The Cultural-Appropriation Police Come for Wes Anderson

It was only a matter of time before a cry of cultural insensitivity was raised against Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. Set in the fictional Japanese metropolis of Megasaki City, it tells the story of Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin), who searches for his lost dog among those exiled to Trash Island by order of the city’s mayor (Kunichi Nomura), a cat person. The story is harmless, and besides avoiding offense and ridicule, Anderson goes out of his way to celebrate Japanese culture. No matter. The cultural-appropriation gendarmes have long established impossible standards for white directors availing themselves of Asian themes, and the accusations began trickling in immediately after the first critics’ showing.

They began with Justin Chang, a film critic for the Los Angeles Times, who focused on Anderson’s use of language. The residents of Megasaki City speak their native Japanese, while the dogs and the human love interest, Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig), speak English. On-screen, the language barrier proves challenging for the hero Kobayashi and the dogs, and in the theatre it does so for the audience, to whom Anderson does not provide subtitles. (Instead, he offers an on-screen translator, voiced by Frances McDormand, and context.)

Chang’s charge is that the language barrier marginalizes the residents of Megasaki and renders them foreigners in their own city. Not only does it cut them out of Anderson’s “droll way with the English language,” but it also makes them passive actors, easily exploited by white-savior Walker, who “becomes the angry, heroic voice of Megasaki’s pro-dog resistance.”

Following Chang’s review was one in the Guardian. There, freelance cinema writer Steve Rose pointed out that, yes, the use of language is problematic, but there’s more, including a mushroom cloud emanating from an explosion, which obviously reminds viewers of the nuclear attack suffered by Japan, which is made doubly offensive because Anderson is “a film-maker from the country that attacked them.” Further, the film employs “alumni of famous Asian whitewashing scandals past,” including Anderson himself.

One such “scandal” Rose mentions is Lost in Translation, a romantic comedy starring Dogs voice actors Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. But Rose fails to mention that Translation also featured Nomura, who served as much more than an actor in the making of Dogs: He was also Anderson’s co-writer, Japan-based casting director, and authenticity guru. In Deadline Hollywood, Dino-Ray Ramos explains that “as a native of Japan, Nomura says that Anderson reached out for his help and was always asking him questions about details about the film” and that “[Nomura] was eager to help make the story details such as the dialogue and general look & feel of the film as accurate as possible.”

Beyond enlisting a Japanese member of the film community to make the Japanese themes in Dogs authentic, Anderson covered his bases in several other traditional areas, leaving the cries of cultural insensitivity quite thin: Japanese actors voice the Japanese characters, the movie actively pays homage to Japanese cinematic history, and the country’s culture is never an object of mockery. Though it’s a story that could happen in Japan, to paraphrase Nomura, Anderson’s only real crime seems to have been placing it there.

Indeed, unless he had cut out references to Japan entirely, anything Anderson produced would have violated the belief in the sanctity of cultural borders at the heart of all cultural-appropriation accusations.

Indeed, unless he had cut out references to Japan entirely, anything Anderson produced would have violated the belief in the sanctity of cultural borders at the heart of all cultural-appropriation accusations. Rose and Chang’s reviews are quite different, but they’re both examples of how the cultural-appropriation brigade euphemizes even the most ridiculous of objections by referring instead to “standards.” Rose’s is the preprogrammed reply to cultural-crossover films, with the sensitivity meter dialed up a bit to offset Anderson’s good behavior. His flimsy evidence includes reminding the reader of Anderson’s 2007 “failure” in The Darjeeling Limited, an exploration of familial relationships set against an Indian backdrop. Meanwhile, Chang sets up a dastardly lose-lose situation: A director will marginalize his foreign characters if he gives them their original tongue; he will whitewash them if he gives them English.

Chang isn’t the first to present this controversial illusion of choice as a common-sense correction. Since the early 1900s, librettists Giacomo Puccini and W. S. Gilbert have been criticized for their operas about — or taking place within — East Asia. Many of these operas suffer from all of the traditional flaws Anderson accounted for in Dogs, including stereotypes, whitewashing, and putting Western languages (Italian for Puccini, English for Gilbert) in Asian characters’ mouths. Indeed, it seems every time a theater group tweaks one of these operas — Turandot, The Mikado, Madame Butterfly, to name a few — something still manages to set off the klaxons. In 2016, however, critics reviewing Lamplighters Music Theatre of San Francisco’s rendition of The Mikado agreed they had succeeded in telling the Gilbert and Sullivan tale in a way that was wholly inoffensive: The Lamplighters uprooted the show and planted it in Milan, where, presumably, opera belongs.

So too, it seems, Japanese belongs in Japan, and by commandeering it and moving it to Wes Anderson Land, Anderson is committing an act of colonialism. Thus, if a director hopes to avoid a similar review from Chang and Rose, he cannot simply add subtitles or take extra caution: The only solution is ensuring that his movie tells an American story, in an American setting, aided by American themes.

Dogs, for its part, rejects the very same restrictive notion of cultural propriety pushed by Chang and Rose, pointing instead to a common love, truth, and beauty across borders, cultures, and species. That’s one of its chief merits, and a big reason that I can only hope that other directors will follow in its footsteps.