An anonymous poster on 2Channel — Japan's popular message-board site — once listed the elements that make for a successful Japanese melodrama as 1. Children 2. Animals 3. Poverty 4. Sickness, and 5. Death.
The poster may have been a cynic but I thought the list was spot on, especially after seeing Joji Matsuoka's "Snow Prince," a weeper that shamelessly pushes all of the above buttons and more, but left me surprisingly dry eyed. I say "surprisingly" because "Snow Prince" was scripted by Kundo Koyama, whose credits include the Oscar-winning "Okuribito" ("Departures," 2008).
"Okuribito" was brilliantly constructed, with an unusual premise (an out-of-work cellist finds his bliss preparing corpses for funerals) and a climax that left millions (including this reviewer) in tears. "Snow Prince," on the other hand, is an uninspired mashup of familiar genre elements. It's as though Koyama copied and pasted such foreign children's classics as "The Little Match Girl," "The Dog of Flanders" and "Oliver Twist," together with such hankie-wringing domestic fare as "Ie Nakiko" ("Sans Famille," 1995) into a plot generator and printed out the result.