Many Japanese films for kids are entries in venerable anime series belonging to multiplatform franchises. To their target audience they are pre-sold and, in their formulas, pre-seen. And that audience is by and large domestic. One big exception is "Stand By Me Doraemon," a 3-D CG anime starring a blue robot cat and his boy companion. After the film's 2014 success in Japan, it made an astounding $87 million in China, a territory considered all-but-closed to Japanese films.
Will "Rudolph the Black Cat," another 3-D anime for kids distributed by Toho, also hit the box office gong here and overseas? The short answer is, unfortunately, "no." Based on a children's book series by Hiroshi Saito that has sold more than 1 million copies since it started in 1987, this film about a stray kitten taken under the wing of the neighborhood boss cat is thoroughly domestic and local. There is cat-chat about hiragana, Kitakoiwa in Tokyo's Edogawa Ward, and the stops on the Tomei Expressway. Kids in Shanghai probably won't relate.
Which is too bad, since this film, co-directed by veteran animators Kunihiko Yuyama (the "Pokemon" series) and Motonori Sakakibara ("Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within"), has that rarity in animated films of any sort, other than ones made for the classroom: a clear educational purpose, entertainingly realized. And like the better animated films for kids, from "Bambi" onward, it deals in life truths as well as fun fantasies. It may make you tear up, whatever your age.