MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Shiro and Marilyn’ Drowned by Plot

The insipid, interminable “Shiro and Marilyn” (at the Little Tokyo Cinema 1) is one of those old-fashioned tear-jerkers with animals cast in the Mary Worth role. Usually you can recommend an animal picture for youngsters, but its almost 2-hour running time and its moments of cruelty to canines would make watching it a form of punishment for most kids.

Living on an island off Okinawa, Shiro is an adorable white mongrel so strongly attracted to Marilyn, a pretty Shelty on a nearby island, that he learns to swim the 2 miles that separate them. Their romance (consummated off-screen) eventually serves as an example for Shiro’s young master Daisuke (Masaya Kato), haunted by his conviction that he is responsible for his sister’s death by drowning a decade before.

There are also various other complications, all of them too tedious to relate. Writer Hisashi Nozawa has weighed down an essentially simple story with a ton of gratuitous exposition, and director Junichi Suzuki has done nothing to overcome the film’s draggy pace. Making matters even worse are long stretches of travelogue-type footage and a lethal elevator-music score. Suzuki would have done better to have spent more time with the uncredited dogs who play Shiro and Marilyn, who are far more appealing than any of the lackluster humans on view.

Suzuki, who lists “Gynecological Ward” and “Female Teacher Hunting” (so help me, it’s true) among his credits, is at least consistent: he starts off on the wrong foot and stays there. When we meet Daisuke, he’s trying to leave Shiro, then a tiny puppy, in an alley trash pile. He seals the dog in a cardboard box, where he awaits suffocation or being crushed to death in a garbage truck compactor. Obviously, Daisuke has a change of heart, but what kind of guy would consider letting this happen to an animal in the first place?