Wes Anderson’s Isle Of Dogs Gets Poster AND Release Date

Wes Anderson‘s next project sure looks … different. The last feature film we saw from the technicolor director was 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, and before that, it was Moonrise Kingdom in 2012. Isle of Dogs is next up on his docket.

The film is described as a stop motion film set in Japan will follow a young boy’s odyssey in search of his missing dog, and marks Wes Anderson’s first full feature return to this film genre since 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on the Roald Dahl book.

The general early consensus (at least from sites like IndieWire) is Isle of Dogs was inspired by the style of visionary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. The poster certainly lends itself to that theory:

Isle of Dogs was also inspired by the various Christmas specials Anderson freely admits he was ‘obsessed with’ as a child:

“I really liked these TV Christmas specials in America,” he explained. “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.”

Previous Anderson collaborators Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum and Tilda Swinton are on board to lend their voices to characters. New additions to the stable include Scarlett Johansson, Greta Gerwig, Yoko Ono, Bryan Cranston and Liev Schreiber.

Fox Searchlight has announced Isle of Dogs will be releasing on April 20th, 2018.

Oh, and here’s another poster.