Hello! Just wanted to address this: Renegade Cut made a very similar video about this topic a couple years ago, and in our analyses we both cite an article by Jonah Weiner, which informed many of our criticisms (much of the literature surrounding Wes Anderson + race echo a lot of the same sentiments)! It was never my intention to copy Renegade Cut - he had this take first, and I really admire his work. But I do recognize our points about Darjeeling have a significant amount of overlap. Here is his video (you should check out the rest of his channel too, he's amazing): ua-cam.com/video/-Ku7PwEKTAw/v-deo.html
@@soaplacide9232 That's the argument Wes and his fans will make, but then the white English speaking student and the white translator both speak in English and not in barks.
I would also like to add that some of the Japanese spoken in Isle of Dogs is not comprehensible to Japanese people/speakers. I don't remember specifics but I remember there were several instances in which English words were simply spoken with a Japanese "accent". While there are 外来語(words "borrowed" from other languages and incorporated into Japanese) Anderson had Japanese characters speak in ways that a real native Japanese speaker/Japanese person would never do. Maybe it's because as a Japanese person I'm always hyper aware/sensitive at how Western media portrays Japanese culture, but that aspect just felt extra icky for me. I wish I could've enjoyed it because I do love the storyline and the dogs and the animation but the use of Japanese culture felt incredibly shallow and fetishistic at points :(
@@bettyblu8115 the fetishisation of people is different to the fetishisation of a culture or country. both are bad, but both are separate from the other
I went to see this in theaters with my family, including my Japanese grandma. I remember she (and my sister, who knows Japanese pretty fluently) was confused at some parts of the movie when the Japanese characters spoke strangely, and I'm learning Japanese now so in a few years I want to watch it again to pick up on that. I did think it was a really good movie, and loved the animation, but yeah I agree, some parts of the culture and language just didn't sit well, and weren't very well done/portrayed by Anderson, which is a shame because he really is one of my favorite directors.
Herr Enid I am aware of this! I don’t have a particular problem with his casting because from what I remember it wasn’t any of his lines that stuck out to me but rather “background” characters with one or two lines (RE: it was the fault of the writing not the acting).
This is so interesting. I am half Japanese, and I speak Japanese, so my Japanese mother and I did not feel the distinct language barrier that other people might have while watching this film. We naturally would not "other" the Japanese elements or people in the film, and we both enjoyed the film quite a bit as a moment of representation of our culture in Hollywood, and we of course have already reflexively learned to give Westerners a pass on cultural accuracy or nuance since we rarely see it (sad but true). However, unpacking this for a non-Japanese audience who might have accidentally diminished the Japanese characters to a backdrop is a very interesting exercise. Thanks for sharing your analysis! There's so much to think about here.
@@moreafterthistime Well, it's more like resignation, really. Even in Europe (except maybe the "big ones", UK, Germany, France etc) we have kinda abandoned all hope to see a mainstream movie presenting our cultures as more than a landscape or a caricature. We are just happy if the USA acknowledges we exist. And we're still privileged in terms of what the USA thinks of us... I can't start imagining what's like growing up in the Middle East and seeing the portrayal that Hollywood movies gives of them.
Yes when a Westerner makes a film on the Eastern culture there has to be some liberty or else it's just going to sound like portrayed through a very Eastern filmmaker perspective. There won't be any significant distinction between the West and the East
@@moreafterthistime have you seen how the west is portrayed in anime? You can't get an accurate 1:1 portrayal of a culture done by people outside of it.
At first I thought that the no subtitles was really clever because it was like we were watching from the perspective of a dog who wouldnt understand human language. And then the white character shows up and is inexplicably perfectly intelligible lmao.
I think you missed the opening title card, which outright said: "The humans in this story speak only in their native tongue (occasionally translated via bi-lingual interpreter, foreign-exhange-student, or electronic device) All barks have been rendered into English." So I don't really see how what you are saying applies.
And Anderson could've avoided this by merely showing the Japanese characters trying to decipher English speakers from their perspective, but he didn't.
@@rsfilmdiscussionchannel4168 His statement definitely applies. You're comment only proves his point really, he chose to give the dogs subtitles and not the japanese characters. The whole point of the vid is that people from eastern cultures are just seen as props in american movies
His statement is based in not knowing what the intention of the filmmaker was with the language stuff. It does not apply, at least not how he is saying it. He could have made a similar point without giving an incorrect observation. And the dogs weren't given subtitles.
As a Japanese speaker, the Japanese spoken in this movie is really off. Like, I can understand what characters like Atari and who else are saying, it seems artificial. Like how Japanese companies use English on their products that make no sense linguistically.
literally like people can say what they like about orientalism but objectively this film fails at its efforts of using japanese culture - my mum could not understand half of what the people were saying
I think that the artificial aesthetic of wes anderson films also contributes to this detachment of the culture. He's a fan of old movies and uses the stereotypes and cliches of them on most of his movies, so when portraying a different culture this approach results insensitive. Love your video, I wouldn't stop to think about this if not for it.
This was going to be my rough point. I think for Darjeeling Limited presents the characters are supposed to be "Ugly Americans" and thus any background character will be seen as a part of the landscape. Rita and the stewart only become humanized the more the boys interact with them. I've known people that traveled in the 1960-70s and they were much like the boys. Very separate from the cultures they cohabitated with with a small selection of humanized locals. I didn't see Isle of Dogs, but I didn't hear much good about. it
You say that but Isle of Dogs is not the movie for that. The one ostensibly white character is so "Quirky and Kooky" that it was obnoxious whenever they were on screen, ie the American school girl. Grand Budapest has the POC main character be one of the most muted characters in terms of bullshit props because they're getting more character through the movie, the white character in Mr Gustave is the one with all the nonsense. Same with Moonrise Kingdom though in that there's a Distinct lack of non-white people.
Why does orientalism persist? A year ago my graduate class read Orientalism. None of the white PhD students understood what Said was talking about but all of them were critical of his argument and didnt see how it applied to our scholarship or literature. I facepalmed through our entire discussion of the text that night
Do any of these classmates watch films made in non western countries? It can aid in the development of understanding that non western ppl have their own gaze and walk through this world.
People are allowed to disagree with opinions of others. That's what academic discourse is about. I would find it very troublesome and boring as a lecturer to have the entire classroom mindlessly agree with whatever I assigned them. Views are meant to be challenged over and over; that's how they are honed and that's how we progress.
@@napturaladvice7646 I'm not a westerner and I've watched hundreds of non-western movies. They do the exact same thing Hollywood does when it comes to presenting cultures foreign to themselves. Cultural appropriation is in the human nature and there's nothing wrong with it. It's how cultures grow and evolve. Following that, it's also expected that a director/writer does not have the knowledge of a native member of a culture. Their portrayal will always leave a lot wanting for a person that has an in-depth knowledge of it. I understand that when I see the rare examples of mine in foreign media, so I doesn't bother me in the slightest. If it isn't purposefully showing it in false negative light then I'm just happy that someone found it interesting enough to portray.
Saw this trailer with my husband at the theater and we both let out an audible "Yikes" at the mushroom cloud scene. One of the most culturally traumatic events of Japan having its' imagery presented for a film by a quirky western filmmaker just never sat well with us.
yeah, that was really one of the ugliest parts of a movie that seemed so worried about making everything look perfect and neat. i still wonder how could someone write a story set in japan and include a mushroom cloud, with literally no importance to the plot nor any thoughts given on how its iconic status is derived from pain and destruction -not "aesthetic pleasure", like cherry blossoms and sea waves over fuji.
I find it intriguing that every video essay that I’ve seen discussing colonialism has a bevy of people in the comments who either dismiss it or excuse it- moreso than any other topic. You can’t just divorce films of this type from their historical context. Yes, Anderson may have intentionally limited the audience’s understanding of the other culture to mirror the characters’ alienation from that culture. So what? There are plenty of movies that have been made showing alienation from society without shamelessly borrowing the aesthetics of other cultures- Fight Club and Priscilla Queen of the Desert come to mind. Hell, Anderson could just have easily as set these films in rural America or England and the same “fish out of water” element would have applied with a trio of elitist, snobby upper class Americans in a very poor area. Instead, he chose to borrow the aesthetics of another place and literally nothing else. (This also lessens the scope of the film, and restricts its appeal to Western audiences.)
Fight Club doesn't address (mostly white) male alienation? It's whole point is that they are a lost generation set adrift, many fatherless...knowing more about duvets and matching dishes than masculinity. Also, Marla Singer, the lone female takes on the parody of masculinity to have freedom and not have to answer to anyone. Why should a film maker have to make every film where they live, because anything unknown or foreign is exploitative? Then Sergio Leone had no right to come to America and make films about the Old West.
BettyBlu Feeling alone and lost *is* alienation- alienation from your own society. You don’t have to be in a different culture to feel alienated. And I never said that filmmakers shouldn’t make films set in foreign locations. But I do think that, if they do, they should at least make some kind of effort to represent the feeling of that place and time instead of just relying on tired, racist tropes of perceived exoticism.
Greyfoot Yodel could you elaborate on Said's work being "historically inaccurate and (...) is a victimizing of most of Asia that almost no modern east or west asian historian would relate to"? specifically the almost no modern or west asian historian part. i'm not doing a gotcha where i somehow found an asian historian that disputes that claim, because you already said almost, but personally ive just not heard about those historians. its not me knocking them, its on me for not knowing about these people. basically im asking for people's work and people who also find Said's work outdated and unrelatable to modern times.
@BettyBlu all of Sergio Leone’s movies were shot in Italy or Spain. Also Every actor in the movie is actually speaking their native language and then over dubbed, so it doesn’t have the problem of silencing non white voices or using orientalized English words like sit-o so the mostly white audience can understand. The person you’re responding to was using fight club as an example of depicting alienation with using another culture as little more than a backdrop so they agree with you. Did you watch the video or did you watch the first couple minutes and start furiously commenting?
That's why I think this video is so interesting, especially reading the comments. It raises so many questions. Does the director have a responsibility in representing a culture because s/he chooses it as a backdrop for their story? Or if s/he is using it just aesthetically or as a background character to the story is that ok as long as it's not re-enforcing negative sterotypes? If we can't portray cultural truths accurately should we even try? Do we have an obligation to try? Do other cultures' filmmakers feel that same obligation? How much true authenticity can really be manufactured? WA has a particular frame of reference in a particular story he wants to tell. I think critique and concerns are important to bring up but are we saying we can't tell stories about places we are not familiar with? Should art be limited based on the grounds of how it is exploitive vs. expressive? And who determines that? There has been a lot of talk about whitewashing and lack of POC and female representation in Hollywood and I'm so glad that people are speaking out about these issues. These are hard questions with a lot of gray areas. I have a huge love for art and film and story-telling and I can't wait to see what the future brings.
Hi - thank you for making this video and pointing out this quality in W.A. movies. However, I must dispute one fact (4:12). While I understand the point that you were making - outright colonialism has not ended! Puerto Rico and Guam are still colonies! I'm not sure if you are from the U.S., but if you are, it is especially important that you not disregard or ignore that fact.
Puerto Rico had the opportunity to become a state, but they voted against it. Not the US, Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico voted AGAINST its own statehood. Let that sink in for a second
I feel like I've not seen the same Darjeeling Limited. I found that the three main characters were shown as selfish, stupid, typical white male. And I did not feel pity at the beginning or joy for them at the end. I understood the film as a critic of spiritual tourism and the use of other culture as a way to escape ours by just "miming" and not trying to actually understand them. When they help the boys in the river, one of the character says something like that : he was disappointed "I could'nt save mine", as if he failed in his quest, but the boy's death isn't important. But now knowing Wes Anderson's filmography, I find it unlikely that he focused on criticizing spiritual tourism instead of telling the usual story of white broken characters. I think this shows how much of orientalism there is in the Darjeeling Limited. What I saw as a (quite smart because not to obvious) critic was just him being quite insensitive and applying usual orientalism without thinking twice. Isle of Dog is an incredible film for the many reason, but yes, Japan is just used as decorative and foreign. The movie wouldn't have been different regarding the story if it was set in India, or in Mexico. When Coco actually tries to speak about the mexican culture seen by mexicans, Anderson simply use it for its imagery. At least his not mocking them! NB: Sorry if my english isn't that great, but I hope I can still be understood
Great point. It can be difficult to discern the intentions behind certain creative liberties until you know the ENTIRE context, like you said about Anderson. I didn't react negatively at all to Isle of Dogs, aside from being weirded out by the white protagonist. Then I saw a couple video essays about Wes Anderson and was shown the patterns in his work that point to these uncomfortable things.
At least i'm not the only one. i see the Darjeeling Limited as the same way as you . The brothers are clearly slefish but maybe it's more preblematic that it should be.
@@Eldiran1 The problem is when I read critics on the film, I never encountered someone talking about the movie that way. So I think it's more likely that we over-interprated the Darjeeling Limited, and the brothers are supposed to be lovable and engaging...
@@domingadoflaminga3961 Huh? Its not like anyone pays the country of Germany every time they make a Red Riding Hood story. This is like complaining the Japanese studios that make fantasy anime don't put all the profits to British charities
as an indian i appreciated this essay so much! yeah american media has a lot of issues in portraying asia lmao. love that it was explored here with care 💓💕
I'm an MA Japanese Studies Student and have been studying Orientalism and Occidentalism in university for quite some time now. I think you did a really great job of explaining this complex topic. I'm glad more people get to learn about it. Sometimes I get so frustrated with stuff like this even (or actually especially) in daily life. People get real mad when non-Japanese people try on Kimonos in a museum but depictions like this in movies are just accepted as edgy and cool. Clearly some priorities off here, haha. (Just to clarify: if you respectfully wear a kimono Japanese people love it! It's wonderful to participate in other cultures, but it's not cool to disrespect/ridicule/fetishize other humans for your enjoyment.)
If Japanese people can wear western style suits and put their own spin on Western hobbies and interests, then westerners can do the same for items from Japanese culture.
What's missing from this discussion is the acknowledgement that Japan's position is firmly placed within the west, even though their culture is eastern. Japan's constitution was written by the US, who still maintains military presence in the Japanese islands, and pretty much dictates its foreign policy. However, Japan is indisputably part of the imperial core countries, whose economic superiority is predicated on the exploitation of third world labor and resources, same as the EU, US and the commonwealth. The type of orientalism and fetishism that Japan is often subjected to, and which is rightfully criticized by westerners, is still seen acceptable when it's aimed at eg. China or Vietnam or North Korea, who are geopolitical adversaries of the West. I mean, how many times have you encountered the stereotype of Chinese people as mindless automatons, a kind of soulless hive-mind who are simultaneously oppressed, but somehow also a barbaric horde of aliens? It's commonplace, but never questioned with the same intensity as insensitive depictions of the Japanese. I'd like to see some consistency about this issue from western cultural critics. Especially since Japanese war crimes and genocide directed at other Asians is so often whitewashed by westerners who have an unhealthy obsession with Japan's conception of ethnic homogeneity.
@@SirBlackReeds You’ve really got to improve your reading comprehension. The OC was presenting a contrast between people getting mad at something appropriate and not getting mad at something inappropriate.
I think the Isle of Dogs is more nuanced than you give it credit for. The New Yorker published a review by Moeko Fujii that made me paused. Fujii, a native Japanese speaker, explained WHAT the Japanese people were saying. And a lot of it was put downs or criticism of the white characters for being out of touch or ineffective. There were also a number of things in the movie that were clearly done with an eye for Japanese viewers: Fujii points to the use and subversion of Japanese archetypes and references. Fujii points to the theme of translation in the film, calling it “the beating heart of the film: there is no such thing as “true” translation. Everything is interpreted. Translation is malleable and implicated, always, by systems of power.” And, importantly, that power is not automatically given to the white characters (or, for that matter, the audience). “in the world of Megasaki City, the Japanese can speak and understand English but choose to speak in their native tongue. They demand fluency on their own terms.” Further, Fujii points out a problem with applying orientalist lens towards Japan. Japan was an imperial power. While the Japanese were indeed caricatured in the west, it didn’t serve the same purpose as in South Asia or the Middle East. Japanese caricature never came with the kind of domination that other Asian nations experienced. While Japan was being exoticized, it was colonizing Korea and invading Manchuria.
I'm curious what Broey's thoughts on this are. I agree with almost everything in the video but I feel like most of the points apply more to Darjeeling Limited than to Isle of dogs. Although it's hard to tell if I'm just being defensive because I really enjoyed the movie. The point about Japan as a colonial nation that gets lumped in with the "east" (from a western perspective) is also something to think about and could take up a whole video by itself!
Hi there, that's a very fair criticism! I definitely thought about that, but I should have presented it as a counter-argument in the video (as any essayist should do). I agree that translation is never pure, and has carried with it its own marred history. But I think the problem is that, by omitting subtitles and having English-speaking characters speak over the Japanese-speaking characters for the majority of the film, we lose a lot of the nuance in the voice acting. As to the untranslated scenes being for Japanese viewers, I genuinely think that this gives each audience a very limited understanding of the movie. If the Japanese characters are criticizing the white characters for being out of touch, that's something that I think Western audiences should be privy to, as its maybe sometime we should learn from. In all, I think Isle of Dogs was an exciting film, but I think the choices Anderson makes in an effort to combat language imperialism, subversive or not, were not executed very effectively and may have had reverse effects for English-speaking audiences. Of course, many people would disagree with me, but that was my own take on the language problem. In regards to your point about Orientalism, yes Japan has sometimes been excluded from narratives about "the Orient" because of its imperial domination of the East and because it Westernized much faster than other countries in that part of the world. However, I included it in my description of Orientalism because Westerners still view it from a very narrow lens - and this has resulted in a significant amount of fetishization of Japanese culture and people. While it may not have been formally colonized by Western powers in the 18th and 19th century as the other cultures that Said speaks of, we are still capable of oversimplifying and distorting it for the Western gaze. The combination of the many cultural references, lack of understanding between the English audiences and the Japanese characters, and the pseudo-white saviour character (Tracy) are the reason I framed the film within the context of Orientalism.
I think acknowledging the different power dynamics is important, but the fact that Japan wasn’t “colonized” doesn’t do much to change weather perception of Japan as an “exotic” land. And although not officially colonized it was forced into trade with western nations, resulting in the importation of Japanese goods and exotic notions of the people who belonged to the land. “Exoticization” doesn’t depend on a docile and innocent victim, this notion also plays into stereotypes. Negative and incorrect images and ideas of Japan and it’s people have existed and continue into history.
