When Wes Anderson unveiled his new stop-motion film Isle of Dogs in 2018, audiences perhaps expected another symphony of symmetry, irony, and warm absurdity. But here the action had shifted to Japan — a country whose aesthetic seems to reflect Anderson's style: strict and ritualistic, yet poetic and meaningful. Needless to say, Anderson has always been a Japanophile with a profound respect for Japanese art. "Some of the main inspirations for the film were Kurosawa's film noirs of the early 1960s, “The Bad Sleep Well” (1960) and “High and Low” (1963)," said Isle of Dogs production designer Nathan Harrod (qtd. in Desowitz, 2018). Indeed, Megasaki, the fictional city where the story unfolds, looks like a futuristic version of Yokohama from High and Low in particular, while Mayor Kobayashi is based quite directly on actor Toshiro Mifune, who played businessman Gondo in the Kurosawa’s film.
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