.S.–German co-production, Isle of Dogs was produced by Studio Babelsberg and Indian Paintbrush in association with Anderson's own company American Empirical Pictures.

The film is set in the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki where Mayor Kenji Kobayashi has banished all dogs to Trash Island due to a canine influenza pandemic.

Anderson started developing the film in October 2015 using stop-motion animation, with a voice cast of Norton, Cranston, and Balaban.

Isle of Dogs opened the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, where Anderson was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Director.

A child warrior sympathetic towards the threatened dogs decapitated the head of the Kobayashi Clan, ending the war, and was immortalized as the Boy Samurai of Legend.

Six months later, Atari hijacks a plane and flies it to Trash Island, now nicknamed "the Isle of Dogs", to search for Spots.

After crash-landing, Atari is rescued by a dog pack ostensibly led by an all-black canine named Chief, a lifelong stray.

By order of the mayor's hatchet man Major Domo, the professor is placed under house arrest and assassinated with poisoned sushi.

Tracy Walker, an American exchange student and member of a pro-dog activist group, suspects a conspiracy and begins to investigate, in the process developing feelings for Atari.

At his re-election ceremony, Kobayashi prepares to give the extermination order when Tracy interrupts, presenting evidence of his corruption.

Atari addresses the crowd and recites a haiku he wrote and dedicated to Kobayashi, rekindling the sympathy that once existed between dogs and humans.

[20] The film's score was composed by Alexandre Desplat, who had previously worked with Wes Anderson on Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The website's critical consensus reads, "The beautifully stop-motion animated Isle of Dogs finds Wes Anderson at his detail-oriented best while telling one of the director's most winsomely charming stories.

[39] Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, praising it for taking risks, and saying: "It's smart and different and sometimes deliberately odd and really funny—rarely in a laugh-out-loud way, more in a smile-and-nod-I-get-the-joke kind of way.

Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "It's in the director's handling of the story's human factor that his sensitivity falters, and the weakness for racial stereotyping that has sometimes marred his work comes to the fore ... Much of the Japanese dialogue has been pared down to simple statements that non-speakers can figure out based on context and facial expressions".

Angie Han, writing in Mashable, cites the American exchange student character Tracy as a "classic example of the 'white savior' archetype—the well-meaning white hero who arrives in a foreign land and saves its people from themselves".

[43] Writing for BuzzFeed, Alison Willmore found "no overt malicious intent to Isle of Dogs' cultural tourism, but it's marked by a hodgepodge of references that an American like Anderson might cough up if pressed to free associate about Japan—taiko drummers, anime, Hokusai, sumo, kabuki, haiku, cherry blossoms, and a mushroom cloud (!).

It's Japan purely as an aesthetic—and another piece of art that treats the East not as a living, breathing half of the planet but as a mirror for the Western imagination".

[44] She continued, "in the wake of Isle of Dogs' opening weekend, there were multiple headlines wondering whether the film was an act of appropriation or homage.

[44] Conversely, Moeko Fujii wrote a favorable review for The New Yorker, complimenting the film's depiction of the Japanese and their culture, as well as pointing out that language is the key theme of the movie.

Fujii wrote, Anderson's decision not to subtitle the Japanese speakers struck me as a carefully considered artistic choice.

[45]Fujii also deconstructed the criticisms of the character of Tracy Walker being a "white savior", and how this relates to the film's language theme, writing, At a climactic moment, the movie rejects the notion of universal legibility, placing the onus of interpretation solely upon the American audience ...