@@BroeyDeschanel I don't mean to say that applying an orientalist lens towards Isle of Dogs is wrong or inappropriate. I actually think the conversation is deeply interesting, topical, and very appropriate. Instead, what I mean is merely to say that the movie is more nuanced than, say, The Darjeeling Limited (a movie I have not seen and thus do not feel comfortable talking about.) And that it's important to think critically about how those movies are different and how they fare when applied with different lenses, in this case, an orientalist one. When doing a critical analysis, I think it's really important to start by looking at the text by itself. When applying a lens focusing on oppression, in this case, Orientalism, I think it's vital to look at what the proposed underclass or oppressed class does and says. The proposed examples that you have given from the Darjeeling Limited idicate that the Brown people in that movie do and say very little; they have very little agency. But I would say that Isle of Dogs is more complicated. You have to look at what the Japanese characters do and say, what impact they have in the plot and their level of agency, in order to do a full analysis. And I think this is a big point where your video falls short. So what do the Japanese characters do? The main protagonist (at least one of them), Atari, is a Japanese boy who steals a plane and takes it to Dog Island to try and rescue his pet dog. Atari is given goals, makes decisions to achieve those goals (i.e. he isn’t reactive), and is the fundamental driving force for the story (at least for one story line.) On the other hand, you have the plot line following the English speaking exchange student, Tracy. While the movie does put a lot of emphasis on Tracy, she doesn’t actually resolve any of the challenges presented by the plot, mostly serving as a driving force instead. A Japanese doctor/politician invents a cure for the “dog flu”. After he is murdered, it’s a Japanese assistant who is able to recover a copy of the cure. While she gives that cure to Tracy, when Tracy attempts to confront the main villain, she is rendered useless and ordered to be deported. Here, Atari, the English speaking dogs, and a number of Japanese supporting characters prove that the cure works, discredit the villain, and then thwart the final scheme to eliminate the dogs. In this story, the English speaking (Japanese) dogs have full arcs and self actualize, Atari has a full arc and self actualizes, and the Japanese villain has a full arc and actualizes. The one character who doesn’t have a full arc and self actualization is Tracy, the one white, English-speaking character. In fact, given the way that the movie is set up, having the characters speak in English would undermine an inherent aspect of being Japanese. Restricting the characters to their own native tongue while still giving them agency is a form of dignity that, in this movie, not even the audience can take away from them. I feel like I could go on and talk about the text and other relevant ways it could be read (the movie immediately draws my mind to Japanese internment, especially given the autocrat in the movie and who, in real life, is in the White House), but, for length, I think I need to stop there. However, that doesn’t get to your point about the inaccessibility of having Japanese characters that speak in a way that is inaccessible to the audience. I think you are really right in this point. If the audience can’t understand - and by extension, humanize - these characters, then what good is all the nice stuff in the text? However, what I am trying to point out is that that is the CONTEXT of the film. It is what the audience brings to the film, how they interpret and access it, not the text itself. And this is where I am pushing back on the video. I don’t think you can jump over the text and straight to the context. That doesn’t mean the context isn’t there or isn’t important. Lindsey Ellis has a really good video about how Megan Foxx was used in the first Transformer’s movie. The text itself actually makes the female characters the only ones who self actualize, who face challenges, make decisions to overcome those challenges, and grow as individuals. In contrast, most of the men are written as hapless morons. But the way that the camera frames Foxx and the other women in the movie exclusively sexualizes them, undermining what’s in the text. Because of this, the text says one thing, but the audience walks away with the opposite. I think it’s entirely valid to at least argue that the same thing is happening in Isle of Dogs. The text says one thing, but because of how it is structured, the audience walks away with the opposite. In this case, that opposite take is an orientalist narrative that minimizes and undermines the Japanese characters for easy consumption by an English speaking audience. I think that context is a very valid thing to scrutinize. But it is necessarily a messy thing to look at considering the role of the audience in this interpretation and the ignoring of the text. That’s why I said it needs more nuance.
The orientalist gaze not reflecting properly the historical depth of the lands depicted, including their more questionable aspects, is a constitutive and defining aspect of orientalism, not something to hold against the contemporary critique of orientalism. Let's not forget that the original orientalism, ever since Lord Byron and Delacroix, emerges as the cultural expression of the dynamic between the West and the Ottoman Empire that the former is pushing back. The Ottoman Empire, one of history's most defining imperial (ie conquering, colonising etc) powers: Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Greece, Wallachia etc these all are the Ottoman Empire. Edit: and that is why the overlap between the orientalist and the colonialist problematic is important but not total. Delacroix going to see "odalysques" (or Jews) in Tangier and Algiers does not have the same implications, at all, as Gauguin's relation with the women of Tahiti.
Your concluding statement is absolutely perfect. Modern media in general has a huge problem with Orientalism and racism, specifically masking them behind progressive ideals (the rebooted Tomb Raider games are a great example of this), and to hear someone discuss this problem so openly is wonderful. Excellent work.
It always made me feel uncomfortable in Darjeeling Limited when Adrian Brody says "I didn't save mine" while still holding a dead child in his arms. It feels completely dehumanizing, like trying to save these children was a game for them .
Literally just made a comment about this, scrolled a litter further and saw ur comment. I’m glad I’m not alone when I say that line is chilling as fuck.
I don’t think the word mine is dehumanizing at all. A mother calling her child mine doesn’t feel like her calling it and object. Same could be for any loved one referencing another as mine. It doesn’t have to mean it’s a goal in a game. He feels a personal failure because it is. He couldn’t not physically save the child even though he wanted to. We know he doesn’t just think it’s some THING because he connects and grieves with the boys family later on a very emotional level. It even reminds him of the loss of his father which most likely would be very emotionally scaring. Even that death seemed to affect him very little and it’s a trend across all of Wes Anderson’s films where deaths seem to have little attention or feeling of importance. I think it’s one of the things that I really love about his films.
@@signpaintr4evr In my opinion, the relationship is important, a mother calls her children hers because they were born from her, wes character doesn't have a connection with the boy, and even when they observe the grief and rituals ir the family of the boy, the three men observe almost like is a show and not the worst posible scenario a parent could go through and even then THEY are center. Maybe my point of view could be biased, because I come from a country where people like them come for an magical world rocking experience, they come and they take whatever they feel like taking and then they leave, they usually don't even make the effort to learn our names. We are just a dusty town, full of colorful people who coincidentally never speak or live outside of their needs. So yeah, maybe I'm biased 😏
I always thought that Adrian Brody’s line “I didn’t save mine” was really dark. Even in this boy’s death, Brody’s character saw him as almost like a coin he had to pick up in a video game. Like Brody’s failure to save him was a huge buzzkill to the brother’s heroics and that’s all it was.
i feel like that was almost meant to sound self-possessed, in almost exactly the way you described it, but it just got lost in translation. Anderson could have used any other phrase there, even replacing "mine" with "him" but he didn't. The first time I heard that it really took me aback, i mean, who approved that line, did anybody on set just think about maybe changing it? from what I'm aware of we didnt even learn the boy's name, it really shows how anderson believed/s that a young person of colors' life was no more important than the movie being 30 seconds shorter. (I'm sorry if that sounds all over the place, I'm very tired)
Josh is never okay because Gerard lied about MCR5 That’s just how Wes Anderson treats death with any of his characters. Yes we don’t learn the boy’s name but the trio still connects with the family and brakes the language barrier. There’s no need for a fake universal language or us getting a translation of what is being said. They all emotionally connect over this tragedy but it feel shallow because all of Wes Anderson’s deaths feel shallow. We don’t learn their father’s name, but they’re way closer connected to their father. And when we see them going to their father’s funeral they’re not all sad and crying the just seemed rushed and ready to get it over with and ready to see their mother. They’re more disappointed to hear that their mother won’t make it to the funeral.
Mine could have referred to an angel or a soul or a child. My child. Belonging to me the one I was supposed to save but I was too weak to do so. It isn’t such a shallow word.
Whoa this is pretty fascinating because I’ve always had a very very different interpretation of that scene. The line “I didn’t save mine” hit me so hard the first time I watched it and it also kind of blew my mind at how much more powerful and sad it was over simply saying “I didn’t save him”. The reason the word “mine” felt so much more powerful and humanizing to me is because I interpreted it as a feeling of personal responsibility for the boy’s life. I never interpreted “mine” as a dehumanizing sense such as a possession, coin, or trophy but rather the commitment to be the boy’s guardian. Each one of the characters chose a boy to save and in that moment became that boy’s guardian in the same way a father considers his son to be “mine”. And I think the fact that Brody’s character immediately asks what the boys name is supports the view that he sees him as a person he was responsible for, not simply a trophy he missed out on. Interesting how we interpreted the line so differently. For me it was perhaps one of the most humanizing and saddest moments in the movie. Hits me a little harder now as well that I’m a little older now and have moved into that guardian role myself in life. If I were to ever fail to save mine I would feel nothing but shame and failure in my role as a guardian.
That's interesting, because when I watched this movie as a Slovenian, I heard two foreign languages. One that I understood (English) and one that I did not (Japanese). The lack of subtitles did not make my mind automatically jump to orientalism. I simply assumed that the parts of the movie that were in Japanese were not meant to be understood fully by me or by English speakers, but by a Japanese audience. I also felt that me not understanding exactly what the people were saying was a clever way to help the viewer experience what it must feel like to be a dog living in a world dominated by humans.
that’s interesting !! but unfortunately the japanese was very stilted and unnatural - in both speech and writing. so it was very clearly not intended for japanese audiences to enjoy if that makes sense :/
That was exactly the point, good job. This film isn’t about the human characters, it’s about the dogs. The poor Japanese being spoken in the film a lot of times could be the result of muffling due to how the character is acted like Atari being a kid and not speaking properly or the Major Domo being a hysterical old man. Also a lot of the Japanese kanji seen in the film isn’t meant to be read either and is supposed to be set decoration, making the world feel more lived in and detailed.
I had the same experience as mexican. I understand english but I don't understand japanese so when I watched the film I assumed that the parts in japanese were meant to not be understood by us the non japanese audience because we are taking the dogs point of view. Also I thought that the japanese was legit and perhaps they used other language in japan to gave the same feeling we got as if we are the dogs
@@nemutai3596 That's funny, because a lot of Japanese people enjoyed it anyways. They were speaking a VERY dialectical form of Japanese. That's like saying "their English wasn't meant to be understood" just because it's spoken in a thick Cajun accent that *you* can't understand, even when most people can. But I understand, you don't actually understand Japanese so you're just parroting what you heard without actually checking anything :)
While this doesn't detract from the overall point, it's a bit ironic to illustrate the claim that "eastern men tend to be emasculated in [orientalist views]" with a snapshot from Lawrence of Arabia, which actually portrays Arabian men as more "authentically" viril and masculine than the "effeminate" and "decadent" British officers - a problematic trope with a long history in its own right for sure, but not very representative of the point being made here.
It's still the "Noble Savage" trope. You say "..effeminate and decadent.." with a self deprecatory wink, but we all know its really the "educated and civilized" bringing enlightenment to the "desert savages".
I had always thought of Isle of Dogs as a peculiar blend of “old fashioned” exoticising orientalism and more “modern” orientalist narratives seen in the cyberpunk genre especially, following Japan and Taiwan’s tech booms in the 80s. Thank you for putting this into better words and theoretical context than I could, this definitely helped me organise my own thoughts on why, much like you noted, the movie rubbed me the wrong way. I can’t wait to watch more of your videos!
I really appreciate the lack of hyperbole in your videos. Not to name names, but I have seen a video on how Wes Anderson writes non-white characters before, and it felt like a blanket condemnation of anyone who enjoyed Darjeeling Limited and Isle of Dogs, regardless of their reasoning. Your videos always feel much more like they’re trying to start a conversation than to end a debate, and even if I don’t agree with every word, they always make me think. Thanks for your great content.
while i appreciate how much you enjoy her videos, i think it can be very important to consume critiques that make you feel uncomfortable in the way his did. having a mirror held in front of us is never a comfortable experience but it is a crucial one.
Renegade Queen It didn’t make me feel uncomfortable, it just felt very dismissive of anyone who enjoys The Darjeeling Limited. The tone of the video made it difficult for me to engage with what was saying, since it felt like I was being talked down to. This video felt a lot more understanding in its approach to the subject matter, and I found myself able to connect with the ideas expressed much more, but that’s just my experience.
@@gilliamfan1705 I agree, especially as a fan of Renegade Cut's channel. He's a brilliant, gifted analyst, but he dipped into grandiose outrage in that video, which had the effect of weakening his argument rather than strengthening it. It's not that I don't agree with his assessment. But the level of contempt for Anderson's cluelessness seemed a little mean-spirited, especially for a film that was attempting to be a confession about that very cluelessness. By comparison to creativity, criticism is relatively easy. We can condemn the failings of white-cis-het-male creators all day long, and goodness knows, we need to call them out. But it's also important to cite and compare their failings to examples of success. What SHOULD Darjeeling Limited have been, aside from a movie with a different, less precious title. (this is a problem with Isle of Dogs too. Atari, Kobayashi, all the Japanese names were chosen for their familiarity to even the most disconnected westerners.) The intent of Darjeeling was to depict the westerners' search for spiritual meaning in the faraway orient as absurdly selfish, insensitive, and reductive. It's supposed to make you uncomfortable, to make these brothers look like assholes. That's what they are. The scene of the boy's death, which seems to get the most merciless condemnation, is meant to convey the brothers' dimwitted realization that these are real people, with real lives and suffering of their own. The point of the revelation wasn't to make the boy's death about the brothers and their journey, but to push their suffering into the background in acknowledgement of this much greater, more significant suffering. The point was that, finally, they stopped thinking that everything going on in India was about them. Most criticism of it seems to me like a misreading. The subtext that this death was a blood sacrifice of a person of color for the spiritual growth of white people is applicable, but it's not the one, inescapable meaning of the scene. The question remains, is there a better way for a white cis male director to handle such material? Or should he avoid it, and just crank out what he knows, white upper-middle-class Americans in emotional crisis? How would that help? It seems like a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" scenario. I absolutely agree Anderson deserves criticism for his handling of this material, but I think Renegade Cut surpassed criticism and delved into the realm of condemnation. And I think that was unnecessarily extreme.
I think Wes Anderson sees other countries only for their stereotypical aesthetics and wants to employ them, but realizes the only appropriate way to incorporate them is to set the movie in said country and then forces himself into a corner where he must write a movie set in a country he actually cares very little about culturally. Like in The Isle of Dogs, I think he fell in love with Japanese symbols and the Japanese aesthetic, but then was faced with creating a non- stereotypical world and just couldn’t live up to the task.
You do realise it's the other way around too right? I've seen so many Japanese movies where foreign people are pictured as a stereotype or maybe a better term hyperstylized version of where they come from. Also you have to take into account the intended audience of a film. You cannot explain an entire foreign culture in 90, 120, 160 minutes (however long a film lasts) and still try to tell a main plot. Which is why writers resort to shorthand. Otherwise you get lost in superfluous details that drag down the movie's pacing. Unless it's necessary to the plot to fully flesh out a specific culture shorthand should be enough.
@@Zeitgeist6 who cares about the other way around, that doesn't change anything about his films. Noone's asking for a documentary on the foreign culture, but it should be written with an understanding and appreciation for that culture rather than something shallow and stereotypical.
@@kiwifruit4019 Aside from completely missing the point of my explanation to WHY cinematic shorthand is used.. 1. I highly doubt Wes Anderson doesn't understand/appreciate foreign cultures. 2. Why should my argument not matter the other way around?
Realised this is practically everyone on Earth. The amount of Japanese films/shows that are set in a stereotypical “medieval Europe” is insane honestly.
I hadn't considered that this might be why Darjeerling and Isle of Dogs didn't really work for me. One thing that did consciously bug me about Isle of Dogs was the passivity of the female characters. Women tend to be very passive in Anderson's films, but he usually finds an in universe 'reason' for it to be that way. Whether that is by placing his narratives in the past, focussing on a mentor-mentee narrative, or on traditionally male exclusive societies (boy scouts, sailor scientists). Now this doesn't excuse the absence of active female characters in his oeuvre, but it does provide an explanation for this absence in the particular films. To me Isle of Dogs doesn't have any of this. Nothing about dogs makes it that they have to be guys, nothing about the setting makes it that the girl can't accomplish anything and has to constantly wait for the boy to take action, unless you want to critique sexism in Japan, which doesn't happen. To me, it was bothersome how useless the female characters were in the plot, how even when they tried to act, their efforts never seemed to matter.
I agree. I can only think of Saoirse Ronan and Tilda Swinton in The Grand Budapes Hotel. Two amazing actresses that were reduced to getting the plot started (Tilda) and the other for saving the male leads and wrapping up the story (Saoirse).
@@valfoin163 nothing she does is meaningful in any way by the end of the film. When the little boy returns, all her hard work turns out to have been for nothing as he exposes the plans of the mayor. She gets a lot of attention and runs around a lot but if we look at the plot you could completely leave her out and almost nothing would change.
Doesn't make her passive in any way. It's not because you fought fiercely for something and you ended up having little to no impact that it's not important. You fight for your life right? But you're still gonna end up dying eventually. You fight for the planet, for freedom, against corruption? What is your insignificant little life gonna change in the world? Does that mean you should give up everything and just die?
@@valfoin163 no, but in fiction it is a bit of a problematic trope that the actions of female characters don't influence the plot as opposed to the actions of male characters. I don't think characters have to have a big influence in every story, but in Anderson's work male characters tend to impact the plot of the story in significant ways and female characters tend not to. It is that asymmetry that I find problematic. Struggling in vain can be a very interesting thing to make a movie about, but that is not what I got from this movie. (He got his dog back after all). As to real life, this is not real nor does it attempt to be. We take artistic liberty to tell a story, dogs don't talk, puppets don't move by themselves, all actions might be considered inconsequential (depending on your outlook on life). In fact, it could be argued that the actions of women are deemed less consequential in the real world as well. None of that is in my opinion a reason by itself to depict things that way in media. So no, I personally still don't think that the girl had an active role in the movie (i.e. the story), because all her actions were basically in vain as opposed to the actions of the male characters.
as an Indian, I felt so indescribably uncomfortable whilst watching the trailer of “The Darjeeling Limited” (yes, just the trailer). I couldn’t explain my apprehension before but this video does an incredible job. 💖 Thank you
I am late to this vid, but let me recommend: Reel Asian Film Festival. This is a Film Fest in Toronto that includes and highlights creators of Asian backgrounds (yes, all of Asia). Being near Toronto, I had known of it growing up, but because of Covid forcing it online, I could finally attend. I had never felt so included. There were no asterisks - no 'but not that kind of Asian' and other similar barriers. It was also amazing to experience something highlighting my culture that was not made for a white audience (and had sliding-scale pricing, acknowledgment of our place on settler lands, and admonishment of anti-blackness - things I'm always nervous about bringing up amongst the diaspora in Canada). I just wanted to recommend it as I assume people on this vid would be interested in it, and I don't have friends that I could recommend it to, and so have been itching to express it.
I love your videos, and as a Wes Anderson fan, this one left me with a lot to think about. As a western white guy I guess the perspective I always took on the little boy drowning was never that brown bodies are expendable -- although I'm not rebutting the fact that this is encoded in the film -- but instead it felt like reality ripping in on the Brothers' selfish entitlement as a reminder of what Real Life is and how precious the time they get to spend together is. Granted, writing that out now I realize the death is subservient to their personal journey but I guess I just wanted to point out how heartbreaking I always found that scene. Thank you for the perspective from your eyes, I know I have much more to learn.
Wes Anderson has always been one of my favorite directors, and Isle of Dogs was one was my favorite movies of that year, so naturally I instinctively felt a bit resistant to this video's thesis when I saw it pop up in my feed, but I think you make a really compelling case. I never stopped to think about it, but you are definitely right that virtually all of Anderson's protagonists are white, and even when other culture's are explored they're explored from a distinctly American perspective and rarely as anything much deeper than set dressing. I really appreciate these types of BreadTube videos - those that challenge things I had previously taken for granted. All that to say: this is a really great video!
It feels like a deliberate choice, not one made to spite other cultures or ethnicities, though? The French Dispatch, Darjeeling Limited and Isle of Dogs feel like a distinctly Americanized perspective. All of the characters speak American English. The reason? The people sitting at home, watching the movies are... for the most part, American. And the way the films seem to portray a heavily 'Americanized' view of the world seems intentional. I have a hard time taking this 'thesis' seriously when the characters in Darjeeling are so clearly not good people. They don't worry about other people, they are constantly using the native population (there's even a scene when one of the brothers literally says 'Thanks for using me' to a character... he literally had sex with to get over a break-up with. It feels like there's a bit of cognitive dissonance going on. I feel like to better understand this issue of Wes Anderson and foreign cultures, there should be an exploration of the themes of other films, to piece together *why* this characterization is going on. I feel like the easy answer is that Wes Anderson desires to make films, about foreign cultures, for a distinctly American audience.
@@ahealthkit2745 how would you describe “American”? Maia grew up in Canada, but she herself is of South Asian descent. I can’t speak for her, but as a South Asian person who was born in America and grew up here, these aspects of Anderson’s work still deeply bother me. Storytellers are supposed to “write what they know”, not “write about your assumptions even if they’re wrong”
Wes Anderson is very Wesian Andersonian, and I have noticed this in many of his films. The inability to see his stories in the eye of minorities. It's a serious crutch that I don't think he will ever overcome and as you've said, yes it is taking advantage of different cultures to a horrible extent. I used to excuse his work by saying it's over stylised and focused heavily on the mindset of the protagonist. And therefore the rich white protagonist usually wouldn't engage with minorities or other cultures and Anderson presents them that way. But as a director and writer, he has to give proper respect and attention to the cultures and groups he constantly uses in his films. The fact that he doesn't means that they really are just decorative pieces for his storytelling and that's horrible. The Japanese culture here then becomes like the walls of the Budapest Hotel, and not anything he treats with true meaning. This was a great review!!
Not to disconnect Wes's scripts because he is very integral to his films, but I've noticed the most glaring times that cultures are used as backdrops occur when he works with Roman Coppola as a co-writer. Darjeeling Limited, Isle of Dogs, and Moonrise Kingdom were all written by him to some extent. All three of these use other cultures as backdrops to some extent. Limited has India, Isle has Japan and Kingdom has a fictional Native American path that the two-child protagonists follow to escape their difficult lives.
@@ZachHessEdits That adds a new element to it and I have seen Coppola's collaboration. I really love Anderson's work that is not based on culture Like Fantastic Mr. Fox! There is no denying he can be great with non-cultural settings like that and I love those films. But this influence, whether Coppolo or his on bias, is hurting his creativity. I wish he could just stick to the really bizarre!
i mean, other than his most acclaimed film, whos protaganist is a minority and that struggle is portrayed, he sure cant portray the struggle of a minority and will never be able to overcome that
fantastic mr. fox does have a cultural setting. it is large town/rural, and white, usa. *disambiguation from native peoples' cultures in the same land.
I like Wes Anderson when he is making a movie that's not about non-white people. Or just not about humans in general. And btw, Grand Budapest Hotel is a mish-mash of Austria-Hungarian and Balkan cultures. Making a broad generalization of foreign culture again.
@@Aster_Risk What generalisations about Austria-Hungary and Balkans does it make exactly ? (It was filmed in the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland as well. So I don't see how the Balkans really enters the equation.)
Thank you for breaking this down so meticulously. I haven't watched "Darjeeling Express" but I enjoyed "Isle of Dogs" a lot, as a person who knows Japan and Japanese films fairly well. I don't intend to contradict your arguments (they are all valid) but my perspective was that I could appreciate the film as an homage to Japanese cinema and not for a minute believe it to be an attempt at portraying Japanese society or culture as it really is. Because the strongest impression that I got was that Anderson is in love with Japanese movies and was simply longing to make one himself by taking what he could gleam from the golden era of Japanese cinema and pack it all together in his artificial, puppet version of Japan. I could accept his version of Japan and the Japanese because, after all, it is a cartoonish puppet version of the country, the artificiality already a self-reflective part of it, full of delightful cinema references and inside jokes. Plus, since the film is dog-centric, I perceived the human characters, including that American schoolgirl, to necessarily end up as caricatures. I might have a different opinion if I rewatch the movie (I'm talking from memory here), but my argument is to first and foremost understand the movie as a Tarantinoesque reflection on cinema history. I'm trying to remember if the film had something keen to say on current real-world issues (like the existence of trash islands and consumerism) but it's been too long ago. Perhaps the most ironic part of it all is that since Japanese people and media today are so obsessed with what is being pushed as Japanese culture's uniqueness and superiority I can imagine that there were people who could find Anderson's portrayal quite agreeable, because nothing is more appreciated there than a foreigner who tells Japanese how strangely unique they are compared to the rest of the world.
Amazing analysis! I remember seeing Isle of Dogs when it came out and leaving the theatre feeling that something wasn't right. Since then I've managed to understand what was it, but this is the first time I see someone articulate it so well!!! This is a larger problem that can be found whenever someone tries to write a story about "the other" and shows us how it is very important that people with a diverse background start to tell their own stories.
I had such an interesting perspective on this because I went to the cinema to see Isle of Dogs with my Japanese mother and my British father's mother. I was young at the time but I still felt like the film really disregarded cultural respect for the sake of aesthetics. The dissonance between the three of us when we were talking about the movie on our way home was fascinating to me, and this video goes into so much detail so, even though it wade three years ago I wanted to say thank you and this video is incredible!
shizzle shakes this channel just continually slaps my donkey brains to bits. i've subscribed and unsubscribed to many yt film theory/critics/reviews/theory over the past several years but this one manages to hold my attention! broey, do you have a letterboxd account? i'd love to read ur blurbs! plus--i mean, hard yes for WA's positively toasted imagining of the Other in all its alienated forms. what more do you expect from the tidily dressed, Texas-come-NYC, centrist heir of the "liberal" upper-class? heck, i love the royal tennenbaums but this boy has about as much 'down to earth' experience as Chelsea Clinton taking a vacation in Port-au-Prince
Wow this video is actually exciting me for my upcoming class on Geography and Politics of the Asia Rim?? Also I really like the Isle of Dogs, and as someone studying Japanese I thought it was fun to see Japanese spoken without subtitles in an English spoken film. But I never thought of the implications of how not understanding the Japanese characters dehumanizes them more than the dogs. I guess I didn’t have the cultural sensitivity to realize how he told this story through a Western, “othering” lense. Thank you.
Thanks for this. Darjeeling Limited is one of my favorite films and I always appreciate knowing every side of a film I enjoy from the good to the problematic. There is so much to think about here and it’s good to know for the future so we can have higher expectations for our favorite filmmakers.
I love Isle of Dogs, it's probably the best stop motion animation there has ever been. But yeah, everything you say here is correct. I think that the film was made with reverence ad huge appreciation of Japanese culture but a lack of understanding of how presenting that culture would fit in to larger history of western representations of foreign peoples.
To add onto this - - I felt like Lost in translation [The one movie with Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson] also did the exact same thing. I never finished it cause I ended up feeling so bored throughout it, because I really wanted to see how they used the Japanese setting, but that just never happened.
Yeah, i thought about that movie too, Japan it´s kind of taken as a background. It´s a beautiful looking movie, but in many scenes the language barrier it's taken as a joke at the expense of the japanese characters, and beside that there´s no much relationship between the city or the culture i guess
This talk reminded me of Western depictions of Russia. Females are oversexualised, males are depicted as violent and barbaric. While India is needed for the main characters to go through a spiritual journey, Russia is needed for a test of strength and wits. It is a place where a western hero has to fight off evil Ivans, endure heavy siberian snowfalls or sabotage some sinister commie plan. Many of the good Russian guys and gals that exist in media are people who immigrated to USA (Black Widow, Colossus), so in order for a character to be positive, he or she has to be americanized.
this video is so important! as a white latin american i hadn't even thought of this as such a deep problem, i was just like "ok wes anderson is a director for white/western people and his movies are very White (even when they're in Asia?) and that's that" like i only noticed it on the surface, but now i the much deeper issue is clear. Thank you so much for this!
Honestly as an Asian, I think aestheticising other cultures is also common in film of non-Western countries, often to the same degree of using other cultures as set dressing like Wes does. It's just different because of the traditional power dynamics and complex geopolitics between Western and Eastern countries. I'm not going to stop liking his movies tbh, because I think his motives aren't as malicious as some people in the comments are painting it to be, I'm sure Wes could do better and make better representation, but I truly don't care if Western movie makers fail to represent my culture accurately or not (unless its an intentional racist caricature since that's something else), and I don't understand why I should care. I think a lot of people who talk about these issues are mostly Asians who grew up in Western countries.
Sorry if I'm bothering you with a sudden late reply, but yeah, I think that the only ones who seem to be bothered by this movie are mostly Americans rather than ACTUAL Japanese citizens lol
well yeah, obviously. Orientalism isn't going to be a problem in places where Asian people aren't a minority. The people most impacted by this sort of appropriation are going to be people living outside the portrayed countries.
@@happysocialmoth1197 I don't think that's fair to say Asian Americans aren't actual _____ because they're American. Asian Americans will have different experiences than Asians in their home country and it's important to understand these different perspectives and why they are different, instead of trying to enforce the idea that all Asians are and should be a monolith.
I actually find this interesting because I felt like I could understand the essence of what the Japanese characters were saying or expressing. I feel like Atari connected to me more than Tracy Walker, because although I couldn’t understand everything he said I could understand his determination, his pain, and his tears. But after seeing what you pointed out I definitely see the problem with the film. Thank you.
I was taking this video is good faith until she asserts the Japanese characters come off as "inhuman" and then I just scoffed in disgust and lost any faith I had in the interpretation. Atari is a wonderful character and full of humanity and personality. But because we don't have subtitles for him the film is "orientalist" and dehumanizes the Japanese characters or whatever... This video is a painfully online take.
As an Asian I think I can speak for many of us when I say we love when our culture is appreciated/celebrated/shared- especially when it comes to representation in media, but I completely understand what you're saying! I think as long as the culture is not disrespected and people are made aware of its history, cultures should be celebrated
Tbh, a lot of white people use the excuse of "I don't want to see cultural misrepresentation" as a dog whistle, when they really mean they don't want to see those other cultures portrayed. Period. They only saw the movie because it had a white director, and so they could blame his whiteness on why they felt upset at seeing it. But if the same movie was made by a Japanese director, it wouldn't even had half the audience that it did, because most Americans wouldn't want to see it at all. It's pretty disgusting how whites love to frame our other cultures as if they're "protecting" us, when really they're just trying to "protect" themselves from us.
I feel like Anderson is so obsessed with capturing the aesthetics of colonialist-era artwork and literature, that he keeps imitating their orientalism and casual racism too. How could one possibly adapt Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver's Travels in a way that's acceptable today, while still being authentic to the period it was made in? You can't. But I don't think Anderson got the memo.
This is why I believe that old movies, art, literature, etc should be enjoyed through a very critical lens and with an understanding of the cultural context of the time. I feel like many people seem to forget this, particularly people who want to use these old classics as inspiration for their own works. Old entertainment can have some really cool and interesting elements in them, but they can also have some pretty serious casual bigotry (by our modern standards) in them as well that needs to be looked out for so it doesn't get accidentally copied.
I am a Japanese Wes Anderson fan. Combining the two sounded like heaven for me. The reality was me angrily yelling at the TV how the boy's Japanese sounded stupid sdjkfskfj
So this is arguably a small mistake, but I believe it is an important one in the context of a video essay on orientalism. I noticed that the flute cover that you use in your video is actually a cover of the song "Taal Se Taal" from the movie Taal not of "Silsila Ye Chaahat Ka" from Devdas as cited in the description. By conflating these two songs, it reduces the complexity of Indian music by defining it solely by the "exotic" sounding wooden flute, rather than the nuance and context of the songs themselves. These are two different songs from two different movies by two different composers. Bollywood music especially is often reduced to gaudy dance numbers by Western media, rather than the often vital vessels for story and character they are. I think that if you were to use Bollywood music in a video like this, then as you said it shouldn't be used as a "curious backdrop". All that is to say, I found your analysis extremely valuable if slightly undermined by your incorrect citation.
Just found your channel and it's a breath of fresh air in this cesspit of content. Can't wait to binge on your videos for the next week. Thanks for all this amazing content.
If it wasn't for the english speaking characters I thought the point of omitting the subtitles was to try and make the narrative from the dog's perspective
it would have been so cool if the only people we could understand as an English-speaking audience were the dogs. Meaning everyone else speaking japanese, including that one American girl, who would.. hopefully speak Japanese with her japanese classmates and teachers given that she's living there and going to school there..?? That she spoke in English confused me.
Wow, you smashed this. Well done. I felt it too having lived in Japan for seven years, when I came out of Isle of Dogs I was already convinced it was a very troubled film that no amount of stylisation could mask.
Thanks for this video, very rewarding. Isle of Dogs is a strange one because unlike The Darjeeling Limited, the Japanese characters (mostly Atari and Kobayashi) are not fodder in their own land, but have real agency, impact on the story, and character growth. It is mostly the choice to have their direct speech untranslated that distances them from the viewer. However, I feel this choice COULD have been *more* authentic than using English dialogue for Japanese characters - a thing that always bothers me as someone who isn't English or American. This adds a layer of distance and points to the *untranslatable.* While I agree that othering portrayals of non-Western cultures are harmful, there exist real cultural differences and untranslateables that are erased by letting everyone speak English or act in ways English-speaking audiences can easily identify with. The danger is that insisting on portraying the "humanity" of Japanese and Indian people can end up in making them speak English and act "Western" -- in effect confusing humanity with "Westernness". While Orientalism expressly wants to create "tableaus of queerness", a truly authentic depiction of "another culture" or of intercultural interaction will at times inevitably surprise or bewilder the sensibilities of a Western audience anyway. But this is all a moot point for Isle of Dogs: as some comments here say, the Japanese dialogue isn't really Japanese. It is there to *sound* Japanese. So instead of it saying something about the parts of our shared humanity that reach to each other over the gulf of intranslatability, it's just there to give off a Japanese "vibe". Which is Orientalism. Anyway if you want to see a movie that explicitly addresses these issues in Lawrence of Arabia, you should check out Theeb: a film that treats its Arabian characters as people *without* "westernizing" them. And a great film to boot.
Having never seen Isle of Dogs (yet, I still wanna watch one day!) some of the aspects in the film really sound....wild. A Japanese kid named....Atari? Ground-breaking.
I haven't watched it neither, though seen some clips. About the boy's name, Atari, I cannot come up any Chinese characters for it except 当たり, which means Bingo! For a boy's name Atari isn't impossible, but most unlikely and strange. (And I wonder why he didn't say Osuwari (お座り) instead of Sitto, for the former is the very common and specific phrase to command any animals/pets to sit down. Well, some people do train their dogs with English, I think...)
another really great video!! i still think wes anderson is one of the best directors out there, but saying his movies can be a bit insensitive is kind of an understatement. darjeeling limited is wonderfully filmed, but the fact the movie holds so little steem for anyone who isnt the main three characters and their mom (egregious in a director whose filmography has come to be defined by large, complex and interestingly characterized casts), when the characters who most clearly have romantic drama (rita and the train employee) take a backseat and then exit the stage to leave room for schwarzman's anodyne relationship with portman. anderson sort of found his way to have his big nice cast of familiar faces in isle of dogs, by basically casting bit roles with respected japanese figures and doing nothing with them. this is awful, of course, but also kind of makes me want to compare them to his other "non-american" movie, and my favorite of his, grand budapest hotel. i personally really enjoy it, especially how he treats narrative perspective and the passing of time, but theres something that i still find unpleasant about it -of course, not as disgusting as framing a literal child's death as a plot point in three white dudes' narrative development - but in the way this country is made up, made to resemble really any mid-to-eastern european country. that sort of lack of specificity, while it can do wonders to make the environment more ~dreamlike and free to create new aspects of a new culture, also carries with it the weight of its influences. zebrowka, i think this country is called, was invaded by textually-mentioned "fascists". why make up a fake brand of fascists? was using real fascists too close to home? why didnt that stop him from portraying a mushroom cloud in isle of dogs, then? what are the limits, and how on earth does he decide on them? theres his upcoming movie set in france, supposedly comfortable enough for him: by the general aesthetics and chalamet's hair, id say this is the sixties. will he use the algerian war as a backdrop, now? will he tackle the french youth's powerful attachment to communism, as andersons fave director godard was? what is considered acceptable to tackle for him, and how does he write other cultures, issues foreign to him -if apparently he doesnt seem to make any research, nor bother himself with more than background aesthetics?
Excellent comment, to which I could only add that Zubrowka does not really look like the generic Central to Eastern European land - to me it looked like Bavaria or Austria, and now that I checked on Wikipedia it has indeed been shot in Germany. Why that was disappointing, see my other comment above...
Thank you for this great, insightful video! I always felt something was off just from the marketing that said he didn't put subtitles to make it more "immersive" or something. You put it to words. Thank you!
I think wes relies on western characters and doesnt feel fit to put himself in the shoes of those native people in settings like India and Japan because it can be perceived as disrespectful to tell a story that isn't his own , and yet he shouldn't write these settings if he can't fully realize this.
I get that in a medium like animation, where every character is legit a puppet.. but in Darjeeling Unlimited I am more critical. The beauty of acting and having Live-Action is that the actors can add something to a character. These people that have been shown in the movie could have done so!
Yeah, I agree. He's not really in a position where he can write about people of color well as main characters, but even if he could I don't think we should rely too much on white people to write our stories for us.
This is an incredible video!!! I had never been able to accurately pinpoint my unease with wes anderson’s Indian/eastern aesthetic but this just explains everything PERFECTLY. Thank you
this incidentally articulates why i think its okay to not always have ethnically diverse backgrounds in your media for the sole reason of being politically correct, i'd rather just have the writers write what they're comfortable writing instead of overthinking it. the overthinking is really where things become awkward and inclusiveness becomes tokenism
I just discovered your channel. Excellent essay! Super nuanced- I hadn't noticed this reduction of Eastern cultures in Wes Anderson films before. Thanks so much xx
THANK YOU. I voted for this topic and I’m glad you called it out. I’m Japanese and it tends to be too emotionally exhausting for me to put together these types of analyses because it’s too personal, as is the inevitable backlash of people defending problematic works of fiction like these and in the process those attacks “defending fiction” demean our very real existence. Thank you for being an ally. ❤️
damn im going to be honest, i never really thought of it that way (i guess that may be because it doesn't directly affect my culture and people) but I'm glad that I watched this video and that these issues have had some light shed on them (especially since i was an oblivious outsider; again pointing to the problem. i never questioned his approach because i was comfortable and familiar with his lens) again, thanks for this video :) i learned something today
this video was beautifully done. i never thought about isle of dogs this way because i watched it online... and it had subtitles for japanese speaking characters :(( i didn’t even know that people in theaters couldn’t understand 80% of the movie
You are one of the most incredible and insightful film commentators on this platform,,, I have been binging your content all afternoon. Thank u v much.
Absolutely fantastic video! This was recommended to me because I've watched things on Wes Anderson as a fan of his work but, ideally, being a fan means recognizing the flawed aspects of Wes Anderson which boil down to, as you brilliantly put it, "well-intentioned liberalism." It's orientalism so subtle, you get all the western imagined aesthetics with none of the guilt! (sarcasm) It's undeniably an issue that deserves to be wrestled with while watching the movie and called out again and again. I love your approach, fantastic research, and summation.
After giving the video a watch, i still maintain my belief that he tries to shoot the film from the perspective of the characters, and presents these cultures as such in order to bring you into their perspective, i believe where this collides is with those that already have a firm knowledge of the cultures represented and thus feel put off by the inaccuracies
I don't see the problem here. I've seen American movies that insult your intelligence, where the foreigners all speak English and never go beyond acting as generic, stereotypical, cardboard charicatures of said culture (Arab, Russian). Because God forbid empathizing with humans of a different culture, frame of reference (including language) with which your audience is not familiar. Isle of Dogs isn't like that at all. When I watched it, I was caught up in the story, and Atari is quite frankly one of the most humane characters in it. I didn't think much about the Japanese not being subtitled, other than creating a 'dog effect' (they don't understand humans save for a few specific commands). It also creates the experience of being a stranger in a land, having to get by on mostly body language, intonation and context to understand what's going on. I don't see what's wrong with depicting things like Kabuki, sushi, cherry blossom and sumo either. Every culture has traditions and practices it upholds and to which it ties its identity. All of this is shown in a beautiful stop motion art style which I thoroughly enjoyed. My main takeaway from the film was that the cats and dogs story was a warning about fascism and how shrewd politicians capitalize on it. Which is always a story about us vs them, superiority and shifting blame, a phenomenon that trancends nationalities and borders. The dogs are ousted, rounded up on an island and deemed 'a disease'. Talk about dehumanization. But this gets lost entirely due to OP deciding to make this about ethnicity, arguing and taking offense that the setting of Japan serves as a mere prop. Well done /sarcasm You know those action movies where the protaganist kills off waves of disposable henchmen and noone gives two shits, but then a main character dies and it's like the whole world is grieving? There is a direct correlation between the time a film devotes to a character's death, his/her importance, and the film's willingness and impetus on you as the viewer to empathize. So tell me how the boy's death in The Darjeeling Limited is of no consequence, when you are taken to the funeral and see the father's intense grief? I'm all too aware of the fact that Western civilization employs a double standard and treats brown lives as less, but you picked the wrong example here.
I'm genuinely curious if anyone actually thinks either of the Wes Anderson films addressed in this video really caused any sort of real world harm, regardless of intentions, and in what form that harm might be. Personally I don't think any of the "problems" presented in this video (about Wes Anderson's films specifically) really are flaws, but maybe just matters of perspective. Also I'm curious that if you do find considerable issues within these films, what you might think of something like Lost in Translation.
I would like to add something else about this discussion with the film The life aquatic with Steve Zissou. Seu Jorge, Brazilian singer, plays the character Pelé dos Santos and also performs various songs throughout the movie. Since I’m a Brazilian myself and watched it here, I thought the lack of subtitles for his lyrics were due to the fact that he was singing in Portuguese, not English. But after I rewatched it on a foreign streaming service, I noticed that the his songs still lacked subtitles. Jorge participation and performance made the film more “exotic” and “mysterious” even though all the songs were David Bowie’s covers in Portuguese. The translation to Portuguese is not exact; Seu Jorge maintains the melodies and styles, but often varies the lyrics, and Bowie himself recognized how beautiful he made them
Yeah, I looked up this video after watching The Life Aquatic and feeling exasperated with the colonial tropes (e.g., the scene with the Filipino pirates) and the unsuccessful attempt to be self-aware enough about the mediocre-white-man-ness of the protagonist to cancel out my natural tendency to give zero shits about such a character. The whole movie felt "off" in a kinda racist way, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Your observations are helpful
I love poignant diagnostics of the artist's art (or storyteller's story) because it positively highlights their humanity, and I really enjoyed what you've done with this. Imagine that with every film he makes, he gets better at understanding his... lets say, accidental xenophobism. He wants to step beyond his boundaries, like you said. There is a sense of empathy in trying to include other worldly people and cultures in your artistic endeavors. He may not be stepping in the right direction, but when we analyze his contributions to cinema, like you've done with this video, it shows that he does have a sense of self and hopefully that could lead to change. If his flaws are taught back to him by use of criticism, he can always get BETTER, and the idea that a director could learn from his audience is an art in and of itself.
But it's not a Japanese movie. It's an American movie that pays homage to the robust and storied tradition of film in Japan. This argument delegitimizes japanese cinema by acting like it's up to Americans to make Japanese movies. The assumption that the Japanese characters are less important or less fleshed out, simply because you don't understand the words, implies that you, yourself, are assigning the status of "background" to these characters, not Anderson. Isle of Dogs is crafted with a clear love and respect for the culture. It can also serve to expose westerners, in a way that's accessible to them, to cultures beyond their own. I'm not going to pretend there isn't room for improvement, but vilifying someone who is working to normalize eastern aesthetics in western culture, is working against the kind of change it seems like you want to bring about.
Thank you for your analysis here Broey. Wes Anderson movies have always been an acquired taste for me. Usually I go in with the mindset and the attention focused on production design and framing and storytelling devices and rarely for empathetic connection. That said, I think it's somewhat a theme of his that his characters are to certain degree detached or insular or self-absorbed or in some kind of isolated emotion torment. I also happen to be Chinese myself. So when I came to watch Isle of Dogs, funny this perspective of "orientalism" never occurred to me. I just think "it's a Wes Anderson" movie." The "White savior" troupe and "eastern exotica" troupe are rampant in so many Hollywood productions. While Isle of Dogs qualifies, as you have some eloquently illustrated in the video, I would say it is not the most egregious of examples--Simply a white filmmaker telling a story in his perspective. I also find the use of the word "orientalism" rather cringey, not to your fault as you didn't come up with the term. But it is like describing an abuse with an abusive word and in turn giving it more light in having to say it some more. To that, I don't know if I have a better alternative. May be #OscarSoWhite or #HollywoodSoWhite speaks to that more directly. Anyway, your points here are well taken. Thanks for the video.
Great stuff. If you think of 'the east' as described in the video it shows how much generalization is needed to support that statement. As an idea think of 'the west' as a big generalization and leave all the variations and cultural differences apart and therefore you could understand how difficult, lazy and sometimes even offending those terms are. Thanks for sheding light onto that subject!
I would like to note that Isle of Dogs is an allegory about the Japanese conquest and conquering of Okinawa, and the brutal elimination of their culture, traditions, and language. They speak OKINAWAN in the film. Dogs are traditionally guardians in Okiwan culture tied to the legend of the Shisa. The destruction of dogs, as opposed to cats(the Shisa are Lion Dogs) is how Japan during the Pacific war used the Okinawan people to fight their war, resulting in a quarter of the population of Okinawa to be killed. This movie came out during the enormous ruckus China was causing over the Senkaku islands, as well as their attempts to take Okinawa from Japan. But sure, I'm sure only western audiences are aware of all this cultural background
Thank you for this video. I'm currently writing an essay on Wes Anderson's films for my final essay in school, however my analysis does not include the two films mentioned in this video, and so I do not have too much insight on them. You have really expanded my views on the ways Anderson makes his films and uses certain tropes that may be offensive, and help me become more critical of media I consume in the future!
I think that one of the main problems that Wes Anderson has with writing or directing about minorities is that he just simply doesn't have any personal attachments to it. Thinking about how sir Hayao Miyazaki draws his characters with his personal experience of observations in mind: like how he told an unusual yet intriguing way of a child putting on their shoes, or how a child eats their food in their own way, etc feels actually realistic for a person who's been around children (I find it very endearing since I studied childhood development in college). But if he wrote or draw something specifically about a foreigner in Japan, it might seem racial at firsthand but if it's based on his personal experience, then I cannot fault him for that. He's always drawn based off of his observations of people's actions so there's at least that kind of understanding a part of his process for making animations. I don't think it'll be fair of me to expect Wes Anderson to write about something that he actually doesn't really know anything about other than what he has experienced through Western films and only through mutual acquaintances of mixed race casts that grew up mainly with Western cultures within their own home and community. I hope that he does acknowledge that he does lack the certain exposure to relaities of the minorities that he couldn't help but only write and direct on what he's only known. He might have also thought (just like other filmmakers have made their opinions clear) that subtitles is also a distraction from the aesthetics he was going for. But then again, a lot of films that have subtitles have become successful despite its presence. Maybe he also does need to be recomended to watch a ton of the most iconic Eastern films that has done its job well even if there were subtitles.
I just found your channel and I've been loving all your videos! It's so good to hear someone speaking so honestly and in a non-pretentious way about this topic. Thank you! Hope to see more :)
I immigrated to the US from Japan in 2007, and since then, I've seen many examples of this kind of orientalism in the media. But I've watched Isle of Dogs 3 times, and while I admit that I may be biased because I can understand the Japanese characters (despite their strange dialogue at some points), I don't think Wes Anderson is dehumanizing them on purpose. I think that he doesn't know how to write for those characters because he doesn't want to have them say anything offensive. Obviously, I think he should learn how to write for them, but this isn't so much a problem with Anderson as it is a problem with Western society as a whole. And this is just speculation, but I think that he didn't put subtitles for the Japanese characters because he was worried that it would distract the viewer from the cinematography, which is what Anderson seems to have the most confidence in. Japanese people also have a very complex view of themselves. We are taught in schools to not be too proud of our country, and many of us grow up with a warped outlook of Japanese culture. When Western directors decide to set their movies in Japan, it will take a lot to offend us. Usually, we will just be happy that they thought our society was interesting enough to be observed by Westerners.
I found this video really interesting! It's clear that you put a lot of effort into constructing this. I'm currently studying Said's Orientalism in class and this opened me up to so many more angles to approach the topic :)
idk i feel like if they set Darjeeling limited in the English countryside i would still expect the same amount of characterisation of the surrounding characters. The story is about the three brothers. it requires a place that they do not feel like they belong or understand. I agree that having the english humans be understood when the Japanese are not is a strange choice and the film would have been better if none of the humans were understandable.
I think that the whole point of Darjeeling Limited is to illustrate that the three brothers don't actually care about India at all. Like, I think it's an intentional comment. And you do say that,but then you say that the insensitive, annoying, selfish brothers are too insensitive,annoying, and selfish. I just dont think it makes sense to acknowledge the point of the movie and then comment on it as if it wasn't the intentional point of the movie. I also think your use of the words "brown bodies" is as dehumanizing as the way the bothers treat the dead kid. Every non-white person I know is against the use of "brown bodies." I've not seen Aisle of Dogs,but that example does sound in poor taste. That the Japanese characters don't even get subtitles.
I only watched Darjeeling recently and yeah i definitely think the brothers are intentionally just pretty shitty people to start out, and the only sane man really is the steward and the indian people they meet, and at first to the brothers India is just the usual tourist trap, like they go to the temple and get the peacock feathers and say they're going on "a spiritual journey" but the more they try and act spiritual in a purposeful way the less it actually works for them, the spiritual journey comes from all the trials they go through, all the hardships it's spontaneous. Like at the end when they finally bury their feather they didn't follow the guru instructions they did what felt natural to them And the death of the boy saying "mine" i think was a thing brought out from guilt, like Adrian Brody's character was taking possession of the guilt about the boy's death I would say I'm probably looking too deep into this film but then again this video exists
I'm a graphic design bachelor student currently working on a Critical Studies minor project (research paper to be written too) about the commodification of Asian cultures in a postmodern consumerist Western society and I wanted to explore the relationship that western society has with Asian cultures, and that it is not really through interactions with actual members of the community themselves, but through playing the role of the consumer. And my argument is that it is a perpetuation of Orientalism and also an act of 'eating the other', as bell hooks puts it. I have yet to complete writing it but I really resonate with the points that you've brought up in this video!
I think ultimately from what we can see from reviews, different audience reactions and the comments on this video is that delving into the ideas and themes involving this film is a grey area and how it is viewed depends on the viewer.
This reminds me of the biggest criticism I get from Westerners (all online, hidden behind safe anonymity) whenever I describe my time in China: "You're just like one of those people who want to go native." I'm always rankled by this critique because what I merely set out to do in my five months in China was to live like a normal Chinese person. Therefore, I chose to live in an apartment building close to my university campus in Beijing but that was almost all Chinese, with the amenities of a normal Chinese apartment building. My neighborhood was also not one that was an expat favorite--99.9% of the people living and shopping there were Chinese. I had absolutely no discomfort in surrounding myself with the "mysterious Orientals" in whose country I happened to be living in. For various reasons, almost all having to do with how damn difficult Mandarin Chinese is to speak, I did hang out with Westerners most of my time in China. But suffice to say, whenever I get this critique that "I went native," that's the Wes Anderson "orientalism" speaking up, since these Western critics learned this need to "otherize" and separate themselves from "mysterious foreigners" from mass media.
This is the second video of yours I'm watching, but damn if these are interesting! Easily some of the most interesting videos I've seen about political philosophy
I personally don‘t think Darjeeling Limited is a good example for this. The way I watched the movie this glossing over Indian culture and just seeing them as an outsider was the whole point. The movie made me watch the journey of the character through their perception. They wear searching for a spiritual journey but totally missed the actual spiritual stuff, they were completely oblivious to what was going on. The way the movie is made reflects that. It is almost as if we are another brother. Edit: I guess it really depends on how much credit you give Anderson. When I saw the movie for the first time after watching Moonrise Kingdom I thought he knew what he was doing. The moment I saw the movie was about three westeners going on a ‚spiritual‘ trip in India I immediately thought the movie was about how stupid this is. So when I saw the movie I just saw it as a visual representation of this ignorance.
I've been trying to pin down for years why I didn't like the aisle of dog when I so loved its animation, story, and character and THIS, THIS was it. I left this movie confused as to why it had to be set in Japan. Sure there is a lot of vague Japanese history and story telling tropes that set the plot but really you could've dumped this movie in Chicago and it would've been the *same thing*. I think as POC I had the sixth sense that I was being had and while I couldn't pin it down back then you've made it abundantly clear what the problem was. Gotta love that "your culture is my costume" feel.
Interesting take. I hadn't even thought about this when I saw Isle of Dogs, but I guess, as a black person, things like orientalism can go over my head sometimes. I don't exactly fit into the colonizing west perspective or the fetishized/generalized east perspective. It's kind of a weird position to be in when you think about it... I mean, I guess there's always black-spoilation...
you are so articulate and your video essays are so well-researched its honestly astounding!! I'm Japanese British myself and havent seen Isle of Dogs and honestly, I don't really plan to. I went through a Wes Anderson phase a couple years back but in hindsight, his films generally feel entertaining in the moment, but pretty empty by the end. Also this is only slightly relevant, but have you heard of the singer Beabadoobee? I think she's filipina-british but her bf (who is white) MAJORLY idolises Anderson and it always made me feel a little icky, and I think perhaps it's his idolisation of Wes' aesthetics, and therefore his well-intentioned orientalism, that makes their relationship seem little more than just for like, show? Ykwim? Obvs I understand they do have a loving private relationship outside social media, but (to me) it really comes across as just another white guy who has a thing for asian girls -- anyway thank uu for the video!!
Hello! Just wanted to address this: Renegade Cut made a very similar video about this topic a couple years ago, and in our analyses we both cite an article by Jonah Weiner, which informed many of our criticisms (much of the literature surrounding Wes Anderson + race echo a lot of the same sentiments)! It was never my intention to copy Renegade Cut - he had this take first, and I really admire his work. But I do recognize our points about Darjeeling have a significant amount of overlap. Here is his video (you should check out the rest of his channel too, he's amazing): ua-cam.com/video/-Ku7PwEKTAw/v-deo.html
UA-cam's suggestions led me from his video eventually to yours and I loved it! Both points of perspective are super valuable in their own ways :)
Sure. Renegade made kind of the same topic but not quite.
Would love to hear your thoughts on Tarantino after watching this
I always thought that the dogs were speaking English so we understand more than actual humans...
@@soaplacide9232 That's the argument Wes and his fans will make, but then the white English speaking student and the white translator both speak in English and not in barks.
I would also like to add that some of the Japanese spoken in Isle of Dogs is not comprehensible to Japanese people/speakers. I don't remember specifics but I remember there were several instances in which English words were simply spoken with a Japanese "accent". While there are 外来語(words "borrowed" from other languages and incorporated into Japanese) Anderson had Japanese characters speak in ways that a real native Japanese speaker/Japanese person would never do. Maybe it's because as a Japanese person I'm always hyper aware/sensitive at how Western media portrays Japanese culture, but that aspect just felt extra icky for me. I wish I could've enjoyed it because I do love the storyline and the dogs and the animation but the use of Japanese culture felt incredibly shallow and fetishistic at points :(
I am wondering how you feel about the heavy fetishism in Japanese comics, created by Japanese artists - especially the sexualized depiction of youth?
@@bettyblu8115 the fetishisation of people is different to the fetishisation of a culture or country. both are bad, but both are separate from the other
I went to see this in theaters with my family, including my Japanese grandma. I remember she (and my sister, who knows Japanese pretty fluently) was confused at some parts of the movie when the Japanese characters spoke strangely, and I'm learning Japanese now so in a few years I want to watch it again to pick up on that. I did think it was a really good movie, and loved the animation, but yeah I agree, some parts of the culture and language just didn't sit well, and weren't very well done/portrayed by Anderson, which is a shame because he really is one of my favorite directors.
The actor who made the child wasn't Japanese, I don't know why he did that
But it may be the reason
Herr Enid I am aware of this! I don’t have a particular problem with his casting because from what I remember it wasn’t any of his lines that stuck out to me but rather “background” characters with one or two lines (RE: it was the fault of the writing not the acting).
This is so interesting. I am half Japanese, and I speak Japanese, so my Japanese mother and I did not feel the distinct language barrier that other people might have while watching this film. We naturally would not "other" the Japanese elements or people in the film, and we both enjoyed the film quite a bit as a moment of representation of our culture in Hollywood, and we of course have already reflexively learned to give Westerners a pass on cultural accuracy or nuance since we rarely see it (sad but true). However, unpacking this for a non-Japanese audience who might have accidentally diminished the Japanese characters to a backdrop is a very interesting exercise. Thanks for sharing your analysis! There's so much to think about here.
i’ve read similar sentiments by Japanese speaking people who’ve written articles reviewing the film. Thanks for sharing :)
Westerners get too many passes
@@moreafterthistime Well, it's more like resignation, really. Even in Europe (except maybe the "big ones", UK, Germany, France etc) we have kinda abandoned all hope to see a mainstream movie presenting our cultures as more than a landscape or a caricature. We are just happy if the USA acknowledges we exist. And we're still privileged in terms of what the USA thinks of us... I can't start imagining what's like growing up in the Middle East and seeing the portrayal that Hollywood movies gives of them.
Yes when a Westerner makes a film on the Eastern culture there has to be some liberty or else it's just going to sound like portrayed through a very Eastern filmmaker perspective. There won't be any significant distinction between the West and the East
@@moreafterthistime have you seen how the west is portrayed in anime? You can't get an accurate 1:1 portrayal of a culture done by people outside of it.
At first I thought that the no subtitles was really clever because it was like we were watching from the perspective of a dog who wouldnt understand human language. And then the white character shows up and is inexplicably perfectly intelligible lmao.
I think you missed the opening title card, which outright said: "The humans in this story speak only in their native tongue (occasionally translated via bi-lingual interpreter, foreign-exhange-student, or electronic device)
All barks have been rendered into English." So I don't really see how what you are saying applies.
@@rsfilmdiscussionchannel4168 yes I am aware, I watched the movie lol
And Anderson could've avoided this by merely showing the Japanese characters trying to decipher English speakers from their perspective, but he didn't.
@@rsfilmdiscussionchannel4168 His statement definitely applies. You're comment only proves his point really, he chose to give the dogs subtitles and not the japanese characters. The whole point of the vid is that people from eastern cultures are just seen as props in american movies
His statement is based in not knowing what the intention of the filmmaker was with the language stuff. It does not apply, at least not how he is saying it. He could have made a similar point without giving an incorrect observation. And the dogs weren't given subtitles.
As a Japanese speaker, the Japanese spoken in this movie is really off. Like, I can understand what characters like Atari and who else are saying, it seems artificial. Like how Japanese companies use English on their products that make no sense linguistically.
literally like people can say what they like about orientalism but objectively this film fails at its efforts of using japanese culture - my mum could not understand half of what the people were saying
I think that the artificial aesthetic of wes anderson films also contributes to this detachment of the culture. He's a fan of old movies and uses the stereotypes and cliches of them on most of his movies, so when portraying a different culture this approach results insensitive.
Love your video, I wouldn't stop to think about this if not for it.
This was going to be my rough point. I think for Darjeeling Limited presents the characters are supposed to be "Ugly Americans" and thus any background character will be seen as a part of the landscape. Rita and the stewart only become humanized the more the boys interact with them. I've known people that traveled in the 1960-70s and they were much like the boys. Very separate from the cultures they cohabitated with with a small selection of humanized locals. I didn't see Isle of Dogs, but I didn't hear much good about. it
Since when are Kurosawa among others stereotypes and cliches?
Okay pro movie critic
So basically he's attached to an ideal of the past which shouldn't be encouraged but it's stil being justified
Oh my God I think I mightve gone to elementary school with you. How common is the specific name Alberto Rangel???
Wes Anderson's non white characters always feel more like props or quirky accessories to white characters rather than actual people
I don’t feel the same way
Preach darla
You say that but Isle of Dogs is not the movie for that. The one ostensibly white character is so "Quirky and Kooky" that it was obnoxious whenever they were on screen, ie the American school girl.
Grand Budapest has the POC main character be one of the most muted characters in terms of bullshit props because they're getting more character through the movie, the white character in Mr Gustave is the one with all the nonsense. Same with Moonrise Kingdom though in that there's a Distinct lack of non-white people.
right can we talk about bottlerocket? very similar dynamic with jack and rita of darjeeling as with anthony and inez of bottlerocket
In grand Budapest its the poc lobby boy who is most relatable and sensible.
Why does orientalism persist? A year ago my graduate class read Orientalism. None of the white PhD students understood what Said was talking about but all of them were critical of his argument and didnt see how it applied to our scholarship or literature. I facepalmed through our entire discussion of the text that night
SilentmageLvX Because of white supremacy and neocolonialism still exists today
Woah I hope you gave them a verbal whooping
Do any of these classmates watch films made in non western countries? It can aid in the development of understanding that non western ppl have their own gaze and walk through this world.
People are allowed to disagree with opinions of others. That's what academic discourse is about. I would find it very troublesome and boring as a lecturer to have the entire classroom mindlessly agree with whatever I assigned them. Views are meant to be challenged over and over; that's how they are honed and that's how we progress.
@@napturaladvice7646 I'm not a westerner and I've watched hundreds of non-western movies. They do the exact same thing Hollywood does when it comes to presenting cultures foreign to themselves. Cultural appropriation is in the human nature and there's nothing wrong with it. It's how cultures grow and evolve. Following that, it's also expected that a director/writer does not have the knowledge of a native member of a culture. Their portrayal will always leave a lot wanting for a person that has an in-depth knowledge of it. I understand that when I see the rare examples of mine in foreign media, so I doesn't bother me in the slightest. If it isn't purposefully showing it in false negative light then I'm just happy that someone found it interesting enough to portray.
Saw this trailer with my husband at the theater and we both let out an audible "Yikes" at the mushroom cloud scene. One of the most culturally traumatic events of Japan having its' imagery presented for a film by a quirky western filmmaker just never sat well with us.
yeah, that was really one of the ugliest parts of a movie that seemed so worried about making everything look perfect and neat. i still wonder how could someone write a story set in japan and include a mushroom cloud, with literally no importance to the plot nor any thoughts given on how its iconic status is derived from pain and destruction -not "aesthetic pleasure", like cherry blossoms and sea waves over fuji.
That scene looked pretty alarming and I gasped when I saw it.
Yes, because japan is the only place that a mushroom cloud has ever been and thus any mushroom cloud is a direct reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki
@@samdkitchen the only two nuclear strikes ever used in armed combat and killed over 200,000 civilians. Yes... It's uniquely a Japanese trauma
@@samdkitchen unfortunately not only Japan experienced it
I always felt uncomfortable with Isle of dogs but couldn't really explain why until now. This video's great!!
ongo bongo holy hell you’re missing the point lmfao
Yeah same, this helped me understand my gripes with the film - video got me to subscribe and I can’t wait to watch the rest of their content 💖📺
ongo bongo and I think orientalism is a lazy way of making art
Yes. My sis forced me to watch it in theaters. Hated it.
This^
My Asian & African Studies Bachelor soul is so happy you made this video. Have always noticed the same thing
I find it intriguing that every video essay that I’ve seen discussing colonialism has a bevy of people in the comments who either dismiss it or excuse it- moreso than any other topic. You can’t just divorce films of this type from their historical context. Yes, Anderson may have intentionally limited the audience’s understanding of the other culture to mirror the characters’ alienation from that culture. So what? There are plenty of movies that have been made showing alienation from society without shamelessly borrowing the aesthetics of other cultures- Fight Club and Priscilla Queen of the Desert come to mind. Hell, Anderson could just have easily as set these films in rural America or England and the same “fish out of water” element would have applied with a trio of elitist, snobby upper class Americans in a very poor area. Instead, he chose to borrow the aesthetics of another place and literally nothing else. (This also lessens the scope of the film, and restricts its appeal to Western audiences.)
Fight Club doesn't address (mostly white) male alienation? It's whole point is that they are a lost generation set adrift, many fatherless...knowing more about duvets and matching dishes than masculinity. Also, Marla Singer, the lone female takes on the parody of masculinity to have freedom and not have to answer to anyone. Why should a film maker have to make every film where they live, because anything unknown or foreign is exploitative? Then Sergio Leone had no right to come to America and make films about the Old West.
BettyBlu Feeling alone and lost *is* alienation- alienation from your own society. You don’t have to be in a different culture to feel alienated. And I never said that filmmakers shouldn’t make films set in foreign locations. But I do think that, if they do, they should at least make some kind of effort to represent the feeling of that place and time instead of just relying on tired, racist tropes of perceived exoticism.
Greyfoot Yodel could you elaborate on Said's work being "historically inaccurate and (...) is a victimizing of most of Asia that almost no modern east or west asian historian would relate to"? specifically the almost no modern or west asian historian part. i'm not doing a gotcha where i somehow found an asian historian that disputes that claim, because you already said almost, but personally ive just not heard about those historians. its not me knocking them, its on me for not knowing about these people. basically im asking for people's work and people who also find Said's work outdated and unrelatable to modern times.
@BettyBlu all of Sergio Leone’s movies were shot in Italy or Spain. Also Every actor in the movie is actually speaking their native language and then over dubbed, so it doesn’t have the problem of silencing non white voices or using orientalized English words like sit-o so the mostly white audience can understand. The person you’re responding to was using fight club as an example of depicting alienation with using another culture as little more than a backdrop so they agree with you. Did you watch the video or did you watch the first couple minutes and start furiously commenting?
That's why I think this video is so interesting, especially reading the comments. It raises so many questions.
Does the director have a responsibility in representing a culture because s/he chooses it as a backdrop for their story? Or if s/he is using it just aesthetically or as a background character to the story is that ok as long as it's not re-enforcing negative sterotypes? If we can't portray cultural truths accurately should we even try? Do we have an obligation to try? Do other cultures' filmmakers feel that same obligation? How much true authenticity can really be manufactured?
WA has a particular frame of reference in a particular story he wants to tell. I think critique and concerns are important to bring up but are we saying we can't tell stories about places we are not familiar with? Should art be limited based on the grounds of how it is exploitive vs. expressive? And who determines that?
There has been a lot of talk about whitewashing and lack of POC and female representation in Hollywood and I'm so glad that people are speaking out about these issues.
These are hard questions with a lot of gray areas.
I have a huge love for art and film and story-telling and I can't wait to see what the future brings.
Hi - thank you for making this video and pointing out this quality in W.A. movies.
However, I must dispute one fact (4:12). While I understand the point that you were making - outright colonialism has not ended! Puerto Rico and Guam are still colonies! I'm not sure if you are from the U.S., but if you are, it is especially important that you not disregard or ignore that fact.
Thank you for pointing that out!
also the entirety of north america is a colony.
Puerto Rico had the opportunity to become a state, but they voted against it. Not the US, Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico voted AGAINST its own statehood. Let that sink in for a second
@@graysonbaker1744 I promise you that I know more about you than this. Do some more research.
Yes! There are more than 50 territories in the world that are still colonies, if I'm not mistaken. This certainly didn't end.
I feel like I've not seen the same Darjeeling Limited. I found that the three main characters were shown as selfish, stupid, typical white male. And I did not feel pity at the beginning or joy for them at the end.
I understood the film as a critic of spiritual tourism and the use of other culture as a way to escape ours by just "miming" and not trying to actually understand them. When they help the boys in the river, one of the character says something like that : he was disappointed "I could'nt save mine", as if he failed in his quest, but the boy's death isn't important.
But now knowing Wes Anderson's filmography, I find it unlikely that he focused on criticizing spiritual tourism instead of telling the usual story of white broken characters. I think this shows how much of orientalism there is in the Darjeeling Limited. What I saw as a (quite smart because not to obvious) critic was just him being quite insensitive and applying usual orientalism without thinking twice.
Isle of Dog is an incredible film for the many reason, but yes, Japan is just used as decorative and foreign. The movie wouldn't have been different regarding the story if it was set in India, or in Mexico. When Coco actually tries to speak about the mexican culture seen by mexicans, Anderson simply use it for its imagery. At least his not mocking them!
NB: Sorry if my english isn't that great, but I hope I can still be understood
Great point. It can be difficult to discern the intentions behind certain creative liberties until you know the ENTIRE context, like you said about Anderson. I didn't react negatively at all to Isle of Dogs, aside from being weirded out by the white protagonist. Then I saw a couple video essays about Wes Anderson and was shown the patterns in his work that point to these uncomfortable things.
At least i'm not the only one. i see the Darjeeling Limited as the same way as you . The brothers are clearly slefish but maybe it's more preblematic that it should be.
@@Eldiran1 The problem is when I read critics on the film, I never encountered someone talking about the movie that way. So I think it's more likely that we over-interprated the Darjeeling Limited, and the brothers are supposed to be lovable and engaging...
The thing is that Disney still profits from Mexicans with Coco. They didn't pay royalties to the original story
@@domingadoflaminga3961 Huh? Its not like anyone pays the country of Germany every time they make a Red Riding Hood story. This is like complaining the Japanese studios that make fantasy anime don't put all the profits to British charities
as an indian i appreciated this essay so much! yeah american media has a lot of issues in portraying asia lmao. love that it was explored here with care 💓💕
Most americans dont even know india is in asia
I'm an MA Japanese Studies Student and have been studying Orientalism and Occidentalism in university for quite some time now. I think you did a really great job of explaining this complex topic. I'm glad more people get to learn about it. Sometimes I get so frustrated with stuff like this even (or actually especially) in daily life. People get real mad when non-Japanese people try on Kimonos in a museum but depictions like this in movies are just accepted as edgy and cool. Clearly some priorities off here, haha.
(Just to clarify: if you respectfully wear a kimono Japanese people love it! It's wonderful to participate in other cultures, but it's not cool to disrespect/ridicule/fetishize other humans for your enjoyment.)
Pretty sure Japanese persons get a kick out of gaijin wearing kimonos, otherwise they wouldn't bother selling them to gaijin.
@@SirBlackReeds they like it. japanese are bappy to see people enjoying their culture.
If Japanese people can wear western style suits and put their own spin on Western hobbies and interests, then westerners can do the same for items from Japanese culture.
What's missing from this discussion is the acknowledgement that Japan's position is firmly placed within the west, even though their culture is eastern. Japan's constitution was written by the US, who still maintains military presence in the Japanese islands, and pretty much dictates its foreign policy. However, Japan is indisputably part of the imperial core countries, whose economic superiority is predicated on the exploitation of third world labor and resources, same as the EU, US and the commonwealth.
The type of orientalism and fetishism that Japan is often subjected to, and which is rightfully criticized by westerners, is still seen acceptable when it's aimed at eg. China or Vietnam or North Korea, who are geopolitical adversaries of the West. I mean, how many times have you encountered the stereotype of Chinese people as mindless automatons, a kind of soulless hive-mind who are simultaneously oppressed, but somehow also a barbaric horde of aliens? It's commonplace, but never questioned with the same intensity as insensitive depictions of the Japanese. I'd like to see some consistency about this issue from western cultural critics. Especially since Japanese war crimes and genocide directed at other Asians is so often whitewashed by westerners who have an unhealthy obsession with Japan's conception of ethnic homogeneity.
@@SirBlackReeds You’ve really got to improve your reading comprehension. The OC was presenting a contrast between people getting mad at something appropriate and not getting mad at something inappropriate.
I think the Isle of Dogs is more nuanced than you give it credit for. The New Yorker published a review by Moeko Fujii that made me paused. Fujii, a native Japanese speaker, explained WHAT the Japanese people were saying. And a lot of it was put downs or criticism of the white characters for being out of touch or ineffective. There were also a number of things in the movie that were clearly done with an eye for Japanese viewers: Fujii points to the use and subversion of Japanese archetypes and references.
Fujii points to the theme of translation in the film, calling it “the beating heart of the film: there is no such thing as “true” translation. Everything is interpreted. Translation is malleable and implicated, always, by systems of power.” And, importantly, that power is not automatically given to the white characters (or, for that matter, the audience). “in the world of Megasaki City, the Japanese can speak and understand English but choose to speak in their native tongue. They demand fluency on their own terms.”
Further, Fujii points out a problem with applying orientalist lens towards Japan. Japan was an imperial power. While the Japanese were indeed caricatured in the west, it didn’t serve the same purpose as in South Asia or the Middle East. Japanese caricature never came with the kind of domination that other Asian nations experienced. While Japan was being exoticized, it was colonizing Korea and invading Manchuria.
I'm curious what Broey's thoughts on this are. I agree with almost everything in the video but I feel like most of the points apply more to Darjeeling Limited than to Isle of dogs. Although it's hard to tell if I'm just being defensive because I really enjoyed the movie. The point about Japan as a colonial nation that gets lumped in with the "east" (from a western perspective) is also something to think about and could take up a whole video by itself!
Hi there, that's a very fair criticism! I definitely thought about that, but I should have presented it as a counter-argument in the video (as any essayist should do). I agree that translation is never pure, and has carried with it its own marred history. But I think the problem is that, by omitting subtitles and having English-speaking characters speak over the Japanese-speaking characters for the majority of the film, we lose a lot of the nuance in the voice acting. As to the untranslated scenes being for Japanese viewers, I genuinely think that this gives each audience a very limited understanding of the movie. If the Japanese characters are criticizing the white characters for being out of touch, that's something that I think Western audiences should be privy to, as its maybe sometime we should learn from. In all, I think Isle of Dogs was an exciting film, but I think the choices Anderson makes in an effort to combat language imperialism, subversive or not, were not executed very effectively and may have had reverse effects for English-speaking audiences. Of course, many people would disagree with me, but that was my own take on the language problem.
In regards to your point about Orientalism, yes Japan has sometimes been excluded from narratives about "the Orient" because of its imperial domination of the East and because it Westernized much faster than other countries in that part of the world. However, I included it in my description of Orientalism because Westerners still view it from a very narrow lens - and this has resulted in a significant amount of fetishization of Japanese culture and people. While it may not have been formally colonized by Western powers in the 18th and 19th century as the other cultures that Said speaks of, we are still capable of oversimplifying and distorting it for the Western gaze. The combination of the many cultural references, lack of understanding between the English audiences and the Japanese characters, and the pseudo-white saviour character (Tracy) are the reason I framed the film within the context of Orientalism.
I think acknowledging the different power dynamics is important, but the fact that Japan wasn’t “colonized” doesn’t do much to change weather perception of Japan as an “exotic” land. And although not officially colonized it was forced into trade with western nations, resulting in the importation of Japanese goods and exotic notions of the people who belonged to the land. “Exoticization” doesn’t depend on a docile and innocent victim, this notion also plays into stereotypes. Negative and incorrect images and ideas of Japan and it’s people have existed and continue into history.
@@BroeyDeschanel
I don't mean to say that applying an orientalist lens towards Isle of Dogs is wrong or inappropriate. I actually think the conversation is deeply interesting, topical, and very appropriate. Instead, what I mean is merely to say that the movie is more nuanced than, say, The Darjeeling Limited (a movie I have not seen and thus do not feel comfortable talking about.) And that it's important to think critically about how those movies are different and how they fare when applied with different lenses, in this case, an orientalist one.
When doing a critical analysis, I think it's really important to start by looking at the text by itself. When applying a lens focusing on oppression, in this case, Orientalism, I think it's vital to look at what the proposed underclass or oppressed class does and says. The proposed examples that you have given from the Darjeeling Limited idicate that the Brown people in that movie do and say very little; they have very little agency. But I would say that Isle of Dogs is more complicated. You have to look at what the Japanese characters do and say, what impact they have in the plot and their level of agency, in order to do a full analysis. And I think this is a big point where your video falls short.
So what do the Japanese characters do? The main protagonist (at least one of them), Atari, is a Japanese boy who steals a plane and takes it to Dog Island to try and rescue his pet dog. Atari is given goals, makes decisions to achieve those goals (i.e. he isn’t reactive), and is the fundamental driving force for the story (at least for one story line.) On the other hand, you have the plot line following the English speaking exchange student, Tracy. While the movie does put a lot of emphasis on Tracy, she doesn’t actually resolve any of the challenges presented by the plot, mostly serving as a driving force instead. A Japanese doctor/politician invents a cure for the “dog flu”. After he is murdered, it’s a Japanese assistant who is able to recover a copy of the cure. While she gives that cure to Tracy, when Tracy attempts to confront the main villain, she is rendered useless and ordered to be deported. Here, Atari, the English speaking dogs, and a number of Japanese supporting characters prove that the cure works, discredit the villain, and then thwart the final scheme to eliminate the dogs. In this story, the English speaking (Japanese) dogs have full arcs and self actualize, Atari has a full arc and self actualizes, and the Japanese villain has a full arc and actualizes. The one character who doesn’t have a full arc and self actualization is Tracy, the one white, English-speaking character. In fact, given the way that the movie is set up, having the characters speak in English would undermine an inherent aspect of being Japanese. Restricting the characters to their own native tongue while still giving them agency is a form of dignity that, in this movie, not even the audience can take away from them.
I feel like I could go on and talk about the text and other relevant ways it could be read (the movie immediately draws my mind to Japanese internment, especially given the autocrat in the movie and who, in real life, is in the White House), but, for length, I think I need to stop there. However, that doesn’t get to your point about the inaccessibility of having Japanese characters that speak in a way that is inaccessible to the audience. I think you are really right in this point. If the audience can’t understand - and by extension, humanize - these characters, then what good is all the nice stuff in the text? However, what I am trying to point out is that that is the CONTEXT of the film. It is what the audience brings to the film, how they interpret and access it, not the text itself. And this is where I am pushing back on the video. I don’t think you can jump over the text and straight to the context. That doesn’t mean the context isn’t there or isn’t important.
Lindsey Ellis has a really good video about how Megan Foxx was used in the first Transformer’s movie. The text itself actually makes the female characters the only ones who self actualize, who face challenges, make decisions to overcome those challenges, and grow as individuals. In contrast, most of the men are written as hapless morons. But the way that the camera frames Foxx and the other women in the movie exclusively sexualizes them, undermining what’s in the text. Because of this, the text says one thing, but the audience walks away with the opposite. I think it’s entirely valid to at least argue that the same thing is happening in Isle of Dogs. The text says one thing, but because of how it is structured, the audience walks away with the opposite. In this case, that opposite take is an orientalist narrative that minimizes and undermines the Japanese characters for easy consumption by an English speaking audience. I think that context is a very valid thing to scrutinize. But it is necessarily a messy thing to look at considering the role of the audience in this interpretation and the ignoring of the text. That’s why I said it needs more nuance.
The orientalist gaze not reflecting properly the historical depth of the lands depicted, including their more questionable aspects, is a constitutive and defining aspect of orientalism, not something to hold against the contemporary critique of orientalism. Let's not forget that the original orientalism, ever since Lord Byron and Delacroix, emerges as the cultural expression of the dynamic between the West and the Ottoman Empire that the former is pushing back. The Ottoman Empire, one of history's most defining imperial (ie conquering, colonising etc) powers: Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Greece, Wallachia etc these all are the Ottoman Empire.
Edit: and that is why the overlap between the orientalist and the colonialist problematic is important but not total. Delacroix going to see "odalysques" (or Jews) in Tangier and Algiers does not have the same implications, at all, as Gauguin's relation with the women of Tahiti.
Your concluding statement is absolutely perfect. Modern media in general has a huge problem with Orientalism and racism, specifically masking them behind progressive ideals (the rebooted Tomb Raider games are a great example of this), and to hear someone discuss this problem so openly is wonderful. Excellent work.
this is so well-researched and highly engaging, thank you! 💗💚
oh my god thank you!! I love your channel, this is such a compliment coming from you :')!
It always made me feel uncomfortable in Darjeeling Limited when Adrian Brody says "I didn't save mine" while still holding a dead child in his arms. It feels completely dehumanizing, like trying to save these children was a game for them .
Literally just made a comment about this, scrolled a litter further and saw ur comment. I’m glad I’m not alone when I say that line is chilling as fuck.
I literally stopped watching after that scene .
its almost like he internalizes it as a personal failure
I don’t think the word mine is dehumanizing at all. A mother calling her child mine doesn’t feel like her calling it and object. Same could be for any loved one referencing another as mine. It doesn’t have to mean it’s a goal in a game. He feels a personal failure because it is. He couldn’t not physically save the child even though he wanted to. We know he doesn’t just think it’s some THING because he connects and grieves with the boys family later on a very emotional level. It even reminds him of the loss of his father which most likely would be very emotionally scaring. Even that death seemed to affect him very little and it’s a trend across all of Wes Anderson’s films where deaths seem to have little attention or feeling of importance. I think it’s one of the things that I really love about his films.
@@signpaintr4evr In my opinion, the relationship is important, a mother calls her children hers because they were born from her, wes character doesn't have a connection with the boy, and even when they observe the grief and rituals ir the family of the boy, the three men observe almost like is a show and not the worst posible scenario a parent could go through and even then THEY are center.
Maybe my point of view could be biased, because I come from a country where people like them come for an magical world rocking experience, they come and they take whatever they feel like taking and then they leave, they usually don't even make the effort to learn our names.
We are just a dusty town, full of colorful people who coincidentally never speak or live outside of their needs.
So yeah, maybe I'm biased 😏
The flute playing tal-se tal mila! in the background is a very nice touch!
we love Taal :')
I always thought that Adrian Brody’s line “I didn’t save mine” was really dark. Even in this boy’s death, Brody’s character saw him as almost like a coin he had to pick up in a video game. Like Brody’s failure to save him was a huge buzzkill to the brother’s heroics and that’s all it was.
i feel like that was almost meant to sound self-possessed, in almost exactly the way you described it, but it just got lost in translation. Anderson could have used any other phrase there, even replacing "mine" with "him" but he didn't. The first time I heard that it really took me aback, i mean, who approved that line, did anybody on set just think about maybe changing it? from what I'm aware of we didnt even learn the boy's name, it really shows how anderson believed/s that a young person of colors' life was no more important than the movie being 30 seconds shorter. (I'm sorry if that sounds all over the place, I'm very tired)
Josh is never okay because Gerard lied about MCR5 That’s just how Wes Anderson treats death with any of his characters. Yes we don’t learn the boy’s name but the trio still connects with the family and brakes the language barrier. There’s no need for a fake universal language or us getting a translation of what is being said. They all emotionally connect over this tragedy but it feel shallow because all of Wes Anderson’s deaths feel shallow. We don’t learn their father’s name, but they’re way closer connected to their father. And when we see them going to their father’s funeral they’re not all sad and crying the just seemed rushed and ready to get it over with and ready to see their mother. They’re more disappointed to hear that their mother won’t make it to the funeral.
Mine could have referred to an angel or a soul or a child. My child. Belonging to me the one I was supposed to save but I was too weak to do so. It isn’t such a shallow word.
Whoa this is pretty fascinating because I’ve always had a very very different interpretation of that scene. The line “I didn’t save mine” hit me so hard the first time I watched it and it also kind of blew my mind at how much more powerful and sad it was over simply saying “I didn’t save him”. The reason the word “mine” felt so much more powerful and humanizing to me is because I interpreted it as a feeling of personal responsibility for the boy’s life. I never interpreted “mine” as a dehumanizing sense such as a possession, coin, or trophy but rather the commitment to be the boy’s guardian. Each one of the characters chose a boy to save and in that moment became that boy’s guardian in the same way a father considers his son to be “mine”. And I think the fact that Brody’s character immediately asks what the boys name is supports the view that he sees him as a person he was responsible for, not simply a trophy he missed out on. Interesting how we interpreted the line so differently. For me it was perhaps one of the most humanizing and saddest moments in the movie. Hits me a little harder now as well that I’m a little older now and have moved into that guardian role myself in life. If I were to ever fail to save mine I would feel nothing but shame and failure in my role as a guardian.
He’s also a soon to be parent so this could make him doubt himself even more.
That's interesting, because when I watched this movie as a Slovenian, I heard two foreign languages. One that I understood (English) and one that I did not (Japanese). The lack of subtitles did not make my mind automatically jump to orientalism. I simply assumed that the parts of the movie that were in Japanese were not meant to be understood fully by me or by English speakers, but by a Japanese audience. I also felt that me not understanding exactly what the people were saying was a clever way to help the viewer experience what it must feel like to be a dog living in a world dominated by humans.
that’s interesting !! but unfortunately the japanese was very stilted and unnatural - in both speech and writing. so it was very clearly not intended for japanese audiences to enjoy if that makes sense :/
That was exactly the point, good job. This film isn’t about the human characters, it’s about the dogs. The poor Japanese being spoken in the film a lot of times could be the result of muffling due to how the character is acted like Atari being a kid and not speaking properly or the Major Domo being a hysterical old man. Also a lot of the Japanese kanji seen in the film isn’t meant to be read either and is supposed to be set decoration, making the world feel more lived in and detailed.
I had the same experience as mexican. I understand english but I don't understand japanese so when I watched the film I assumed that the parts in japanese were meant to not be understood by us the non japanese audience because we are taking the dogs point of view.
Also I thought that the japanese was legit and perhaps they used other language in japan to gave the same feeling we got as if we are the dogs
@@nemutai3596 That's funny, because a lot of Japanese people enjoyed it anyways. They were speaking a VERY dialectical form of Japanese. That's like saying "their English wasn't meant to be understood" just because it's spoken in a thick Cajun accent that *you* can't understand, even when most people can.
But I understand, you don't actually understand Japanese so you're just parroting what you heard without actually checking anything :)
Same. I don't "dehumanize" Someone just because I don't understand the language.
While this doesn't detract from the overall point, it's a bit ironic to illustrate the claim that "eastern men tend to be emasculated in [orientalist views]" with a snapshot from Lawrence of Arabia, which actually portrays Arabian men as more "authentically" viril and masculine than the "effeminate" and "decadent" British officers - a problematic trope with a long history in its own right for sure, but not very representative of the point being made here.
the virgin industrial br!tish vs the chad arabian desert dweller
It's still the "Noble Savage" trope. You say "..effeminate and decadent.." with a self deprecatory wink, but we all know its really the "educated and civilized" bringing enlightenment to the "desert savages".
I had always thought of Isle of Dogs as a peculiar blend of “old fashioned” exoticising orientalism and more “modern” orientalist narratives seen in the cyberpunk genre especially, following Japan and Taiwan’s tech booms in the 80s. Thank you for putting this into better words and theoretical context than I could, this definitely helped me organise my own thoughts on why, much like you noted, the movie rubbed me the wrong way. I can’t wait to watch more of your videos!
I really appreciate the lack of hyperbole in your videos. Not to name names, but I have seen a video on how Wes Anderson writes non-white characters before, and it felt like a blanket condemnation of anyone who enjoyed Darjeeling Limited and Isle of Dogs, regardless of their reasoning. Your videos always feel much more like they’re trying to start a conversation than to end a debate, and even if I don’t agree with every word, they always make me think. Thanks for your great content.
Are the initials of the channel RC?
Kosta Jovanovic Yes
while i appreciate how much you enjoy her videos, i think it can be very important to consume critiques that make you feel uncomfortable in the way his did. having a mirror held in front of us is never a comfortable experience but it is a crucial one.
Renegade Queen It didn’t make me feel uncomfortable, it just felt very dismissive of anyone who enjoys The Darjeeling Limited. The tone of the video made it difficult for me to engage with what was saying, since it felt like I was being talked down to. This video felt a lot more understanding in its approach to the subject matter, and I found myself able to connect with the ideas expressed much more, but that’s just my experience.
@@gilliamfan1705 I agree, especially as a fan of Renegade Cut's channel. He's a brilliant, gifted analyst, but he dipped into grandiose outrage in that video, which had the effect of weakening his argument rather than strengthening it. It's not that I don't agree with his assessment. But the level of contempt for Anderson's cluelessness seemed a little mean-spirited, especially for a film that was attempting to be a confession about that very cluelessness.
By comparison to creativity, criticism is relatively easy. We can condemn the failings of white-cis-het-male creators all day long, and goodness knows, we need to call them out. But it's also important to cite and compare their failings to examples of success. What SHOULD Darjeeling Limited have been, aside from a movie with a different, less precious title. (this is a problem with Isle of Dogs too. Atari, Kobayashi, all the Japanese names were chosen for their familiarity to even the most disconnected westerners.)
The intent of Darjeeling was to depict the westerners' search for spiritual meaning in the faraway orient as absurdly selfish, insensitive, and reductive. It's supposed to make you uncomfortable, to make these brothers look like assholes. That's what they are. The scene of the boy's death, which seems to get the most merciless condemnation, is meant to convey the brothers' dimwitted realization that these are real people, with real lives and suffering of their own. The point of the revelation wasn't to make the boy's death about the brothers and their journey, but to push their suffering into the background in acknowledgement of this much greater, more significant suffering. The point was that, finally, they stopped thinking that everything going on in India was about them. Most criticism of it seems to me like a misreading. The subtext that this death was a blood sacrifice of a person of color for the spiritual growth of white people is applicable, but it's not the one, inescapable meaning of the scene.
The question remains, is there a better way for a white cis male director to handle such material? Or should he avoid it, and just crank out what he knows, white upper-middle-class Americans in emotional crisis? How would that help? It seems like a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" scenario.
I absolutely agree Anderson deserves criticism for his handling of this material, but I think Renegade Cut surpassed criticism and delved into the realm of condemnation. And I think that was unnecessarily extreme.
I think Wes Anderson sees other countries only for their stereotypical aesthetics and wants to employ them, but realizes the only appropriate way to incorporate them is to set the movie in said country and then forces himself into a corner where he must write a movie set in a country he actually cares very little about culturally. Like in The Isle of Dogs, I think he fell in love with Japanese symbols and the Japanese aesthetic, but then was faced with creating a non- stereotypical world and just couldn’t live up to the task.
Nobody should go into a Wes Anderson movie and expect an accurate depiction of our world lol
You do realise it's the other way around too right? I've seen so many Japanese movies where foreign people are pictured as a stereotype or maybe a better term hyperstylized version of where they come from.
Also you have to take into account the intended audience of a film. You cannot explain an entire foreign culture in 90, 120, 160 minutes (however long a film lasts) and still try to tell a main plot. Which is why writers resort to shorthand. Otherwise you get lost in superfluous details that drag down the movie's pacing.
Unless it's necessary to the plot to fully flesh out a specific culture shorthand should be enough.
@@Zeitgeist6 who cares about the other way around, that doesn't change anything about his films. Noone's asking for a documentary on the foreign culture, but it should be written with an understanding and appreciation for that culture rather than something shallow and stereotypical.
@@kiwifruit4019 Aside from completely missing the point of my explanation to WHY cinematic shorthand is used..
1. I highly doubt Wes Anderson doesn't understand/appreciate foreign cultures. 2. Why should my argument not matter the other way around?
Realised this is practically everyone on Earth. The amount of Japanese films/shows that are set in a stereotypical “medieval Europe” is insane honestly.
I hadn't considered that this might be why Darjeerling and Isle of Dogs didn't really work for me.
One thing that did consciously bug me about Isle of Dogs was the passivity of the female characters. Women tend to be very passive in Anderson's films, but he usually finds an in universe 'reason' for it to be that way. Whether that is by placing his narratives in the past, focussing on a mentor-mentee narrative, or on traditionally male exclusive societies (boy scouts, sailor scientists). Now this doesn't excuse the absence of active female characters in his oeuvre, but it does provide an explanation for this absence in the particular films. To me Isle of Dogs doesn't have any of this. Nothing about dogs makes it that they have to be guys, nothing about the setting makes it that the girl can't accomplish anything and has to constantly wait for the boy to take action, unless you want to critique sexism in Japan, which doesn't happen. To me, it was bothersome how useless the female characters were in the plot, how even when they tried to act, their efforts never seemed to matter.
I agree. I can only think of Saoirse Ronan and Tilda Swinton in The Grand Budapes Hotel. Two amazing actresses that were reduced to getting the plot started (Tilda) and the other for saving the male leads and wrapping up the story (Saoirse).
The American girl in Isle of dogs is literally the most active character in the whole film?..
@@valfoin163 nothing she does is meaningful in any way by the end of the film. When the little boy returns, all her hard work turns out to have been for nothing as he exposes the plans of the mayor.
She gets a lot of attention and runs around a lot but if we look at the plot you could completely leave her out and almost nothing would change.
Doesn't make her passive in any way. It's not because you fought fiercely for something and you ended up having little to no impact that it's not important. You fight for your life right? But you're still gonna end up dying eventually. You fight for the planet, for freedom, against corruption? What is your insignificant little life gonna change in the world? Does that mean you should give up everything and just die?
@@valfoin163 no, but in fiction it is a bit of a problematic trope that the actions of female characters don't influence the plot as opposed to the actions of male characters. I don't think characters have to have a big influence in every story, but in Anderson's work male characters tend to impact the plot of the story in significant ways and female characters tend not to. It is that asymmetry that I find problematic.
Struggling in vain can be a very interesting thing to make a movie about, but that is not what I got from this movie. (He got his dog back after all).
As to real life, this is not real nor does it attempt to be. We take artistic liberty to tell a story, dogs don't talk, puppets don't move by themselves, all actions might be considered inconsequential (depending on your outlook on life). In fact, it could be argued that the actions of women are deemed less consequential in the real world as well. None of that is in my opinion a reason by itself to depict things that way in media.
So no, I personally still don't think that the girl had an active role in the movie (i.e. the story), because all her actions were basically in vain as opposed to the actions of the male characters.
as an Indian, I felt so indescribably uncomfortable whilst watching the trailer of “The Darjeeling Limited” (yes, just the trailer). I couldn’t explain my apprehension before but this video does an incredible job. 💖 Thank you
I thought i was the only one.
Agastya Hedgehog - EXACTLY! there are worse offenders... like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
omg yes this film and the exotic marigold hotel made me want to vomit.
I don’t see it with the Darjeeling limited if I’m being honest…can you elaborate at all? I don’t really understand the apprehension you have to it.
I totally understand you !
I am late to this vid, but let me recommend:
Reel Asian Film Festival.
This is a Film Fest in Toronto that includes and highlights creators of Asian backgrounds (yes, all of Asia).
Being near Toronto, I had known of it growing up, but because of Covid forcing it online, I could finally attend.
