Having been bitten too many times as a child, I don’t love dogs, but I’m not deaf to the pun in the title of Wes Anderson’s new animated film, Isle of Dogs. The play on words (I love dogs, get it?) captures the director’s compound of irony and earnestness, the way he takes puerile things seriously, in a mode of rigorous deadpan. The premise of Isle of Dogs is antically apocalyptic. A city’s entire population of canines—pets and strays both—is the target of a genocidal campaign. The authorities plan first to infect them with man-made illnesses; then to isolate them on an island that previously served as a trash heap, industrial waste site, and clandestine laboratory for nefarious state experiments; and finally to eradicate them, replacing real dogs with a breed of lethal government-issue robot dogs. Isle of Dogs is a children’s movie, but then Anderson’s compass has always pointed to age twelve.

The film’s hero, Atari Kobayashi, is a twelve-year-old boy who loves nothing more than his dog and risks his life to save him. Twelve-year-olds are just discovering the world’s hidden meanings: They’re the perfect audience for puns. For an adult, there’s something like dramatic irony inherent in watching a hero of this age: The idealized twelve-year-old boy sees the world in terms of good and evil. His idealism is uncomplicated. He’s capable of romantic love but hasn’t experienced the messiness of actual sex. His is a masculinity that’s yet to become toxic. His earnestness is adorable and a bit silly. It’s harmless to laugh at him, as harmless as laughing at a pun.

The setting of Atari’s quest is Japan, the fictional city of Megasaki, 20 years in the future. The governing clan has decided to avenge an ancient humiliation under the cover of protecting the city’s humans from the manufactured menace of canine flu. Anderson’s dogs are mangy and emaciated, with bulging, bloodshot eyes, and voiced by Bryan Cranston, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, and Bob Balaban. (If you close your eyes, it might seem the massacre isn’t being carried out against dogs but against a group of middle-aged American celebrities.) Atari is an orphan, distant nephew and now ward to Mayor Kobayashi, mastermind of the anti-dog plot. Atari has hijacked a plane and crashed on the island in search of his dog, Spots (Liev Schreiber), and the dogs agree to help him, despite the misgivings of their leader, Chief (Cranston), who unlike the others is a stray and feels no loyalty toward humankind. Of course, the boy wins him over: He gives him half a biscuit and a bath.

Atari, of course, shares a name with the console that taught Generation X how to play video games, and as he and his canine comrades make their way east across Trash Island, the frames scroll from left to right as if in a game from the 1980s. Frogger and Space Invaders are as much a point of reference in Isle of Dogs as The Seven Samurai or Star Blazers, the anime series that made its way to American UHF in the late 1970s; for the most part, the future in Isle of Dogs is less digital than the present, with the exception of the government’s drones and drone hounds. Every Anderson film, no matter how exotically conceived, is a love letter to his own analog childhood, and every Anderson film is also a subtle revolt against the digital age.

Anderson was born in 1969 and grew up in Houston, the child of parents who divorced when he was eight years old. Like Etheline Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), his mother worked on archaeological digs. Like Max Fischer in Rushmore (1998), Anderson was educated in both private and public schools. His early aspiration was to be a writer, but as he told Matt Zoller Seitz in his book of interviews with and essays on the director, The Wes Anderson Collection, he was drawn to film when he started reading books by and about filmmakers as a student at the University of Texas, where he met his frequent collaborator Owen Wilson in a playwriting class. After a success with a short version of Bottle Rocket at the Sundance Film Festival soon afterward, Anderson scored a deal to remake the film as a feature for Columbia under the mentorship of the producer James L. Brooks, the pioneering 1970s sitcom auteur who created The Mary Tyler Moore Show.