The central characters are a group of a few scrappy dogs—Chief, Rex, Duke, Boss, King, and elegant (but still very scrappy) Nutmeg (voiced by Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, and Scarlet Johansson)—and a boy, the evil overlord's orphaned nephew Atari (voiced only in Japanese by Koyu Rankin), who flies to the island to rescue his beloved guardian dog, Spots (Liev Schreiber). There's an activist group of high school students back on the mainland, with an American exchange student, Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig), as ringleader. (My conclusion is that she had to be American so the issue of translation didn't become onerous—see below.)
The bad guys are really, really bad. The good guys have adventures and setbacks but ultimately emerge victorious. I guess that's a bit of a spoiler, but you know they do win in the end, right? The Japanese characters all speak Japanese, and there are various clever modes of interpreting into English (some of the time, not all of the time). Yoko Ono and Frances McDormand appear. Kurosawa and Miyaziki were inspirations. It's wacky Wes Anderson all round.
We thoroughly enjoyed the movie, partly for the story, which works fine, but mainly for the production: the stop-action animation of literally hundreds of puppets is simply astonishing, and the art is exquisite—all of it, exquisitely obsessive to boot. Anderson made a few "featurettes" on the creation of the movie. (Though if you'd like to start with the trailer, go here.)
First up, the animators:
Then, the puppets:
Weather and set elements:
Here are a few of the cast describing their roles in the movie:
And finally, here's an "Ode to Dogs on Set":
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