I had never felt so included. There were no asterisks - no 'but not that kind of Asian' and other similar barriers. It was also amazing to experience something highlighting my culture that was not made for a white audience (and had sliding-scale pricing, acknowledgment of our place on settler lands, and admonishment of anti-blackness - things I'm always nervous about bringing up amongst the diaspora in Canada).
I just wanted to recommend it as I assume people on this vid would be interested in it, and I don't have friends that I could recommend it to, and so have been itching to express it.
thank you! I just moved to Toronto as a film student so this is perfect timing 🫶🏼🫶🏼🫶🏼
I love your videos, and as a Wes Anderson fan, this one left me with a lot to think about. As a western white guy I guess the perspective I always took on the little boy drowning was never that brown bodies are expendable -- although I'm not rebutting the fact that this is encoded in the film -- but instead it felt like reality ripping in on the Brothers' selfish entitlement as a reminder of what Real Life is and how precious the time they get to spend together is. Granted, writing that out now I realize the death is subservient to their personal journey but I guess I just wanted to point out how heartbreaking I always found that scene. Thank you for the perspective from your eyes, I know I have much more to learn.
Wes Anderson has always been one of my favorite directors, and Isle of Dogs was one was my favorite movies of that year, so naturally I instinctively felt a bit resistant to this video's thesis when I saw it pop up in my feed, but I think you make a really compelling case.
I never stopped to think about it, but you are definitely right that virtually all of Anderson's protagonists are white, and even when other culture's are explored they're explored from a distinctly American perspective and rarely as anything much deeper than set dressing.
I really appreciate these types of BreadTube videos - those that challenge things I had previously taken for granted.
All that to say: this is a really great video!
It feels like a deliberate choice, not one made to spite other cultures or ethnicities, though? The French Dispatch, Darjeeling Limited and Isle of Dogs feel like a distinctly Americanized perspective. All of the characters speak American English. The reason? The people sitting at home, watching the movies are... for the most part, American. And the way the films seem to portray a heavily 'Americanized' view of the world seems intentional.
I have a hard time taking this 'thesis' seriously when the characters in Darjeeling are so clearly not good people. They don't worry about other people, they are constantly using the native population (there's even a scene when one of the brothers literally says 'Thanks for using me' to a character... he literally had sex with to get over a break-up with.
It feels like there's a bit of cognitive dissonance going on. I feel like to better understand this issue of Wes Anderson and foreign cultures, there should be an exploration of the themes of other films, to piece together *why* this characterization is going on.
I feel like the easy answer is that Wes Anderson desires to make films, about foreign cultures, for a distinctly American audience.
@@ahealthkit2745 how would you describe “American”? Maia grew up in Canada, but she herself is of South Asian descent. I can’t speak for her, but as a South Asian person who was born in America and grew up here, these aspects of Anderson’s work still deeply bother me. Storytellers are supposed to “write what they know”, not “write about your assumptions even if they’re wrong”
Wes Anderson is very Wesian Andersonian, and I have noticed this in many of his films. The inability to see his stories in the eye of minorities. It's a serious crutch that I don't think he will ever overcome and as you've said, yes it is taking advantage of different cultures to a horrible extent. I used to excuse his work by saying it's over stylised and focused heavily on the mindset of the protagonist. And therefore the rich white protagonist usually wouldn't engage with minorities or other cultures and Anderson presents them that way. But as a director and writer, he has to give proper respect and attention to the cultures and groups he constantly uses in his films. The fact that he doesn't means that they really are just decorative pieces for his storytelling and that's horrible. The Japanese culture here then becomes like the walls of the Budapest Hotel, and not anything he treats with true meaning. This was a great review!!
Not to disconnect Wes's scripts because he is very integral to his films, but I've noticed the most glaring times that cultures are used as backdrops occur when he works with Roman Coppola as a co-writer. Darjeeling Limited, Isle of Dogs, and Moonrise Kingdom were all written by him to some extent. All three of these use other cultures as backdrops to some extent. Limited has India, Isle has Japan and Kingdom has a fictional Native American path that the two-child protagonists follow to escape their difficult lives.
@@ZachHessEdits That adds a new element to it and I have seen Coppola's collaboration. I really love Anderson's work that is not based on culture Like Fantastic Mr. Fox! There is no denying he can be great with non-cultural settings like that and I love those films. But this influence, whether Coppolo or his on bias, is hurting his creativity. I wish he could just stick to the really bizarre!
i mean, other than his most acclaimed film, whos protaganist is a minority and that struggle is portrayed, he sure cant portray the struggle of a minority and will never be able to overcome that
fantastic mr. fox does have a cultural setting. it is large town/rural, and white, usa. *disambiguation from native peoples' cultures in the same land.
I like Wes Anderson when he is making a movie that's not about non-white people. Or just not about humans in general.
And btw, Grand Budapest Hotel is a mish-mash of Austria-Hungarian and Balkan cultures. Making a broad generalization of foreign culture again.
It was a fictional country tho.
Oh so what do you actuality dislike? Because you just contradicted yourself
@@finnersmcspeed5646 That's not a defense.
as we all know, when making a fictional setting you are only allowed to chose one culture to draw inspiration from
@@Aster_Risk What generalisations about Austria-Hungary and Balkans does it make exactly ? (It was filmed in the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland as well. So I don't see how the Balkans really enters the equation.)
Thank you for breaking this down so meticulously. I haven't watched "Darjeeling Express" but I enjoyed "Isle of Dogs" a lot, as a person who knows Japan and Japanese films fairly well. I don't intend to contradict your arguments (they are all valid) but my perspective was that I could appreciate the film as an homage to Japanese cinema and not for a minute believe it to be an attempt at portraying Japanese society or culture as it really is. Because the strongest impression that I got was that Anderson is in love with Japanese movies and was simply longing to make one himself by taking what he could gleam from the golden era of Japanese cinema and pack it all together in his artificial, puppet version of Japan. I could accept his version of Japan and the Japanese because, after all, it is a cartoonish puppet version of the country, the artificiality already a self-reflective part of it, full of delightful cinema references and inside jokes. Plus, since the film is dog-centric, I perceived the human characters, including that American schoolgirl, to necessarily end up as caricatures. I might have a different opinion if I rewatch the movie (I'm talking from memory here), but my argument is to first and foremost understand the movie as a Tarantinoesque reflection on cinema history. I'm trying to remember if the film had something keen to say on current real-world issues (like the existence of trash islands and consumerism) but it's been too long ago.
Perhaps the most ironic part of it all is that since Japanese people and media today are so obsessed with what is being pushed as Japanese culture's uniqueness and superiority I can imagine that there were people who could find Anderson's portrayal quite agreeable, because nothing is more appreciated there than a foreigner who tells Japanese how strangely unique they are compared to the rest of the world.
Amazing analysis! I remember seeing Isle of Dogs when it came out and leaving the theatre feeling that something wasn't right. Since then I've managed to understand what was it, but this is the first time I see someone articulate it so well!!!
This is a larger problem that can be found whenever someone tries to write a story about "the other" and shows us how it is very important that people with a diverse background start to tell their own stories.
I had such an interesting perspective on this because I went to the cinema to see Isle of Dogs with my Japanese mother and my British father's mother. I was young at the time but I still felt like the film really disregarded cultural respect for the sake of aesthetics. The dissonance between the three of us when we were talking about the movie on our way home was fascinating to me, and this video goes into so much detail so, even though it wade three years ago I wanted to say thank you and this video is incredible!
shizzle shakes this channel just continually slaps my donkey brains to bits. i've subscribed and unsubscribed to many yt film theory/critics/reviews/theory over the past several years but this one manages to hold my attention! broey, do you have a letterboxd account? i'd love to read ur blurbs!
plus--i mean, hard yes for WA's positively toasted imagining of the Other in all its alienated forms. what more do you expect from the tidily dressed, Texas-come-NYC, centrist heir of the "liberal" upper-class? heck, i love the royal tennenbaums but this boy has about as much 'down to earth' experience as Chelsea Clinton taking a vacation in Port-au-Prince
Wow this video is actually exciting me for my upcoming class on Geography and Politics of the Asia Rim?? Also I really like the Isle of Dogs, and as someone studying Japanese I thought it was fun to see Japanese spoken without subtitles in an English spoken film. But I never thought of the implications of how not understanding the Japanese characters dehumanizes them more than the dogs. I guess I didn’t have the cultural sensitivity to realize how he told this story through a Western, “othering” lense. Thank you.
Thanks for this. Darjeeling Limited is one of my favorite films and I always appreciate knowing every side of a film I enjoy from the good to the problematic. There is so much to think about here and it’s good to know for the future so we can have higher expectations for our favorite filmmakers.
I love Isle of Dogs, it's probably the best stop motion animation there has ever been. But yeah, everything you say here is correct. I think that the film was made with reverence ad huge appreciation of Japanese culture but a lack of understanding of how presenting that culture would fit in to larger history of western representations of foreign peoples.
To add onto this - - I felt like Lost in translation [The one movie with Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson] also did the exact same thing. I never finished it cause I ended up feeling so bored throughout it, because I really wanted to see how they used the Japanese setting, but that just never happened.
*Bill Murray, not Tom Hanks
RaccoonJS Was it Bill Murray? Oh, sorry about that. I thought for sure that it was Tom Hanks.
@@ethernalhiro4594 look up Atrocity Guide's latest vid for a bit of a trip
ScotRotum Do you mean the one about the airport? That’s the last east I can see.
Yeah, i thought about that movie too, Japan it´s kind of taken as a background. It´s a beautiful looking movie, but in many scenes the language barrier it's taken as a joke at the expense of the japanese characters, and beside that there´s no much relationship between the city or the culture i guess
This talk reminded me of Western depictions of Russia. Females are oversexualised, males are depicted as violent and barbaric. While India is needed for the main characters to go through a spiritual journey, Russia is needed for a test of strength and wits. It is a place where a western hero has to fight off evil Ivans, endure heavy siberian snowfalls or sabotage some sinister commie plan. Many of the good Russian guys and gals that exist in media are people who immigrated to USA (Black Widow, Colossus), so in order for a character to be positive, he or she has to be americanized.
this video is so important! as a white latin american i hadn't even thought of this as such a deep problem, i was just like "ok wes anderson is a director for white/western people and his movies are very White (even when they're in Asia?) and that's that" like i only noticed it on the surface, but now i the much deeper issue is clear.
Thank you so much for this!
Honestly as an Asian, I think aestheticising other cultures is also common in film of non-Western countries, often to the same degree of using other cultures as set dressing like Wes does. It's just different because of the traditional power dynamics and complex geopolitics between Western and Eastern countries. I'm not going to stop liking his movies tbh, because I think his motives aren't as malicious as some people in the comments are painting it to be, I'm sure Wes could do better and make better representation, but I truly don't care if Western movie makers fail to represent my culture accurately or not (unless its an intentional racist caricature since that's something else), and I don't understand why I should care. I think a lot of people who talk about these issues are mostly Asians who grew up in Western countries.
Sorry if I'm bothering you with a sudden late reply, but yeah, I think that the only ones who seem to be bothered by this movie are mostly Americans rather than ACTUAL Japanese citizens lol
well yeah, obviously. Orientalism isn't going to be a problem in places where Asian people aren't a minority. The people most impacted by this sort of appropriation are going to be people living outside the portrayed countries.
@@happysocialmoth1197 I don't think that's fair to say Asian Americans aren't actual _____ because they're American. Asian Americans will have different experiences than Asians in their home country and it's important to understand these different perspectives and why they are different, instead of trying to enforce the idea that all Asians are and should be a monolith.
You don't need to stop liking a movie because some uppity wokescold has a problem with it on YT...
The dichotomy of discovering such a well founded critical take of a movie you adore. Such great analysis, you’re truly in a league of your own
Exactly! You nailed it. I like Wes Anderson films, but that doesn't mean I'm not critical of his work, and this issue is frustratingly still relevant.
I actually find this interesting because I felt like I could understand the essence of what the Japanese characters were saying or expressing. I feel like Atari connected to me more than Tracy Walker, because although I couldn’t understand everything he said I could understand his determination, his pain, and his tears. But after seeing what you pointed out I definitely see the problem with the film. Thank you.
I was taking this video is good faith until she asserts the Japanese characters come off as "inhuman" and then I just scoffed in disgust and lost any faith I had in the interpretation. Atari is a wonderful character and full of humanity and personality. But because we don't have subtitles for him the film is "orientalist" and dehumanizes the Japanese characters or whatever...
This video is a painfully online take.
@@nope5657 its so hard to take this video serious
As an Asian I think I can speak for many of us when I say we love when our culture is appreciated/celebrated/shared- especially when it comes to representation in media, but I completely understand what you're saying! I think as long as the culture is not disrespected and people are made aware of its history, cultures should be celebrated
Tbh, a lot of white people use the excuse of "I don't want to see cultural misrepresentation" as a dog whistle, when they really mean they don't want to see those other cultures portrayed. Period.
They only saw the movie because it had a white director, and so they could blame his whiteness on why they felt upset at seeing it. But if the same movie was made by a Japanese director, it wouldn't even had half the audience that it did, because most Americans wouldn't want to see it at all. It's pretty disgusting how whites love to frame our other cultures as if they're "protecting" us, when really they're just trying to "protect" themselves from us.
I feel like Anderson is so obsessed with capturing the aesthetics of colonialist-era artwork and literature, that he keeps imitating their orientalism and casual racism too. How could one possibly adapt Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver's Travels in a way that's acceptable today, while still being authentic to the period it was made in? You can't. But I don't think Anderson got the memo.
This is why I believe that old movies, art, literature, etc should be enjoyed through a very critical lens and with an understanding of the cultural context of the time. I feel like many people seem to forget this, particularly people who want to use these old classics as inspiration for their own works. Old entertainment can have some really cool and interesting elements in them, but they can also have some pretty serious casual bigotry (by our modern standards) in them as well that needs to be looked out for so it doesn't get accidentally copied.
The Isle of Dogs scene where all the name tags of the dogs are shown is really strange. They’re all in English.
I am a Japanese Wes Anderson fan. Combining the two sounded like heaven for me. The reality was me angrily yelling at the TV how the boy's Japanese sounded stupid sdjkfskfj
shdhd ikr !!! i was dying by the end out of frustration
I love your Profile Picture!!!!!!
So this is arguably a small mistake, but I believe it is an important one in the context of a video essay on orientalism. I noticed that the flute cover that you use in your video is actually a cover of the song "Taal Se Taal" from the movie Taal not of "Silsila Ye Chaahat Ka" from Devdas as cited in the description. By conflating these two songs, it reduces the complexity of Indian music by defining it solely by the "exotic" sounding wooden flute, rather than the nuance and context of the songs themselves. These are two different songs from two different movies by two different composers. Bollywood music especially is often reduced to gaudy dance numbers by Western media, rather than the often vital vessels for story and character they are. I think that if you were to use Bollywood music in a video like this, then as you said it shouldn't be used as a "curious backdrop". All that is to say, I found your analysis extremely valuable if slightly undermined by your incorrect citation.
I love it. Doesn't matter if it is serious (and if it is, I am sooo sorry) or not, but I love every bit of it.
Just found your channel and it's a breath of fresh air in this cesspit of content. Can't wait to binge on your videos for the next week. Thanks for all this amazing content.
If it wasn't for the english speaking characters I thought the point of omitting the subtitles was to try and make the narrative from the dog's perspective
it would have been so cool if the only people we could understand as an English-speaking audience were the dogs. Meaning everyone else speaking japanese, including that one American girl, who would.. hopefully speak Japanese with her japanese classmates and teachers given that she's living there and going to school there..?? That she spoke in English confused me.
Wow, you smashed this. Well done. I felt it too having lived in Japan for seven years, when I came out of Isle of Dogs I was already convinced it was a very troubled film that no amount of stylisation could mask.
Wes anderson films seems like its from the perspective of a tourist. It's hard for a western person to escape that viewpoint.
Thanks for this video, very rewarding. Isle of Dogs is a strange one because unlike The Darjeeling Limited, the Japanese characters (mostly Atari and Kobayashi) are not fodder in their own land, but have real agency, impact on the story, and character growth. It is mostly the choice to have their direct speech untranslated that distances them from the viewer. However, I feel this choice COULD have been *more* authentic than using English dialogue for Japanese characters - a thing that always bothers me as someone who isn't English or American. This adds a layer of distance and points to the *untranslatable.* While I agree that othering portrayals of non-Western cultures are harmful, there exist real cultural differences and untranslateables that are erased by letting everyone speak English or act in ways English-speaking audiences can easily identify with. The danger is that insisting on portraying the "humanity" of Japanese and Indian people can end up in making them speak English and act "Western" -- in effect confusing humanity with "Westernness". While Orientalism expressly wants to create "tableaus of queerness", a truly authentic depiction of "another culture" or of intercultural interaction will at times inevitably surprise or bewilder the sensibilities of a Western audience anyway. But this is all a moot point for Isle of Dogs: as some comments here say, the Japanese dialogue isn't really Japanese. It is there to *sound* Japanese. So instead of it saying something about the parts of our shared humanity that reach to each other over the gulf of intranslatability, it's just there to give off a Japanese "vibe". Which is Orientalism.
Anyway if you want to see a movie that explicitly addresses these issues in Lawrence of Arabia, you should check out Theeb: a film that treats its Arabian characters as people *without* "westernizing" them. And a great film to boot.
Having never seen Isle of Dogs (yet, I still wanna watch one day!) some of the aspects in the film really sound....wild. A Japanese kid named....Atari? Ground-breaking.
I haven't watched it neither, though seen some clips. About the boy's name, Atari, I cannot come up any Chinese characters for it except 当たり, which means Bingo! For a boy's name Atari isn't impossible, but most unlikely and strange. (And I wonder why he didn't say Osuwari (お座り) instead of Sitto, for the former is the very common and specific phrase to command any animals/pets to sit down. Well, some people do train their dogs with English, I think...)
another really great video!! i still think wes anderson is one of the best directors out there, but saying his movies can be a bit insensitive is kind of an understatement. darjeeling limited is wonderfully filmed, but the fact the movie holds so little steem for anyone who isnt the main three characters and their mom (egregious in a director whose filmography has come to be defined by large, complex and interestingly characterized casts), when the characters who most clearly have romantic drama (rita and the train employee) take a backseat and then exit the stage to leave room for schwarzman's anodyne relationship with portman. anderson sort of found his way to have his big nice cast of familiar faces in isle of dogs, by basically casting bit roles with respected japanese figures and doing nothing with them. this is awful, of course, but also kind of makes me want to compare them to his other "non-american" movie, and my favorite of his, grand budapest hotel. i personally really enjoy it, especially how he treats narrative perspective and the passing of time, but theres something that i still find unpleasant about it -of course, not as disgusting as framing a literal child's death as a plot point in three white dudes' narrative development - but in the way this country is made up, made to resemble really any mid-to-eastern european country. that sort of lack of specificity, while it can do wonders to make the environment more ~dreamlike and free to create new aspects of a new culture, also carries with it the weight of its influences. zebrowka, i think this country is called, was invaded by textually-mentioned "fascists". why make up a fake brand of fascists? was using real fascists too close to home? why didnt that stop him from portraying a mushroom cloud in isle of dogs, then? what are the limits, and how on earth does he decide on them? theres his upcoming movie set in france, supposedly comfortable enough for him: by the general aesthetics and chalamet's hair, id say this is the sixties. will he use the algerian war as a backdrop, now? will he tackle the french youth's powerful attachment to communism, as andersons fave director godard was? what is considered acceptable to tackle for him, and how does he write other cultures, issues foreign to him -if apparently he doesnt seem to make any research, nor bother himself with more than background aesthetics?
