On Wednesday night at New York City’s Metrograph theater, while Wes Anderson acolytes geeked out over the presence of the auteur himself, Anderson was geeking out over Akira Kurosawa—the legendary Japanese director, best known for films like Seven Samurai and Drunken Angel. Anderson, who co-programed the Lower East Side revival house’s new six-film Kurosawa retrospective, was in attendance to pay homage to the 1949 post-war crime drama Stray Dog, which he echoes in his return to stop-motion animation, Isle of Dogs, which screened to joyfully raucous laughter later that night.

Like Kurosawa before him, Anderson knows a thing or two about the value of trusted collaborators. The Houston-born director has assembled a motley crew of talent, including Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, and Jeff Goldblum, that will follow Anderson’s idiosyncratic storytelling wherever it leads.

That tight-knit quality is especially rare in the world of animated filmmaking, where actors typically record their roles separately. “One joke that’s made all the time by the actors is, ‘I can’t wait to meet my co-stars.’ And what I felt [Tuesday] night [at the premiere] was the total opposite of that,” said longtime Anderson collaborator Jason Schwartzman Wednesday afternoon. “All the actors have worked together and known each other, and even the ones who had worked together for the first time, they were [recorded] together. I think that’s to Wes’s credit: he makes it an experience . . . watching all these people who’ve worked together in different capacities and orientations, it’s actually quite moving, because you just don’t see it very often.”

For Isle of Dogs, Anderson called on old friends (Schwartzman and Roman Coppola) and new (Kunichi Nomura) to co-write the screenplay—a strategy, he pointed out, more common in Japanese filmmaking than in American. During the Q&A, Anderson recalled someone telling him that Kurosawa used a similar technique involving several collaborators working alongside him, who was known as the “control tower,” or primary writer. The collaborators would sketch out a scene; the “control tower” would read the newspaper or something until they were ready for his feedback (or, as Anderson put it with a knowing smirk, his “grumbles”).

Anderson’s resulting film—as gorgeously wrought as it is genuinely funny—is set in a futuristic, imagined Japanese metropolis where a severe flu has overtaken the country’s canine population, leading the tyrannical Mayor Kobayashi (Nomura) to decree that all dogs, be they purebreds or mutts, be exiled to Trash Island. When Spots (Liev Schreiber), the beloved protector of Kobayashi’s 12-year-old ward, Atari (Koyu Rankin), is taken to the island, the human boy embarks on an epic search across the strange landscape to find his pet, with the help of four formerly domesticated dogs—Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), and Duke (Jeff Goldblum)—and one rough-around-the-edges stray, Chief (Bryan Cranston), who turns out to be a very good boy.