The MPAA has made some silly rating decisions over the years, giving R ratings to movies with a couple bad words, yet letting movies with an absurd level of violence skate by with a PG-13. Now they’ve made one of their most questionable moves in recent memory, giving the new Wes Anderson stop-motion animated movie, ISLE OF DOGS, a near-adult rating of PG-13.
The movie was given the rating from the MPAA (via Collider) for “thematic elements and violent images," but chances are it got the added "13" for the second part. The story takes place in a future, dystopian Japan where dogs have been quarantined on trash island to stop the outbreak of a “canine flu.” Several dogs on the island then help a young boy who ventures there find his lost dog as Japanese authorities hunt him down. We can only hope the “violent images” doesn’t refer to lots of dead dogs.
The last Anderson stop-motion movie – THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX – walked away with a PG rating. Upon watching the trailer for the movie (below) there’s much about DOGS that is similar to FOX, so it's curious why the rating board felt the need to give it a more serious rating. However, I can’t say the movie looks made specifically for kids, even though a PG-13 rating won’t stop parents from taking their kids to it anyway.
Another surprising rating to come out was for RED SPARROW, the Jennifer Lawrence spy thriller. The movie received a hard-R rating for several elements including “strong violence, torture, sexual content, language, and some graphic nudity.” That ticks off a lot of boxes and hints at a pretty brutal, sexual movie. Some people were criticizing the movie in the past for coming off too much like a Black Widow origin movie, but director Francis Lawrence assured this movie is much darker than a comic book movie. Well, this rating certainly proves that.
I was most taken aback by the DOGS rating, but frankly, both ratings sort of surprise me. Even though Anderson's audience skews to adults I can't see why parents wouldn't take their kids to this movie, much like they did FOX. Maybe when we see it we'll discover that the movie is much more serious than it's let on, but still, stop-motion doggies ring PG to me. As for RED SPARROW, I always assumed it would be R, but this is a pretty hard R. There's torture, sex, violence and basically everything else, which means Lawrence and the team didn't hold back at all when making it. Now I want to see it even more, and it's not because of the sex. It's for, you know, the serious filmmaking and stuff…
ISLE OF DOGS hits theaters March 23, while RED SPARROW swoops in March 2.