Hachi: A Dog's Story (2009)

The famous true story of Hachiko, the loyal Japanese dog who awaited his master's return every day at the Shibuya train station, gets a modern makeover starring Richard Gere and Joan Allen.  Sony Pictures Entertainment booted this movie straight to a DVD release (just like the last movie re-make I reviewed, Ice Castles), so you'd expect that it would be pretty bad.  But after watching this one, I was surprised it never got a proper theatrical release.

Is there some rule that dog-centric movies must culminate in ultimate sadness?  Entertainment Weekly's review cites Marley and Me and I Am Legend  as recent examples of this man-dog bond motif.  Gere plays a music professor who stumbles upon the lost puppy, Hachi.  The movie bounces between scenes at the university, the professor's home, and the community of merchants around the commuter train station.  I'll try not to give away anything from this story based on events from the 1920s. but you can bet every effort to squeeze tears from the viewer is exhausted here.

The ophthalmology content involves scenes from Hachi's point of view, and show obvious color perception derangement.  This begs the question: Are dogs really color-blind?  My research took me to Paul Miller's (from University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Veterinary Medicine) excellent review article Vision in Dogs.  Some selected excerpts:

Color vision in domestic mammals has been the subject of numerous studies with conflicting results.  More recent, well-controlled studies suggest that most domestic mammals possess, and use, color vision... cones constitute less than 10% of the visual streak in the dog, whereas they occupy almost 100% of the human fovea.  Additionally, instead of the three types of cones found in humans with normal color vision, dogs have only two functional cone types.

The article goes on to state that dogs lack or do not use "green" cones, and confuse red and green colors.  The canine visible spectrum is divided in the violet and greenish-yellow ranges.  Additionally, dog discrimination of closely related shades of grey is thought to be superior to that of a human.

Despite its manipulative tear-jerking stunts, Hachi tells a compelling story with likable characters and strong actors.  The train station scenes and season changes are very appealing and capture a strong sense of place.  The dog point-of-view scenes accurately reflect current thinking in canine veterinary ophthalmology, depicting a desaturated and altered color spectrum, but not a total lack of color perception.  I think this movie could have enjoyed modest success at the box office, and I reward this dog DVD with a solid B .