KINAKO: POLICE DOG DREAM (Kinako: Minarai keisatsuken no monogatari) DVD (2010)

SYNOPSIS:

Kyoko Mochizuki is an 18 year old girl who dreams of becoming a police dog trainer. Kyoko is then admitted to a police dog training school and meets a young Labrador Retriever puppy named Kinako. An instructor at the training school informs Kyoto that Kinako is too weak to become a ploce dog but Kyoko charmed by the puppy tells him she will make Kinako into a police dog.

Kyoko starts her project to make Kinako into police dog. Unfortunately for the duo, Kinako fails his test every time and Kyoko eventually becomes disappointed in Kinako. Kyoko finally separates from Kinako and leaves the training camp. Will Kinako ever turn into a police dog?

MOVIE REVIEW:

While their Hollywood counterparts like to make Man’s best friend talk in family-friendly comedies, the Japanese prefer to have them in inspirational stories with popular themes of loyalty and commitment- think “Hachiko” and “10 Promises to My Dog”. This latest from director Yoshinori Kobayashi is no different, and uses the genre formula of an underdog story to get to his audience’s sentiments.

Well to be precise, there are actually two underdog stories here. The first is that of Kinako, a Labrador retriever which few believe to have the potential to be a police dog; and the other is that of Kinako’s trainer, Kyoko Mochizuki (Kaho), a young girl following in the footsteps of her reputed father in her aspirations to be a police dog trainer. Both are under the tutelage of Seijiro Bamba (Yasufumi Terawaki) whose unorthodox techniques of teaching both canine and trainer have received the derision of his colleagues.

Is it any surprise that by the end of the movie, both Kinako and Kyoko will prove their worth in a real-life search and rescue operation calibrated for maximum poignancy? Indeed, if there is any gripe to be made about the earnest “Kinako”, it’s that it makes no apologies about hitting all the familiar beats of a film whose chief aim is to tug at the heartstrings of its viewers no matter how predictable they may be- including the obligatory ‘aw-shucks’ moments of Kinako as a puppy.

Aside from that, there’s little else you can find fault with this sincere well-meaning movie about hope, believing in oneself and the courage to persevere for one’s ambitions. Kobayashi moves the film along at a steady pace, and allows for each scene to have its intended emotional impact on his audience. A subplot involving Bamba’s star pupil Wataro (Yusuke Yamamoto) may seem a little superfluous and even distracting to the central story at the start, but it adds a more human dimension to the often stern and demanding Bamba later on.

Performances are uniformly consistent, and Kaho and Terawaki share a nice rapport with each other on screen as trainee and trainer. Formulaic though it may be, this agreeable enough film will surely strike a chord with dog lovers out there- and one suspects that there are definitely many within this demographic, given that this, as well as the proverbial talking-dog Hollywood family comedy, are unlikely to be the last of its kind.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

NIL

AUDIO/VISUAL:

Audio is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0, but there’s admittedly little a surround sound track could have offered for this movie. Visuals are clean but presented in 4:3 standard TV format.

MOVIE RATING:

DVD RATING :

Review by Gabriel Chong

Posted on 17 June 2011