You can't get less industrial than that. The movie does actually explore the tension between social pressures and willful seclusion, as expressed in painful and hilarious eloquence by its source, Brit author, editor and proto-snob J.R. Ackerley, in his 1956 memoir of the same name. Ackerley's strangely romantic, acerbic book details his 16-year relationship with an "Alsatian bitch" named Tulip (Ackerley's pet was named Queenie, and it's an indication of his peculiar perspective toward the dog and toward the world at large that he renamed her in print, as if to preserve her privacy), and the Fierlinger's film attends carefully to Ackerley's prose, ironic-haughty tone, and the undulating textures of his ruminations, recollections and barbed observations. Their style is ostentatiously sketchy and unstable, looking very much like a cartoonist's impromptu drawing pad, often (during Ackerley's daydreamy descriptions, usually) devolving further into wild and free-hand doodlings. But the filmmakers capture both human fussiness and canine reflexes beautifully, and that strange and lovely aspect of animation - the thing that allows us to accept "reality" as something apparently drawn, and to revel in it empathically - happens in a way that eludes most big-budget, movie-star-voiced kids' epics.
The voice in this case is Christopher Plummer, narrating a bit too plummily at first it seems, but quickly Ackerley's regal, Britishly witty language takes control, and the tale itself is as beguiling as a yarn spun by an old East London uncle in a tweed chair. Simply, Ackerley, a single gay man and loner, decides in middle age to adopt a dog as what he hopes to be his "ideal companion" - and thus begins what Ackerley defines as, simply, the most important and passionate relationship of his entire life. Ackerley himself is no small oddball - a judgmental, busybody shut-in who works for the BBC, unable or unwilling to deal with people generally, and prone to view his human interactions as though they were lurid scenes in Grand Guignol melodramas. The ordinary travails of dog-owning strike Ackerley as fantastical in their intensity and unrelentingly foul - for a line-drawn film My Dog Tulip is exceptionally disgusting, with special attention given to the beast's fecal decisions, swollen anal glands, and even an episode of spontaneous vomiting in a cemetery.
Ackerley's sardonic voice makes outrageous fun of our tendency to anthropomorphize our pets, and in doing so - describing Tulip in very ladylike terms even as she squirms in heat and destroys furniture - comes out the other end, evoking a genuine awed respect for the animal and the role she played in her life. Episodes come and go, although Ackerley's decision to finally mate Tulip - to give her the "full life" he along cannot manage - becomes a huge and pivotal debacle, testing one potential sire (and owner) after another, and suffering the hordes of neighborhood dogs during Tulip's estrus, envisioned by Ackerley as paparazzi waiting in crowds by his front door, and as sailors emptying out of bars once Tulip's sexual scent hits the open air.
For an animated film about a dog, My Dog Tulip positively pulses with sexual preoccupation. (Truman Capote once described Ackerley's book as "one of the greatest books ever written by anybody.") There's the specter of death, too, and separation, and grief - in other words, Ackerley and the Fierlingers both contrive to pack all of the ingredients of an epic soap-operatic saga into a slim, off-hand story about a simple dog and her bewitched owner. But the upshot is not pretentious - the narrative voice is so refulgent, so blithely ironic, and so funny that the grand questions the story makes feel modest and earned. We don't completely buy into Ackerley's cosmic ardor for Tulip, but he doesn't ask us to - he simply asks that we appreciate his humiliating helplessness, as the owner of an impetuous creature to which he is virtually betrothed.
The DVD comes with a welter of ancillary viewing, including a home visit with the Fierlingers (who say they never go out), a look at their next film, downloadable materials, and variety of dog-lover bits and scraps from other media.
To order My Dog Tulip, go to TCM Shopping.
by Michael Atkinson
