Appearance in the film
Chief was one of many stray dogs that were transferred from Megasaki City, Japan to Trash Island. There he befriended 4 house-pet dogs named Rex, King, Duke, and Boss.
Since he lived most of his life as a stray, Chief was used to the conditions, unlike his friends. 6 months passed and his friends were still unhappy about their current lives. Chief, who doesnt listen, thinks the dogs should stop complaining and get used to the island. The dogs first notice another dog named Nutmeg and rumor that shes with another dog named Felix. The dogs notice a plane with Atari piloting it. They help rescue Atari and find out that his dog, Spots, is missing. Everyone but Chief agrees to help.
The pack find a locked down cage with the bones of a dead dog, who is Sport, not Spots. Atari mourns over the dog and hosts a funeral, with Chief ignoring the moment. The dogs realize that the wrong dog died and warn Atari. Atari decides to stay a little longer until he finds where Spots truly is. Meanwhile Chief finds a robot dog and the Trash Island guards who captures Atari and the dogs, but they fight against them and escape. Chief and his friends hide in a glass bottle hideout where they can stay for the night. Chief leaves the hideout for a drink until he meets Nutmeg. She reveals to Chief that she has no mate and would never bring puppies to this world. She also tells him about her job for being a show dog by Tracy Walker. Nutmeg lastly convinces Chief to help Atari. Chief returns to the hideout and vows to help Atari rescue Spots.
The next morning Chief, Rex, Boss, Duke, and King follow Atari throughout the island and stop at the abandoned athlete club and recall their backstories(see Chiefs backstory below). They head to a rusty boat where they can find more directions from Jupiter and Oracle. Jupiter tells them that the pack must cross the end of the Middle Fingers and head to a lab where “the cannibal dogs” live, and hopes they will find him. The pack leaves the boat and ride on a trash converter but the ride separates Chief and Atari from Boss, Duke, King, and Rex, but they plan to find a way to reunite. Meanwhile Atari and Chief take a stop at a forgotten theme park. After playing some fetch, Chief starts to become more caring towards Atari. He lets Atari bathe and groom his fur and is shocked to look as similar to Spots, except with different noses. Atari feeds him a puppy snap which becomes Chiefs new favorite food. Chief watches Atari that night promising that they will find Spots.
The next morning, Atari and Chief find their friends all dirty in the trash convertor, but are ambushed again by the Kobayashis guards and the robot dogs. The 6 friends, however, escape with the help of Spots in a water chute, while everyone assumes that Atari is dead. Spots recalls that he has been hoping to reunite with Atari and that he is Chiefs older brother by five minutes, which upsets Chief. The water chute takes the pack to an abandoned lab where Spots friends live, including his mate, Peppermint.
After hearing that all the dogs will be exterminated with Wasabi Poison gas, Atari plans that he will build boats for him and the other dogs and head back to Megasaki to stop Kobayashi. Spots relinquishes his role as a bodyguard to Chief. That night Atari, Chief, Spots, and the other dogs set sail to the city. They enter the re-election ceremony as Atari retells a Haiku to the citizens, including his uncle. Tracy helps out by giving Chief a dose of dog flu serum, which works successfully, reforming Kobayashis cruelty. However his majordomo, Yoko, fights against Kobayashi to kill all the dogs, but the all the gas devices had been hacked after the red button was pressed. Atari and Spots are severely injured after the fight, but Chief kindly looks after them. After Kobayashi gives up his kidney for Atari, Atari is elected the new mayor of Megasaki with Chief as the new city bodyguard. Later, all the dogs were freed and peace and order was restored in the city.
Atari and Tracy become a couple and Chief and Nutmeg become friends. He confesses that he doesnt really like to fight because of stress and emotional issues, but feels happier after winning a friendship with Atari.
Chief was born in a storm drain in central Megasaki City six years before the movie, one of a litter of nine, along with Spots. A lifelong stray, Chief has been dodging dog catchers almost as long as he can remember. He only has three captures to his record where he spent any time in a pound. The first two times, he escaped within 24 hours of his incarceration, but the third time, he was adopted by a family before he could finish his escape tunnel. It was a big family, two parents, five kids, two other dogs already. Chief was loaded into the back of a station wagon and driven out of Megasaki city and out into the countryside. Chiefs new home was seemingly ideal for a dog; trees, a big lawn, swimming pool, anime on the TV almost all day.
About a week later, Chief was roused from his sleep by the familys youngest child, a little boy named Toshiro. It was about 6:15 in the morning and the boy was already wide awake, and looking to play with the new dog. Chief doesnt remember much of the incident, but apparently, he bit down hard enough to almost separate Toshiros hand from his arm.
