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Behind the Scenes: The Tons of Craftwork That Went Into Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs”

The reason movies are shot in places like New York, Tokyo or Hong Kong is obvious: Our built-up urban environments provide visually dense palettes that make great labor-free backdrops.

Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs,” however, took the opposite approach in terms of labor/backdrops. The stop-motion animated film is as much a testament to craftsmanship as it is a storytelling adventure, featuring some 240 hand-built micro sets. The 35-foot-long set for the laboratory alone contained “600 practical fixtures, every one of which was dimmable and controlled,” cinematographer Tristan Oliver told IndieWire.

A team of graphic designers had to further populate those sets with over 1,000 pieces of graphics, from signage to posters to Post-It notes to computer punch cards to saké bottle labels and newspapers, with both English and Japanese typography.

And then, of course, there were the actual puppets themselves: Seventy artists created 500 dogs and a further 500 humans, all handmade, with the main characters being created in multiple sizes depending on how they were to be shot. The dog fur isn’t synthetic, but was created using Alpaca and Merino wool, skinning a metal armature and mechanical head that allowed for a range of expressions.

While Bill Murray famously fell asleep during a cast-and-crew panel for the movie, it’s unlikely the 27 animators got much sleep at all during the production: Producing 7.5 seconds of footage reportedly took one week, while one particularly complicated scene involving a character making sushi took six months!

Take a look at how the animators worked their magic: