Watch the delightful trailer to Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs

Welcome to the Japanese archipelago 20 years in the future, where the canine saturation has reached epidemic proportions and an outbreak of dog flu has seen man’s best friend exiled to a vast rubbish dump called Trash Island. That’s the setup for Isle of Dogs, the delightful-looking new animation from Wes Anderson.

Edward Norton has featured in Anderson’s previous two films (Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel) and he gets the lead role here as a dog called Rex. Other Anderson regulars also show up in the star-studded cast, including Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, Frances McDormand, Harvey Keitel and F Murray Abraham, while other famous names like Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, Greta Gerwig and, more surprisingly, Yoko Ono are welcomed into Anderson’s unofficial rep company.

The film’s chief two-legged character is Atari (Koyu Rankin), a 12-year old boy who hijacks a Junior-Turbo Prop plane to fly to the island to find his beloved “bodyguard-dog” Spots (voiced by Liev Schreiber).

Anderson has made one stop-motion animation previously, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox, and it’s one of his very finest films, so fans are excited to see this new project. Speaking to IndieWire, Anderson revealed two of the film’s chief inspirations: the first is the classic Rankin-Bass animated christmas specials, such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

“I really liked these TV Christmas specials in America,” Anderson told IndieWire. “I always liked the creatures in the Harryhausen-type films, but really these American Christmas specials were probably the thing that really made me want to do it.”

The other is one of Japan’s all-time great filmmakers. “The new film is less influenced by stop-motion movies than it is by Akira Kurosawa,” said Anderson.

Take a look at the trailer in the player above or on YouTube; and take a look at Isle of Dog's gorgeous poster below.

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The Isle of Dogs is released 30 Mar 2018 by 20th Century Fox