Vulture: Wes Anderson’s animated feature Isle of Dogs might be the most lyrically disjunctive movie ever made: Nothing fits together and everything harmonizes, magically. The animation is stop-motion, reportedly inspired by such TV perennials as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but filtered through Kabuki and late, formal Akira Kurosawa epics like Kagemusha and Ran. It’s a series of moving paintings, tableaux vivants, a goofy dog comedy, a grim totalitarian allegory. It’s sui generis. It’s the damnedest thing.

Slant: Then again, Isle of Dogs is surprisingly bleak for an ostensible kids' film: Kobayashi's pro-dog scientist opponent is assassinated (a poisoning rebranded by news media as suicide), and three of the leading dog ensemble are incinerated in one of the island's processing plants (spoiler: they survive). Himself a throwback to the autocratic nationalists of imperial-era Japan, Kobayashi sends drones and robot dogs to the island to retrieve Atari and terrorize his newfound posse—and their sinister eyes and gnashing teeth could be modeled after Toho's Mechagodzilla from the 1970s.

These twee phantasmagorias are finer-grained in their references than Fantastic Mr. Fox or 2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel (which stole from the still-underappreciated Soviet-bloc animators Ladislas Starevich and Karel Zeman, respectively), but the conditions of late capitalism worldwide are such that it's worth asking why Anderson had to set this fairy tale in the real-life country of Japan. Using feudal history (Kobayashi's hatred of dogs traces back to a feud between shogunates) and remixed anime tropes (the characters appear hand-drawn on TV screens and faux woodcuts), the film yields only aesthetic answers: The images may be rich, but their context is shallow.

NPR: As is often the case with Anderson's work, the movie's formalism is itself a refined pleasure, especially with its approach to language. Courtney B. Vance's stentorian voice-over is in English, and the dogs speak English, but all the Japanese human characters speak Japanese and are performed by Japanese actors. (Rankin, who was all of eight years old when he recorded his dialogue, is half-Japanese, born in Canada to a Japanese mother.) All onscreen text, including the credits and the judiciously deployed subtitles, is shown in English and Japanese, and when Anderson translates the Japanese speech, he uses a number of ingenious methods, including an onscreen interpreter voiced by Frances McDormand. Equally inventive is the way that all video feeds seen in this stop-motion world display hand-drawn animation.

LATimes: The ever-contentious subject of cultural appropriation has haunted "Isle of Dogs" since before its recent premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Anderson won a directing prize. Bluntly put, does this white American filmmaker's highly selective, idiosyncratic rendering of an East Asian society constitute a sincere act of homage, or a clueless failure of sensitivity?

For what it's worth, every one of Anderson's films is an act of imaginative plundering — a crazy-quilt of popular touchstones and personal influences, tailored to a specific milieu, designed to flatter his sophistication and the viewer's as well. Anderson's appreciation of Japanese culture is nothing if not wide-ranging: While it's no surprise to see him repurpose screen painting and pagoda architecture as superior design elements, his movie shows an admirable willingness to embrace the weird, the unnerving and the grotesque.

EW.com: The movie’s darker allegory of persecution and internment isn’t hard to miss, though, and the dogs themselves, with their tactile tufts of fur and Buster Keaton eyes, have an endearing, complicated humanity. In these cotton-wooled times, Isle may be deemed too bleak for children, and a warning wouldn’t be entirely wrong; the story, for all its snowglobe-diorama enchantment, doesn’t swerve away from the more ragged realities of poisoned hearts and mangled paws. But the bittersweet singularity of its telling speaks to every creature, big and small.

The Ringer: Isle of Dogs is visually dynamic in a way that reminds you not only who directed this movie, but also who that director’s influences are. It’s the little things, like the way Anderson stylishly foregrounds characters looking out at the horizon, that feel blatantly borrowed from, among other sources, classic American Westerns, which had in turn borrowed more than a few tricks from overseas, in the movies of Kurosawa (Yojimbo and Seven Samurai being prime examples) and others. It’s the kind of cultural crosscurrent Anderson would love: Japan by way of America by way of Japan.

Is that problematic? We already know Anderson makes movies about, and arguably for, hipsters, and that his films have been subject to the same criticisms that plague hipster culture broadly—namely, the blind borrowing of other cultures and the effete cosmopolitan posturing that comes with it. I’ve tended to feel that the minority characters in Anderson’s movies aren’t ciphers, but rather testaments to who got there first: who invented the styles Anderson’s white characters are drawing from. The three brothers of The Darjeeling Limited are a mess of borrowed styles—one has literally copped random items of his dead father’s clothes—and never seem to be of any place in particular, being displaced in every possible way. They lack a center, which, in that movie, is a source of grief and confusion. That, to me, is the white hipster’s condition: rather than dominate any authentic culture or style, they are excluded from them all. It’s a condition of having to borrow. Hipsters can only ever approximate the cultures they mimic, and what I see in Anderson’s movies, with all their fussy production value and ornate style, is the same celebration of that hipsterish ability to curate an identity that everyone criticizing him sees. But I also see characters struggling to escape the inherent dissatisfaction of having to curate an identity, and that stands out. I love Anderson’s movies, but I’ve never really envied the people in them.

Rolling Stone: It's art cinema instilled with a child's sense of wonder – which is also true of of the quirky auteur's live-action films, from Rushmore to The Grand Budapest Hotel. Following 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson returns to stop-motion and puppets, but this time with a deep bow to Japan and its iconography. Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu are sampled frequently. Cultural appropriation? Maybe, but it works like a charm.

Variety: Either way, Anderson’s Japanophilia is intricately expressed, as present in the film’s unexpected, tensely deliberate pacing — in which the director’s professed debt to Kurosawa doesn’t feel as far-fetched as it sounds. It’s more blatant in Alexandre Desplat’s wonderfully sparse, louring score, which sounds like precisely nothing else the melodically inclined Frenchman has ever composed before — setting the whole film on edge, the soundtrack blends a steady tremble of Taiko drumming with, of all things, the occasional interpolation of Prokofiev’s “Troika.” “Why not?” appears to have been the guiding principle behind much of “Isle of Dogs,” and it serves the film well more often than not.

Vox: That Anderson finds inspiration in the work of many Japanese directors isn’t all that surprising, given how he favors precision and symmetry. In this film, he’s taken it further, drawing on Japanese styles of theater, illustration, and storytelling for a tale about a pack of dogs and a little boy in search of a place to belong.

How you feel about the film’s employment of Japanese culture likely depends on how well you feel Anderson succeeds at paying homage to those films rather than just using them for his own devices. I think it sometimes succeeds — largely because the film makes the choice to have most of its Japanese characters speak in Japanese, sometimes with an interpreter (voiced by Frances McDormand), and sometimes without.

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