Director: Carlos PImentel, Nathan Sifuentes
Distributor: TriCoast Worldwide
Duration: 90 minutes
K9 World Cup (Selección Canina) (VOD) – Movie Review
While an animated film about football would probably already have made many kids enthusiastic, a film about dogs playing football probably speaks even more to their imagination. K9 World Cup (see what they did there?) promises a story full of dogs, football and a valuable lesson. We could hardly have asked for more, could we?
Years ago, in the Canine Cup final, Barnardo Lapata (Fernando Luján) was captain of the Mexicanine team. They did well but eventually lost the match, because of two of the players arguing at the crucial moment. Instead of playing as a team, they let personal glory overpower their moves, which resulted in them losing the final. Even though it’s years ago now, it’s still something that is on Lapata’s mind. This year, he is chosen to be the coach of the Mexicanine national team, and he is determined for his team not to make the same mistake. First things first though: he has to find his players.
Lapata recruits players everywhere he can find them, boys playing football on the beach, in the city, students at university, both players that are unknown, as well as players that already have a bit of a reputation. While Lapata is recruiting his players, Midas (Gaspar Henaine), a little, yet very talkative and cunning dog, offers his services at, what he finds, a very reasonable price. Even though it takes a while to find all his players, Lapata doesn’t accept Midas’ offer, and once the team is complete, he certainly doesn’t need Midas anymore, despite the latter’s efforts to convince the coach that there is a lot of money to be made.
Only four weeks before the first match of the Canine Cup, Lapatta has a lot of work to do. His players are a bunch of dogs on the loose, rather than the team he wants them to be. Two dogs immediately stand out: Polo (Plutarco Haza) and Juancho (Raúl Araiza). Polo comes from a good home and studies at the university, while Juancho helps out his dad in his shop when he’s not playing football or getting into trouble. The two are rivals from the start, trying to get all the attention they can get. Clearly, the work of coach Lapata has only just begun.
The storyline of this film is certainly not a bad one. The message it’s trying to give, namely that playing as a team will get you to victory, rather than trying to find glory only for yourself, is certainly a meaningful one, yet it also makes the story a bit predictable. Adding to this is the fact that there is hardly any side story worth mentioning, even though the developers tried by adding Midas’ character in, and thus the story is quite straightforward, which makes that it doesn’t keep being interesting. Luckily, there are quite a few matches that are shown throughout the film, with a live reporter who livens everything up immediately.
Graphically, the animations look a bit rough around the edges, and the characters don’t move as smoothly as we are used to seeing these days in animated movies. Nonetheless, the characters do look quite nice, and we didn’t really find the lack of state-of-the-art graphics to stand in the way of the story. One thing that did bother us a bit were the very obviously shown sponsors, but again it’s nothing that did damage to the story.
Even though we didn’t understand a word of what they were saying, as all voice acting is in Spanish, the actors still sounded quite convincing for the characters they portrayed. Funny jokes livened the whole film up, making for a bright story.
Conclusion
K9 World Cup is a film that might be quite enjoyable to watch for your kids, but suffers from a few flaws nonetheless. The story is a bit too straightforward, and the animations are a bit rough around the edges, thus not really making this film stand out. Overall we still found it a fun film to watch though, as it tries to teach us a valuable lesson, all while having dogs that play football in the lead.
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