Writer and director Wes Anderson hosted a competition for someone to be a member of the voice cast for this film. The only requirement was that they donated ten dollars or more to the Film Foundation, a non-profit founded by Martin Scorsese, which specializes in the preservation and restoration of film around the world.
The hair of the dogs is made out of alpaca wool.
The title "Isle of Dogs" is a play on words. Said quickly and fluidly it sounds like "I love dogs." However, the play on words only works in English and loses that meaning in the Japanese pronunciation of the kanji, "Inu ga shima."
The movie was influenced by the work of Akira Kurosawa and Rankin-Bass stop-motion Christmas specials.
In the exact opposite of this film's backstory of the cat loving evil Kobayashi dynasty, historically there was actually a Japanese Shogun known for his love of dogs. Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (1646 - 1709) was known for instituting animal protection laws, particularly for dogs. This earned him the nickname of "the dog shogun".