An old man telling a story while rice steams is all this needs to be perfect. The Two Dogs unfolds in real time, unhurried, the way folklore actually lives, not performed, but remembered. Children listen the way children do: completely present, asking nothing but to be near someone who knows how to make silence matter. You watch a story being born in the space between an elder and the young, and that transaction is the entire point. There is no spectacle because presence itself is the magic here.

Old Man Goichi of the water mill is pressed by a group of children to tell them a story, so he recounts the tale of The Two Dogs while his rice cooks. In it, a white dog and a black dog come across a piece of meat on the road and quarrel over who gets it. Even after they cut it in two, they keep arguing about which half is larger, and they turn to a clever monkey to settle the matter. Goichi uses the fable to show the children that greed leaves you worse off. The film is an animated story told within a story.