Dog & Scissors: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Dog & Scissors: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Pretty good dog.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 28, 2014

There’s a great old tune by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields that comes from their musical version of Two for the Seesaw which is called “It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish.” Those may be words to live by for such television stalwarts as James L. Brooks, Allan Burns and Chris Hayward, three creatives who had a hand in all sorts of iconic television series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Barney Miller, and Get Smart. If any of them ever got too high-falutin’ for their own good, however, a simple but weighty pointing out of one of their relatively early efforts might have been enough to curb any burgeoning hubris. My Mother the Car, anyone? In a decade rife with odd “high” concepts (that adjective might indeed be referring to the mental states of any given show’s creator), My Mother the Car certainly stands out as among the oddest, with a hapless Jerry Van Dyke portraying a guy who discovers his restored vintage Porter automobile houses the spirit of his dear, departed Mom. Even a viewing populace inundated with a number of peculiar properties in the mid-sixties couldn’t quite cotton to this premise, and the show expired after one inglorious season. Could a largely Christian nation’s views of reincarnation have had something to do with it? Well, that’s probably highly doubtful (the show was not exactly a model of Noel Coward level sophistication), but it’s at least worth considering when one moves on to the relatively recent anime Dog & Scissors, a sweet if ultimately featherweight offering that is built around a somewhat similar premise of a soul returning to life in a different form. Perhaps the Asian sensibilities that at least consider the possibility of reincarnation make this premise a bit more palatable for a native Japanese viewing audience, but Dog & Scissors may well appeal even to resolute Westerners who believe that once you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, you’re either dead, gone and buried or perhaps able to spiritually move on to either Heaven or Hell. Dog & Scissors is notable for its often frenetic slapstick humor, and if it, somewhat like My Mother the Car, doesn’t exactly push the boundaries of intellectually driven comedy, it’s still often gently amusing in its own way.

A brief prologue before the series’ first episode opening credits joins the story in media res, with a little dog curiously perched in front a book while a woman scribbles something at a desk. The woman turns to the dog, ostensibly her pet, and informs the poor canine that it’s time for her to kill the beast. A chase ensues, and the hapless dog screams about having once been human. In the post-credits sequence, we then meet avid reader Kazuhito Harumi, a kid so addicted to books that he begged his parents to let him stay in the big city when they moved to a backwater, for the sole reason that he would still be able to easily find the books he wanted to read. Kazuhito is therefore on his own, but seems to be doing fine, aided by his deep love of a writer who works under the pseudonym Shinobu Akiyama. No one knows much about Shinobu, starting with the writer’s actual gender, but he or she has churned out an amazingly diverse set of books in a wide array of genres, and all of them have intrigued Kazuhito. In fact Kazuhito makes a glib statement that he hopes he doesn’t die before Shinobu’s latest tome, entitled Lust, is released.

Unfortunately fate conspires against Kazuhito very soon after he makes that statement. A holdup at a restaurant goes terribly wrong, and when Kazuhito tries to deflect attention away from a woman scribbling something in a booth who is so intent on her activities she doesn’t respond to the increasingly frantic thief. The bad guy turns his gun on Kazuhito, and the next thing the poor boy knows, he’s traveling through some bizarre astral plane where he’s visited by images from his past. When Shinobu’s book suddenly appears, he touches it, only to “awaken” in what looks like a cage, with a young man calling him “pup.” Kazuhito is understandably confused by this turn of events, but quickly realizes he’s been reincarnated as a little dog (several sources identify the breed as a dachsund, but a quick glance at the screenshots accompanying this review show that it’s not what most would consider a so-called “weiner dog”).

Kazuhito is less freaked out by his new form than he is by the fact that he can’t get near a book, let alone read one. He starts getting increasingly frantic, at which point a young woman appears at the pet store where Kazuhito has ended up, demanding to know if Kazuhito is the source of the unending noise she’s been hearing in her brain. The woman turns out of course to be the young lady from the restaurant hold up, and perhaps just as predictably, she also turns out to be the person behind the pen name of Shinobu Akiyama. Her real name is Kirihime Natsuno, and it’s evident from her first appearance in the shop that she’s a take no prisoners sort of person. She simply informs the pet shop owner that Kazuhito is now hers, and takes the little dog home, which is where Dog & Scissors proper finally begins. The fact that she can "hear" Kazuhito's thoughts telepathically makes "conversations" between them a given in one of the series' most patent artifices.

Perhaps unexpectedly for an anime which starts out rather manically comic, Dog and Scissors gets into some crime solving in some episodes. There’s a brief arc given to the very killer of Kazuhito, which has a rather bizarre yet somehow touching denouement, and later Kazuhito and Kirihime investigate other crimes. Playing out against these low level mysteries is Kirihime’s penchant for erupting in tsundere furor at Kazuhito, often for little reason. She tends to tie up the poor dog and threaten him with a pair of scissors, hence at least one meaning for the show’s title.

Dog and Scissors is a rather odd hybrid, or perhaps more appropriately “mutt”, of a show. It combines a number of weird elements while focusing on the slowly growing relationship between an enigmatic author and her new “pet.” The series tends to delve into at least relatively serious subtexts at times (how could it not, considering the fact that one of the two main characters has died and come back in a new form?) but its essential ambience is kind of schtick laden comedy. It’s definitely an acquired taste, but the show ends up being surprisingly charming quite a bit of the time. Like many an errant pet, it tends to demand attention a bit too often, supplanting noise for actual content, but Dog and Scissors may end up appealing even to cat fanciers.

Dog & Scissors: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Dog and Scissors is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This offering from the Gonzo production house boasts a very strong palette and some appealing if minimal CGI blended with traditional cel animation. Character designs are not especially innovative but serve the series well, with chibi-esque forms breaking out occasionally (even for the dog), adding a bit of visual impact now and again. Line detail is sharp and stable, and the series generally looks very sharp and pleasingly clear.

Dog & Scissors: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Dog and Scissors features lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 tracks in both the original Japanese as well as an English dub. The voice work is manifestly different in these tracks and fans will probably want to check both of these out. I actually preferred Blake Shepard's kind of slightly out of control take on Kazuhito to Takahiro Sakurai's somewhat more measured approach, but of course individual tastes may vary. One way or the other, both tracks sport good fidelity and rather wide dynamic range, given the proclivity of this series to erupt into manic frenzies every few seconds.

Dog & Scissors: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Clean Opening Animations (1080p; 1:32 and 1:32)


• Clean Closing Animations (1080p; 1:32 and 1:32)

Dog & Scissors: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Take a reincarnated bookworm, stick him in a dog's body, add in a kind of slightly sociopathic author, sprinkle in just a dusting of fan service, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what's in store for you in Dog and Scissors. As odd as the general premise is, there's actually decent humor and enjoyable characters in this anime. This may not be "best in show" (so to speak) but it's no junkyard dog, either. Recommended.