Rent Sherlock Hound (1985)

Wondrous bizarrerie - Sherlock Hound review by NW

A film which can name Hayao Miyazaki as director has a guarantee for qualities of liveliness, sensitivity and imaginative inventiveness nonetheless, I was alarmed to find that Sherlock Hound was dubbed into English with no subtitles or Japanese spoken script ... films such as “Spirited Away” or “Totoro” can be ruined if you have to see them dubbed into rebarbatively false sounding US dialect! It was an amazing relief to find that the English was fairly truly ... if slightly exaggerated ... early twentieth century English speech and I relaxed. Similarly, the street scenery and crowds pretty sensitively represent the sense of late nineteenth century London (with solecisms of course) and, above all the mad technical spirit of inventiveness of the age. One could watch undistracted by undue gritting of the teeth! At the same time, perhaps the first two or three of these five tales are a bit below Miyazaki’s usual delicacy of treatment? – a bit too noisy and mere caricature? Perhaps Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who is dutifully acknowledged before each one, really was spinning gently in his grave down there? If so, I. at least, progressively tuned in to the spirit of the piece, with its cast of dogs with funny coloured faces. The last two tales, with the characters fully developed and accepted, had the true touch of imaginative genius and were hilarious.