Directed by Paul Fierlinger and Sandra Fierlinger. Voices of Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave, Isabella Rossellini Club, QFT, Belfast, 83 min
IF YOU'RE ON the hunt for an unjustly forgotten cinematic gem, then keep an eye out for We Think the World of You. This fine 1988 film, starring Alan Bates and Gary Oldman, tackled a JR Ackerley story about a lonely man's slightly unhealthy obsession with an Alsatian dog.
If you fail to find that film, then you should get along nicely with this adaptation of, erm, a JR Ackerley story about a lonely man's slightly unhealthy obsession with an Alsatian dog. Amazingly, My Dog Tulipis adapted from a different Ackerley piece (a memoir, as it happens).
The author was master of a very English class of grey miserbalism, and this gorgeous animated film, though often funny, stays true to that urban melancholy. My Dog Tulipfollows the protagonist, then in his 50s, as he acquires the dog and, somewhat to his own surprise, ends up forging a painfully close relationship.
Ackerley, editor of The Listener, the BBC's weekly journal, was openly gay in an era when homosexuality was rarely discussed in polite society. Here one gets a hint that his warm relationship with the dog stands in for the formal human relationship he was never allowed to have. "She offered me what I had never found in my life with humans," he says. "Constant, single-hearted, incorruptible, uncritical devotion, which it is in the nature of dogs to offer."
Featuring hand-drawn animation by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, My Dog Tulipis not quite as detailed or as lavish as Sylvain Chomet's recent masterpiece The Illusionist. But it has something very much its own: a hazy, wind-blown look that offers beautifully evocative flavours of London in the dozy 1950s.
And how perfect the voice-work is. After enjoying just a few seconds of Christopher Plummer’s mournful vowels, the viewer will find it impossible to imagine anybody else taking on the job.
A real discovery. Let’s hope it gets wider distribution later in the year.