Locked in the tool shed in the backyard, Chief had time to think of what hed done. It was a shock even to him. Toshiro had done nothing to deserve it. Hed only been friendly. Chief was almost certain Toshiros affection had scared him and provoked the reaction. That night, an old woman, he thinks she was the grandmother, came to the shed and gave him a bowl of homemade Hibachi chili. While hes certain the chili was just leftovers, he still likes to think she made it just for him. Rather than face being sent back to the pound or outright shot, Chief dug his way out of the shed by morning, jumped onto the back of a dump truck and made his way back to the city.
Chief is five minutes younger than Spots.
Chief recalls that all of his sisters were drowned, though its unknown how many sisters he had.
As Atari sleeps, the Alpha Pack discusses what to do. They worry over Ataris physical and mental health due to the propeller clutch stuck in his skull. Duke mentions that Atari is the distant nephew of Mayor Kobayashi, to which the party grows nervous. However, they decide to travel across the Middle Fingers to get advice from Jupiter and Oracle, two sage dogs who live farther out than the rest of the dog society. Chief returns and states that trying to help Atari will get the pack euthanized. He is outvoted, with Rex becoming the new de facto leader.
Back in Megasaki, Professor Watanabe is placed under house arrest for criticizing Kobayashis policy concerning the dogs. A school newspaper, The Daily Manifesto, begins discussing the event. An American exchange student, Tracy Walker, suspects that Mayor Kobayashi is controlling a conspiracy to get re-elected in the upcoming vote by ordering the Municipal Dome to spread Anti-Dog propaganda and suppressing Watanabes cure to turn Megasakis citizens against their dogs. When asked for proof, she says she does not know if she can provide any.
Tracy approaches Yoko Ono, who initially states that it is too late to stop Kobayashi. However, once Tracy gets in her face, snapping her out of her grief, she reveals that Tracys theory is accurate, and gives her the last cure. At Kobayashis re-election ceremony, he announces his plan to the public, along with the robot dogs as replacement pets. Kobayashi wins the election by a landslide at 98.6%. Tracy comes in and she reveals evidence of his misconduct. Kobayashi claims that Tracy has been sent by foreign special-interest groups to agitate disorder and incite anarchy. He then cancels and nullifies Tracys study visa, deporting her back to the United States. Major Domo brings in the red button, which will activate the robot dogs on Trash Island, causing them to poison all the dogs from Uni Prefecture.
After the fight, Domo sees the button, and he and Mayor Kobayashi grapple over it before Domo successfully presses the button, completely unsympathetic that it would also result in the countless deaths of the human citizens of Megasaki who are now in the way. But by the time the signal reaches the extermination electronics (via the signal demultiplexer), they are hacked. The human exterminators poison backfires, the robotic dogs return to normal, and the drones start going haywire due to a hacker from Tracys school, causing the extermination electronics to malfunction and fail, shocking Domo in the process and foiling his extermination plans.
A owl that Spot understands brings word to the pack that Kobayashi is planning to order death for every dog on Trash Island following his re-election. When the pack finds out these circumstances, they begin building boats to travel to the mainland. On the main boat, Peppermint gives birth, leading to Spots asking Chief to replace him as Ataris bodyguard. He accepts, and Atari places the headset on Chiefs ear. Atari feeds one of the pups with a bottle.
1M: A Completely Blue Dog
At one point, the dogs romp through an abandoned factory where testing was done on dogs, which left the pups with deformities—some have rigging on their heads, others have metal legs. One in the background is completely blue. I would like to meet a completely blue dog!
Rating: Very Good Dog
Oracle’s companion, Jupiter is a large, wise dog who knows the history of the island. He looks like a mastiff of some sort, but carries a booze barrel around his neck like a St. Bernard. (It is filled with turpentine brandy, which apparently does not have any adverse effects on dogs.) While I appreciate the boozehound, I am a bit confused by the premise of a historian dog—my dog forgets who I am if I put on a winter jacket or suit.
Rating: Very Good Dog
Rex is not the leader of the pack—the group is a democratic body, and all decisions are made via vote—but Rex is typically the one who brings issues up to a vote. He is the most thoughtful of the dogs—before fighting Igor’s gang, he urges the dogs to actually inspect the bag of garbage they were about to fight over, just in case the contents weren’t worth fighting over. (They were.) But Rex yearns for his old home—he is, as he describes himself, an indoor dog.
Rating: Very Good Dog
all puppies scenes in Isle Of Dogs (2018)
Wes Anderson’s new film “Isle of Dogs,” a comedic drama realized with stop-motion animation (like his film “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” from 2009) is both a persuasive argument for big-screen viewing and for watching at home via streaming or a disk (preferably Blu-ray). The movie is overwhelming, in the very best sense: the pointillistic profusion of the movie’s visual details—décor, action, and the gestures of the characters (all of which are puppets, deftly manipulated, frame by frame)—and, for that matter, its drolly nuanced sound mix, make a big-screen viewing a prime necessity. But that very profusion of visual details, plus the speed with which the movie’s intricate story is told, the flashes forward and back, and the quick introduction of a wide array of characters and subplots, make a first viewing merely a rough draft of an experience and invite savoring, in private, in slow motion and in freeze-frame.
