Featuring the voices of Bryan Cranston and Koyu Rankin. In English and Japanese, with English subtitles. Rated PG

Barely out of the kennel, Wes Anderson’s latest cornucopia of antique design, cutting-edge technology, and pop-culture weirdness is getting a lot of heat for stereotypical treatment of its Japan-based story. A whiff of ivy-league privilege hovers around all his work, but let’s be honest: Wes Anderson is not someone we can look to for insightfully realistic portrayals of human behaviour, or of any specific culture that behaviour might spring from.

The famously fastidious filmmaker used India as a prop in The Darjeeling Limited, and was just as artificial inventing a whole Central European country for The Grand Budapest Hotel. Some of his more convincingly anthropological stuff was actually in Fantastic Mr. Fox, the Roald Dahl adaptation that most resembles Isle of Dogs, given both films’ use of stop-motion animation, computer-enhanced effects, twee typography, lacquer-box graphics, and animal protagonists.

Set in the fictional city of Megasaki, “twenty years into the future”, the new movie finds man’s best friend now reduced to refugee status, with cats ascendant as all dogs have been sent to Trash Island. This was part of a power grab by the evil Mayor Kobayashi, voiced by Kunichi Nomura, who shares a writing credit with Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and the director. There are some subtitles, but most of the Japanese language here is self-explanatory or is rendered in English by an on-screen translator voiced by Frances McDormand.

The plot nominally centres on Kobayashi’s boy ward, Atari (Vancouver’s young Koyu Rankin), whose own pet, Spots (Liev Schreiber), was the first dog deported. Atari brings his best game when he lands on Trash Island, but still can’t find Spots. The mutts there only speak English and some sound suspiciously like Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Edward Norton, and Jeff Goldblum, with Bryan Cranston getting the most soundtrack time as Chief, a street-smart stray. Courtney B. Vance narrates.

Scarlett Johansson shows up briefly as a former show dog, perhaps underlining a more pressing issue regarding Anderson’s social representation. The film’s only recurring female lead is a foreign-exchange student (Greta Gerwig) who somehow leads otherwise passive Japanese in a revolutionary March For Our Dogs. (Yoko Ono has a quick bit as a scientist named Yoko Ono.)

Some plot elements are similar to the recent mixed-media Birdboy: The Forgotten Children, also centering on animals lost in a toxic rubbish heap. But that Spanish cartoon had a doom-laden mood at odds with Anderson’s essentially playful outlook. The exquisitely crafted Dogs may be futuristic, but its mix of Godzilla movies, Kabuki theatre, hard-boiled detective dialogue, Rube Goldberg contraptions, and Hokusai block prints is more nostalgic than dystopian. And, of course, nostalgia is always a lie.