Excellent comment, to which I could only add that Zubrowka does not really look like the generic Central to Eastern European land - to me it looked like Bavaria or Austria, and now that I checked on Wikipedia it has indeed been shot in Germany. Why that was disappointing, see my other comment above...
This is so well made! Thank you so much for this. coming from a person who just learned about orientalism
Thank you for this great, insightful video! I always felt something was off just from the marketing that said he didn't put subtitles to make it more "immersive" or something. You put it to words. Thank you!
I think wes relies on western characters and doesnt feel fit to put himself in the shoes of those native people in settings like India and Japan because it can be perceived as disrespectful to tell a story that isn't his own , and yet he shouldn't write these settings if he can't fully realize this.
I get that in a medium like animation, where every character is legit a puppet.. but in Darjeeling Unlimited I am more critical. The beauty of acting and having Live-Action is that the actors can add something to a character. These people that have been shown in the movie could have done so!
Yeah, I agree. He's not really in a position where he can write about people of color well as main characters, but even if he could I don't think we should rely too much on white people to write our stories for us.
This is an incredible video!!! I had never been able to accurately pinpoint my unease with wes anderson’s Indian/eastern aesthetic but this just explains everything PERFECTLY. Thank you
this incidentally articulates why i think its okay to not always have ethnically diverse backgrounds in your media for the sole reason of being politically correct, i'd rather just have the writers write what they're comfortable writing instead of overthinking it. the overthinking is really where things become awkward and inclusiveness becomes tokenism
I just discovered your channel. Excellent essay! Super nuanced- I hadn't noticed this reduction of Eastern cultures in Wes Anderson films before. Thanks so much xx
THANK YOU. I voted for this topic and I’m glad you called it out. I’m Japanese and it tends to be too emotionally exhausting for me to put together these types of analyses because it’s too personal, as is the inevitable backlash of people defending problematic works of fiction like these and in the process those attacks “defending fiction” demean our very real existence. Thank you for being an ally. ❤️
damn im going to be honest, i never really thought of it that way (i guess that may be because it doesn't directly affect my culture and people) but I'm glad that I watched this video and that these issues have had some light shed on them (especially since i was an oblivious outsider; again pointing to the problem. i never questioned his approach because i was comfortable and familiar with his lens) again, thanks for this video :) i learned something today
this video was beautifully done. i never thought about isle of dogs this way because i watched it online... and it had subtitles for japanese speaking characters :(( i didn’t even know that people in theaters couldn’t understand 80% of the movie
You are one of the most incredible and insightful film commentators on this platform,,, I have been binging your content all afternoon. Thank u v much.
Absolutely fantastic video! This was recommended to me because I've watched things on Wes Anderson as a fan of his work but, ideally, being a fan means recognizing the flawed aspects of Wes Anderson which boil down to, as you brilliantly put it, "well-intentioned liberalism." It's orientalism so subtle, you get all the western imagined aesthetics with none of the guilt! (sarcasm) It's undeniably an issue that deserves to be wrestled with while watching the movie and called out again and again. I love your approach, fantastic research, and summation.
After giving the video a watch, i still maintain my belief that he tries to shoot the film from the perspective of the characters, and presents these cultures as such in order to bring you into their perspective, i believe where this collides is with those that already have a firm knowledge of the cultures represented and thus feel put off by the inaccuracies
I don't see the problem here. I've seen American movies that insult your intelligence, where the foreigners all speak English and never go beyond acting as generic, stereotypical, cardboard charicatures of said culture (Arab, Russian). Because God forbid empathizing with humans of a different culture, frame of reference (including language) with which your audience is not familiar. Isle of Dogs isn't like that at all. When I watched it, I was caught up in the story, and Atari is quite frankly one of the most humane characters in it. I didn't think much about the Japanese not being subtitled, other than creating a 'dog effect' (they don't understand humans save for a few specific commands). It also creates the experience of being a stranger in a land, having to get by on mostly body language, intonation and context to understand what's going on.
I don't see what's wrong with depicting things like Kabuki, sushi, cherry blossom and sumo either. Every culture has traditions and practices it upholds and to which it ties its identity. All of this is shown in a beautiful stop motion art style which I thoroughly enjoyed. My main takeaway from the film was that the cats and dogs story was a warning about fascism and how shrewd politicians capitalize on it. Which is always a story about us vs them, superiority and shifting blame, a phenomenon that trancends nationalities and borders. The dogs are ousted, rounded up on an island and deemed 'a disease'. Talk about dehumanization. But this gets lost entirely due to OP deciding to make this about ethnicity, arguing and taking offense that the setting of Japan serves as a mere prop. Well done /sarcasm
You know those action movies where the protaganist kills off waves of disposable henchmen and noone gives two shits, but then a main character dies and it's like the whole world is grieving? There is a direct correlation between the time a film devotes to a character's death, his/her importance, and the film's willingness and impetus on you as the viewer to empathize. So tell me how the boy's death in The Darjeeling Limited is of no consequence, when you are taken to the funeral and see the father's intense grief? I'm all too aware of the fact that Western civilization employs a double standard and treats brown lives as less, but you picked the wrong example here.
I'm genuinely curious if anyone actually thinks either of the Wes Anderson films addressed in this video really caused any sort of real world harm, regardless of intentions, and in what form that harm might be. Personally I don't think any of the "problems" presented in this video (about Wes Anderson's films specifically) really are flaws, but maybe just matters of perspective. Also I'm curious that if you do find considerable issues within these films, what you might think of something like Lost in Translation.
I would like to add something else about this discussion with the film The life aquatic with Steve Zissou. Seu Jorge, Brazilian singer, plays the character Pelé dos Santos and also performs various songs throughout the movie. Since I’m a Brazilian myself and watched it here, I thought the lack of subtitles for his lyrics were due to the fact that he was singing in Portuguese, not English. But after I rewatched it on a foreign streaming service, I noticed that the his songs still lacked subtitles. Jorge participation and performance made the film more “exotic” and “mysterious” even though all the songs were David Bowie’s covers in Portuguese. The translation to Portuguese is not exact; Seu Jorge maintains the melodies and styles, but often varies the lyrics, and Bowie himself recognized how beautiful he made them
Yeah, I looked up this video after watching The Life Aquatic and feeling exasperated with the colonial tropes (e.g., the scene with the Filipino pirates) and the unsuccessful attempt to be self-aware enough about the mediocre-white-man-ness of the protagonist to cancel out my natural tendency to give zero shits about such a character. The whole movie felt "off" in a kinda racist way, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Your observations are helpful
I love poignant diagnostics of the artist's art (or storyteller's story) because it positively highlights their humanity, and I really enjoyed what you've done with this. Imagine that with every film he makes, he gets better at understanding his... lets say, accidental xenophobism. He wants to step beyond his boundaries, like you said. There is a sense of empathy in trying to include other worldly people and cultures in your artistic endeavors. He may not be stepping in the right direction, but when we analyze his contributions to cinema, like you've done with this video, it shows that he does have a sense of self and hopefully that could lead to change. If his flaws are taught back to him by use of criticism, he can always get BETTER, and the idea that a director could learn from his audience is an art in and of itself.
But it's not a Japanese movie. It's an American movie that pays homage to the robust and storied tradition of film in Japan. This argument delegitimizes japanese cinema by acting like it's up to Americans to make Japanese movies. The assumption that the Japanese characters are less important or less fleshed out, simply because you don't understand the words, implies that you, yourself, are assigning the status of "background" to these characters, not Anderson. Isle of Dogs is crafted with a clear love and respect for the culture. It can also serve to expose westerners, in a way that's accessible to them, to cultures beyond their own. I'm not going to pretend there isn't room for improvement, but vilifying someone who is working to normalize eastern aesthetics in western culture, is working against the kind of change it seems like you want to bring about.
Your video was the second result when I searched 'orientalism'. Glad the SEO lead me here.
Thank you for your analysis here Broey. Wes Anderson movies have always been an acquired taste for me. Usually I go in with the mindset and the attention focused on production design and framing and storytelling devices and rarely for empathetic connection. That said, I think it's somewhat a theme of his that his characters are to certain degree detached or insular or self-absorbed or in some kind of isolated emotion torment. I also happen to be Chinese myself. So when I came to watch Isle of Dogs, funny this perspective of "orientalism" never occurred to me. I just think "it's a Wes Anderson" movie." The "White savior" troupe and "eastern exotica" troupe are rampant in so many Hollywood productions. While Isle of Dogs qualifies, as you have some eloquently illustrated in the video, I would say it is not the most egregious of examples--Simply a white filmmaker telling a story in his perspective. I also find the use of the word "orientalism" rather cringey, not to your fault as you didn't come up with the term. But it is like describing an abuse with an abusive word and in turn giving it more light in having to say it some more. To that, I don't know if I have a better alternative. May be #OscarSoWhite or #HollywoodSoWhite speaks to that more directly. Anyway, your points here are well taken. Thanks for the video.
Love Said, Love Wes Anderson, Love this video. Thank you for making this
Great stuff.
If you think of 'the east' as described in the video it shows how much generalization is needed to support that statement.
As an idea think of 'the west' as a big generalization and leave all the variations and cultural differences apart and therefore you could understand how difficult, lazy and sometimes even offending those terms are.
Thanks for sheding light onto that subject!
Thank you for articulating this so well! You’re amazing 💜
I would like to note that Isle of Dogs is an allegory about the Japanese conquest and conquering of Okinawa, and the brutal elimination of their culture, traditions, and language. They speak OKINAWAN in the film. Dogs are traditionally guardians in Okiwan culture tied to the legend of the Shisa. The destruction of dogs, as opposed to cats(the Shisa are Lion Dogs) is how Japan during the Pacific war used the Okinawan people to fight their war, resulting in a quarter of the population of Okinawa to be killed. This movie came out during the enormous ruckus China was causing over the Senkaku islands, as well as their attempts to take Okinawa from Japan.
But sure, I'm sure only western audiences are aware of all this cultural background
Wow! That’s really cool to know! Thank you!
Thank you for this video. I'm currently writing an essay on Wes Anderson's films for my final essay in school, however my analysis does not include the two films mentioned in this video, and so I do not have too much insight on them. You have really expanded my views on the ways Anderson makes his films and uses certain tropes that may be offensive, and help me become more critical of media I consume in the future!
I think that one of the main problems that Wes Anderson has with writing or directing about minorities is that he just simply doesn't have any personal attachments to it.
Thinking about how sir Hayao Miyazaki draws his characters with his personal experience of observations in mind: like how he told an unusual yet intriguing way of a child putting on their shoes, or how a child eats their food in their own way, etc feels actually realistic for a person who's been around children (I find it very endearing since I studied childhood development in college). But if he wrote or draw something specifically about a foreigner in Japan, it might seem racial at firsthand but if it's based on his personal experience, then I cannot fault him for that. He's always drawn based off of his observations of people's actions so there's at least that kind of understanding a part of his process for making animations.
I don't think it'll be fair of me to expect Wes Anderson to write about something that he actually doesn't really know anything about other than what he has experienced through Western films and only through mutual acquaintances of mixed race casts that grew up mainly with Western cultures within their own home and community. I hope that he does acknowledge that he does lack the certain exposure to relaities of the minorities that he couldn't help but only write and direct on what he's only known. He might have also thought (just like other filmmakers have made their opinions clear) that subtitles is also a distraction from the aesthetics he was going for. But then again, a lot of films that have subtitles have become successful despite its presence. Maybe he also does need to be recomended to watch a ton of the most iconic Eastern films that has done its job well even if there were subtitles.
I just found your channel and I've been loving all your videos! It's so good to hear someone speaking so honestly and in a non-pretentious way about this topic. Thank you! Hope to see more :)
I immigrated to the US from Japan in 2007, and since then, I've seen many examples of this kind of orientalism in the media. But I've watched Isle of Dogs 3 times, and while I admit that I may be biased because I can understand the Japanese characters (despite their strange dialogue at some points), I don't think Wes Anderson is dehumanizing them on purpose. I think that he doesn't know how to write for those characters because he doesn't want to have them say anything offensive. Obviously, I think he should learn how to write for them, but this isn't so much a problem with Anderson as it is a problem with Western society as a whole.
And this is just speculation, but I think that he didn't put subtitles for the Japanese characters because he was worried that it would distract the viewer from the cinematography, which is what Anderson seems to have the most confidence in.
Japanese people also have a very complex view of themselves. We are taught in schools to not be too proud of our country, and many of us grow up with a warped outlook of Japanese culture. When Western directors decide to set their movies in Japan, it will take a lot to offend us. Usually, we will just be happy that they thought our society was interesting enough to be observed by Westerners.
I found this video really interesting! It's clear that you put a lot of effort into constructing this. I'm currently studying Said's Orientalism in class and this opened me up to so many more angles to approach the topic :)
idk i feel like if they set Darjeeling limited in the English countryside i would still expect the same amount of characterisation of the surrounding characters. The story is about the three brothers. it requires a place that they do not feel like they belong or understand.
I agree that having the english humans be understood when the Japanese are not is a strange choice and the film would have been better if none of the humans were understandable.
broey deschanel i appreciate you greatly and i hope you're having a great day and keeping safe and well during these times
I think that the whole point of Darjeeling Limited is to illustrate that the three brothers don't actually care about India at all. Like, I think it's an intentional comment. And you do say that,but then you say that the insensitive, annoying, selfish brothers are too insensitive,annoying, and selfish. I just dont think it makes sense to acknowledge the point of the movie and then comment on it as if it wasn't the intentional point of the movie. I also think your use of the words "brown bodies" is as dehumanizing as the way the bothers treat the dead kid. Every non-white person I know is against the use of "brown bodies."
I've not seen Aisle of Dogs,but that example does sound in poor taste. That the Japanese characters don't even get subtitles.
I only watched Darjeeling recently and yeah i definitely think the brothers are intentionally just pretty shitty people to start out, and the only sane man really is the steward and the indian people they meet, and at first to the brothers India is just the usual tourist trap, like they go to the temple and get the peacock feathers and say they're going on "a spiritual journey" but the more they try and act spiritual in a purposeful way the less it actually works for them, the spiritual journey comes from all the trials they go through, all the hardships it's spontaneous. Like at the end when they finally bury their feather they didn't follow the guru instructions they did what felt natural to them
And the death of the boy saying "mine" i think was a thing brought out from guilt, like Adrian Brody's character was taking possession of the guilt about the boy's death
I would say I'm probably looking too deep into this film but then again this video exists
I'm a graphic design bachelor student currently working on a Critical Studies minor project (research paper to be written too) about the commodification of Asian cultures in a postmodern consumerist Western society and I wanted to explore the relationship that western society has with Asian cultures, and that it is not really through interactions with actual members of the community themselves, but through playing the role of the consumer. And my argument is that it is a perpetuation of Orientalism and also an act of 'eating the other', as bell hooks puts it. I have yet to complete writing it but I really resonate with the points that you've brought up in this video!
I think ultimately from what we can see from reviews, different audience reactions and the comments on this video is that delving into the ideas and themes involving this film is a grey area and how it is viewed depends on the viewer.
This reminds me of the biggest criticism I get from Westerners (all online, hidden behind safe anonymity) whenever I describe my time in China: "You're just like one of those people who want to go native." I'm always rankled by this critique because what I merely set out to do in my five months in China was to live like a normal Chinese person. Therefore, I chose to live in an apartment building close to my university campus in Beijing but that was almost all Chinese, with the amenities of a normal Chinese apartment building. My neighborhood was also not one that was an expat favorite--99.9% of the people living and shopping there were Chinese. I had absolutely no discomfort in surrounding myself with the "mysterious Orientals" in whose country I happened to be living in. For various reasons, almost all having to do with how damn difficult Mandarin Chinese is to speak, I did hang out with Westerners most of my time in China. But suffice to say, whenever I get this critique that "I went native," that's the Wes Anderson "orientalism" speaking up, since these Western critics learned this need to "otherize" and separate themselves from "mysterious foreigners" from mass media.
I’m so glad someone’s point this out, I finely woven into a lot of his films in many different and coded ways.
Take your meds schizo lmao
馬鹿は死ななきゃ治らない
This is the second video of yours I'm watching, but damn if these are interesting! Easily some of the most interesting videos I've seen about political philosophy
I personally don‘t think Darjeeling Limited is a good example for this.
The way I watched the movie this glossing over Indian culture and just seeing them as an outsider was the whole point. The movie made me watch the journey of the character through their perception. They wear searching for a spiritual journey but totally missed the actual spiritual stuff, they were completely oblivious to what was going on. The way the movie is made reflects that. It is almost as if we are another brother.
Edit: I guess it really depends on how much credit you give Anderson. When I saw the movie for the first time after watching Moonrise Kingdom I thought he knew what he was doing. The moment I saw the movie was about three westeners going on a ‚spiritual‘ trip in India I immediately thought the movie was about how stupid this is.
So when I saw the movie I just saw it as a visual representation of this ignorance.
I don’t know how so many people don’t get that
I've been trying to pin down for years why I didn't like the aisle of dog when I so loved its animation, story, and character and THIS, THIS was it. I left this movie confused as to why it had to be set in Japan. Sure there is a lot of vague Japanese history and story telling tropes that set the plot but really you could've dumped this movie in Chicago and it would've been the *same thing*. I think as POC I had the sixth sense that I was being had and while I couldn't pin it down back then you've made it abundantly clear what the problem was. Gotta love that "your culture is my costume" feel.
Interesting take. I hadn't even thought about this when I saw Isle of Dogs, but I guess, as a black person, things like orientalism can go over my head sometimes. I don't exactly fit into the colonizing west perspective or the fetishized/generalized east perspective. It's kind of a weird position to be in when you think about it...
I mean, I guess there's always black-spoilation...
you are so articulate and your video essays are so well-researched its honestly astounding!! I'm Japanese British myself and havent seen Isle of Dogs and honestly, I don't really plan to. I went through a Wes Anderson phase a couple years back but in hindsight, his films generally feel entertaining in the moment, but pretty empty by the end.
Also this is only slightly relevant, but have you heard of the singer Beabadoobee? I think she's filipina-british but her bf (who is white) MAJORLY idolises Anderson and it always made me feel a little icky, and I think perhaps it's his idolisation of Wes' aesthetics, and therefore his well-intentioned orientalism, that makes their relationship seem little more than just for like, show? Ykwim? Obvs I understand they do have a loving private relationship outside social media, but (to me) it really comes across as just another white guy who has a thing for asian girls -- anyway thank uu for the video!!