“Isle of Dogs” is the third film in a virtual trilogy, following “Moonrise Kingdom” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel”—a trilogy of revolt. “Moonrise Kingdom” shows two teen-agers overturning narrow mores and narrow legalism while displaying their own inspired fusion of new and old styles (helped by a deus ex machina who is none other than God himself). In “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” a true sense of style, restraint, and pleasure functions in two ways: as both a mark of and a weapon against the depravities of a tyrannical and racist regime. With “Isle of Dogs,” Anderson looks even more closely at the victims of a radically exterminationist ruler, and, in effect, inverts the terms of “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Thrust into situations of utter degradation, places of utter ruin, and fates of utter despair, these victims unite in resisting the forces that would destroy them and, in the process, tap into a latent sensibility and forge a sublime style of their own.
The victims in “Isle of Dogs,” of course, happen to be canines. In the fictitious Japanese city of Megasaki, twenty years in the future, they are deported en masse to a fictitious offshore garbage dump, known as Trash Island, under orders from the city’s tyrannical Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura, who co-wrote the story with Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, and Roman Coppola). (There’s a mythic backstory of the Kobayashi clan’s ancient hatred for dogs.) The pretext for that deportation is public health: the city’s canine population is widely infected with dog flu, which can be transmitted to humans, as well as with snout fever. But at the rigorously orchestrated rally at which the mayor declares his intentions, he allows, pro forma, a speaker in opposition—the scientist Watanabe, from the Science Party, who’s there with his colleague, named (and voiced by) Yoko Ono. Watanabe (voiced by Akira Ito) announces that he has nearly completed a cure for dog flu and a treatment for snout fever, but the pro-Kobayashi public filling the hall shout him down and pelt him with produce and garbage. From its basic setup, “Isle of Dogs” is a fantasy that reflects no aspect of Japanese current events but, rather, the xenophobic, racist, and demagogic strains of contemporary American politics.
The dogs on Trash Island are being left to die from malign neglect. They’re all afflicted with dog flu, and they have nothing to eat but the garbage scraps that they scavenge, and there’s little clean water to drink. The action is centered on five of them: Rex (voiced by Edward Norton), Duke (Jeff Goldblum), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), and Chief (Bryan Cranston). What distinguishes Chief is that, unlike the other four, all former house pets, he is a stray—and, as a stray, who has led a tough life, he has no patience for his cohorts’ nostalgia for creature comforts. He girds them for a fight to survive.
Their sense of battle, however, is galvanized by the arrival of a human: the twelve-year-old Atari Kobayashi (voiced by Koyu Rankin), the mayor’s ward and distant relative, whose parents were killed in a train accident years earlier. When Atari was brought into the mayor’s home, he was given a guard dog named Spots (Liev Schreiber). To launch the anti-dog campaign, Mayor Kobayashi makes Spots the first deportee to Trash Island; but Atari secretly commandeers a small plane in the hope of rescuing Spots. The plane crash-lands, and the band of five dogs vote not to eat Atari but to rescue him—and to help him find Spots, in a mission that they know to be all but hopeless but that reaffirms their dignity and engages their righteous outrage at their persecutors.
The Japanese characters speak Japanese; their dialogue isn’t subtitled, but, rather, is frequently translated by onscreen simultaneous translators (one is voiced by Frances McDormand); the one American character speaks English; the dogs speak English. The decision not to subtitle the Japanese speakers has been criticized, as by Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times, for diminishing the prominence of the movie’s Japanese characters; yet the bulk of the dialogue is translated, and the most conspicuous non-translations, when Atari speaks to the dogs, replicates the mutual incomprehension of the species—there’s even a winking yet, in context, touching aside by one of the dogs, who, upon rescuing Atari, says, “I wish someone spoke his language.” The center of the movie is neither the Japanese characters nor the American one; it’s the canine ones. The movie looks closely at deportation, internment in a prison camp, and the threat of extermination—all from the perspective of the victims.
