Juui Dolittle eps 1-5

 
I was planning to give Juui Dolittle a miss. The name enough to give me images of talking animals, childish jokes and the over-photoshopped poster didn't inspire any confidence. To my surprise, Tottori (Oguri Shun) does not develop abilities to talk to animals. Dolittle is merely a nickname given to him by his uni friend Hanabishi (Narimiya Hiroki) because he was so good in his studies. If I'm not mistaken, this is the first reunion between these two stand up alumni.

MILF alert in ep 1.

So if Dolittle is not about a vet talking to animals, what is it about? Basically Tottori is the Asada Ryutaro of vets, able to perform the most difficult surgeries that no vet would want to do. He charges a premium for his services and is always direct in his dealings with other people. Hanabishi a charisma vet who regularly appears on television who is excellent at diagnosing animals but is unable to perform surgeries because of a past failure.

Joining them is Asuka, (Inoue Mao) who came to Tottori to help heal her horse but has to pay for it with her body by slavishly helping him out in his vet clinic. Hhmm, sounds like the perfect concept for a JAV. Asuka's job is basically to say to Tottori 'why are you so mean/money-faced' at least 3 times per episode and of course play the nice girl act that she does so well.

I do have to agree that sexy is not a word to describe Inoue Mao.

The bad thing about Dolittle is the stories can be very contrived and try way to hard to pull at the viewers' heartstrings. Your enjoyment of the series will depend on your willingness to be so openly manipulated by a jdorama. For cynical bastards like me who prefer subtle manipulation like in Hachiko Monogatari, some of the storylines and dialogue just had me rolling my eyes. I sort of expected the show to be aimed at kids but I didn't expect the writing to be done by them.

For example, the dolphin episode with the trainer who keeps shouting 'boku wa muri desu' in order to do a story with the message about not giving up. The level of maturity of the writing is such that its like the writer is trying to hit the message of the episode onto the viewers' heads over and over again with a giant hammer. However, I do appreciate the difficulty of writing a series about animals and usually they have two animal cases per episode.

Kuninaka Ryoko makes ep 4 worth watching.

Probably the main thing I enjoyed about Juyu Dolittle was the acting of the three main actors. The interplay between the characters is fun to watch, especially between Tottori constantly abusing Asuka and Hanabishi and Tottori's friendship. Oguri Shun was too young to be cast in Tokyo Dogs but he doesn't look that out of place here. There is the main story of this evil chain of vet hospitals and someone who keeps on harming animals in the park. Perhaps is due to my low expectations but Juui Dolittle is turning out to be a surprising watchable dorama.