I think I stumbled across this movie as I looked at my phone one day trying to find any good movies to watch on the weekend. Looking at the star-studded cast I went and checked out the trailer. It seemed good, definitely a movie that I would want to watch, but I never did. At least at the time. Weeks went by, and the movie stopped being shown in the cinemas. I remember being a little saddened by it because I did not expect it to fade out so quickly. In another few days, I had probably forgotten about it.

After a long while when I booted up my firestick to checkout content on Hotstar, I was mildly surprised to see Isle of Dogs in the recently added ones.

Of all movies, they got this!

Well, what do you know, I said to myself, I’m totally gonna watch this 🕺

And so I did. Just now actually.

The story intersects very much with Japanese culture. It feels longer than it actually is because there is a lot going on in the story, not because it was boring. The characterization is of course great, and it feels heavily inspired from Japanese anime/manga stories in the respect of having a wide spectrum of behaviors, habits, etc and also because of the different kinds of mindsets that characters have in those serializations.

The funny thing with the story would be that certain characters that you would think should get more development do not, but some totally other ones do. Although I find that to be okay, as a lover of different kinds of stories and such, I encountered reviews citing similar views. But those reviews were pretty crappy in my opinion, as they mainly highlighted all the negative things that they could find with Isle of Dogs. Don’t you get deterred by those. It’s definitely quite an underrated movie (in terms of viewership), not stars really. So people who have watched it enjoy it, but not many people have seen the movie, which is probably why it arrived on Hotstar shy of two months of its blockbuster release.

Upon reflecting further, I felt like the movie focused more on trying to deliver in terms of a complete story than delve into the smaller details of each scene, which I suppose appeal to some people more. I however, really enjoyed the film for what it tried to portray.

Weekend or not, if you just want to chill out and relax or watch something before your turn in for the night, you might want to tune in to this flick ;)