No contemporary director delights like Anderson does in depicting military or quasi-military organization, its somewhat ludicrous yet deeply earnest and potentially very effective rituals and hierarchies. In that regard, “Isle of Dogs” is something like Anderson’s first John Ford movie—filled with the emotionalism of respect and principle, embodied in the dogs’ own organization and in their relationships with humans. A flashback to the first encounter of Atari and Spots is an extraordinarily tender scene that’s undergirded by a self-aware, steadfast canine devotion—the very root of the action that follows. Chief is a wild dog who’s aware of his own recklessness, which presents a danger to others (and to himself—he lost his one chance at becoming a house pet when he bit a child). When he is thrust into Atari’s company, he confronts his lifelong conflict between impulses toward obedience and disobedience. When Anderson films the ruins of Trash Island, he aestheticizes and stylizes them without beautifying them, and he does the same thing with the disciplined and symmetrical order of Mayor Kobayashi’s public rallies (a Riefenstahlian twist on a contemporary American malady). Andersonian beauty is principled, passionate, liberating, and the contrast between mere order and beauty is presented nowhere more clearly in his oeuvre than in “Isle of Dogs.” (For that matter, it’s a mistake to consider Anderson’s work in animation a pursuit of total control: the director’s work with his animators involves vast amounts of back-and-forth, of attempts and suggestions, variations and surprises; their personal and physical involvement, even if offscreen, is no less vital to the film than the presence of actors in a live-action movie.)
There’s another character who’s crucial to the resistance to Mayor Kobayashi’s reign of terror: an American foreign-exchange student named Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig), who is the only white student in her class in Megasaki Senior High. I was at first surprised that Anderson would cast a white foreigner as the central figure in the political liberation of Megasaki City, but Tracy’s presence—virtually inviting the xenophobic wrath of the demagogic ruler—meshes with the parallels that Anderson develops with current American politics. The connection becomes even clearer when—not to give away too much—Mayor Kobayashi is revealed to be a kleptocrat whose policies are driven by his business interests. What’s more, the climactic line that unleashes the movie’s dénouement is Tracy’s interruption of Mayor Kobayashi’s campaign rally with the cry, “He’s stealing the reëlection!” (The suggestion that citizens of the future Megasaki City seem passive in the face of tyranny could, to an outside observer, hold quite as well here, now.)
For Anderson, Japan is a sort of mirror-America, a country that has as prominent, as rich, and as inspiring a cinematic , due to its movie industry and to the artists whom it sustained; the Japan of “Isle of Dogs” is a movie-made place. “Isle of Dogs” doesn’t draw upon Japanese history, doesn’t delve into Japanese politics, doesn’t consider the present-day specifics of Japanese society. The movie’s future-Japan (a future that is decoratively imbued, Anderson-style, with industrial styles and technological devices of the fifties and sixties) is akin to the fictitious Central European country of Zubrowka in “Grand Budapest,” which is as much a movie creation—a reference to films by Ernst Lubitsch and other nineteen-thirties filmmakers—as is the futuristic-dystopian Japan of “Isle of Dogs.” Even the geography of Japan is fictitious (it includes the so-called Middle Finger Islands which the dogs must cross in order to reach the distant Cuticles). The film’s political references have nothing to do with real-life Japan, either; they’re heralded very early on, in the voice-over narration (by Courtney B. Vance) that refers to “the Japanese archipelago,” a word that instantly resounds not with Japanese history but with exposés of Soviet prison camps.
The movie’s Japan resembles Zubrowka in another way: like Lubitsch’s comedies of manners, the movies of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, and others show a society in which the expression of emotion is modulated through conventional hints, deflections, and indirections. The iconography of Japan, as represented copiously in Japanese movies, art, and architecture reflects a culture of shared formalities. The demagogy of Mayor Kobayashi (like the ultimate villainy of his henchman, the Major-Domo Hatchet-Man, voiced by Akira Takayama) stands out all the more for saying and doing, with disruptive ferocity, what few in his position would be likely to express publicly. (Here, too, Japan is a stand-in for current-day America.) But the virtues of mutually respected formalities emerge in a sort of epilogue, when Mayor Kobayashi publicly admits (in a gesture virtually unimaginable in American public life), “I have no honor,” and makes a vast offering in repentance. (No spoilers; it’s not seppuku but a brilliantly conceived, humanistic, life-giving substitute.)
As ever in Anderson’s work, there’s a powerful strain of romanticism in “Isle of Dogs,” both in the portrayal of the uprising (the lonely three-tone whistle that serves as the dogs’ sign of recognition, the abandoned Spots’s Chaplinesque stare into camera) and in matters of actual romance (two involving dogs and one involving a teen or tween crush). I confess that I was surprised by the gender separation of dogs on Trash Island—the only prominent female dogs, Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson) and Peppermint (Kara Hayward), aren’t fighters. Nutmeg is a former show dog (though she tells Chief, “That’s what I do, it’s not my identity”), deft and dainty. Peppermint, a survivor of a distant, woeful camp of experimentation on animals, is also slender and domestic. The martial masculinity of the movie’s band of fighting dogs is an aesthetic holdover—a reference to a cinematic and literary heritage that is receiving long-overdue critiques in Hollywood today, but Anderson seems to replicate it unquestioningly. Given the central place of misogyny in the current American strain of political madness, and the clarity and force of the movie’s allegory of rage at that madness, that absence is all the more gaping.