A yellow lab is determined by his master to be special and sent to live with a family who trains guide dogs. Separated again while still a puppy, he then enrolls in a school where he struggles to keep pace but shows great instinct for the art of blind assistance. His first human charge is a cantankerous writer (Kaoru Kobayashi in an enjoyable, hammy performance) who is scared to give up his cane but quickly forms a bond with the extraordinary pooch. In keeping with my misanthropic duties, I feel obligated to say that films about pets are too easy to do. That being said, "Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog" is a sweet, funny, and disarming family film. Made in Japan in 2004, it's shocking that it took eight years to find distribution, and if the great American fear of subtitles played a factor (which I suspect it did), those buying into that idiocy are missing out on a movie they would surely cherish.
Very good film, and it avoids the kind of cutesy whitewashing you often see in pet films. And yeah, I think you're right about the subtitles being an obstacle to distribution. It's movies like these that make me wish you could still get away with dubbing movies. Granted, I personally prefer subtitles, but there was a time when a foreign film with potential mainstream appeal could be dubbed and do fairly well. Now people will just make fun of how it doesn't match up, so movies like this are pretty much damned no matter what.
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