Dana introduces herself to The Movie Sleuth with a review of the animated film, The Plague Dogs.
 |
| "Yo. You're my dog, dog." |
Fans of animation often make a grave mistake in dividing the
traditions of Eastern and Western animation down what TVTropes.com calls the
“animation age ghetto” – most people are happy to consider anime as mature,
serious cinematic offering while relegating Western European and American
animated features as children’s or family fodder. This view, however, throws a
lot of truly beautiful artistry into a category to which it doesn’t belong –
and, beyond “cult cinema”, I would argue that Western Animation as a whole,
especially feature animation throughout the 1970s and 1980s, ought to be
revisited in the American cultural collective. Often grittier, with heavy
subject matter and animated by hand, such films form a baseline from which many
people in my generation grew up – enchanting and traumatizing us by turns, yet
somehow remaining in the dusty attic of said animation age ghetto, VHS boxes in
our memories which deserve to be brought back into focus.
The studied brutality of Martin Rosen’s 1982 animated
adaptation of The Plague Dogs is,
much like his earlier feature, Watership
Down (1978), an unflinchingly honest look at the effect man has on his
fellow animals. Both films were based upon novels by British author Richard
Adams, and while there are parallels between the visual storytelling in the
almost watercolor-like strokes and stark, shadowed worlds created by their
animators, this latter film is undoubtedly far more austere, and carries a
heavier message for its human audience than did the social metaphors of its
predecessor. Rosen has been careful to point out that it is not really meant to
be an “anti-vivisection film”; still, industrial group Skinny Puppy may have
given impetus to many familiar with “Testure” in sampling both pieces of dialog
from the film and its end-credits theme, Alan Price’s “Time and Tide”, to
believe this message was deliberate.
But this is not a film about animal testing. Lushly
animated, The Plague Dogs follows the
survival instinct of a pair of research animals as they escape the questionable
ethics of a laboratory in which both have been subjected to grotesque
experimentation and into the wilds of the Lake District in England. As the two
dogs attempt to find a place in which they can thrive, they are forced deeper
into the roles of their canine ancestors as the public have been told to shoot
on sight, believing the pair to be carrying a strain of bubonic plague. Each
human being they meet as they attempt to drive themselves further away from the
research facility force them closer and closer to viciousness – not because
they are inherently ferocious animals, but because they must unearth their own
canine intuitions to stay alive.
The greatest strength of the film, as in the novel upon
which it is based, are its characters – focusing on the animals, rather than
the humans, Adams and Rosen tell an uncompromisingly bleak tale of two
creatures simply trying to survive in a world hell-bent upon their
obliteration. Realist Rowf (voiced by Christopher Benjamin), whose point of
view the film seems keener to follow, understands the danger he is in and
doesn’t see much reason to continue trying to survive – particularly after he
realizes that he and his friend are, essentially, wanted fugitives. Snitter
(voiced by John Hurt), who had once been a beloved house pet and still believes
in the inherent goodness of mankind, staunchly believes they can find a Master
and have a chance at a good life – despite the madness encroaching upon him from
the experimental brain surgery he suffered in the laboratory. As both dogs face
the possibility of starvation, they are grudgingly befriended by a fox, known
only as “the tod” (voiced by James Bolam, in broad Geordie dialect) who shows
them how to find food like wild dogs and helps them to escape their pursuers.
 |
| "Didn't yo momma ever teach you how to swim?!" |
The film’s ending differs strongly from that of the
book, so the reaction of the viewer by the adventure’s end may depend upon
whether or not they have read and enjoyed the novel – many things are left
uncertain as the credits roll, and if one approaches Rosen’s animated versions
of Adams’s fiction with an eye for symbolism, they may find that they actually
appreciate this ambiguity. As with Watership
Down, the handprint of Man is acutely present, even as the most sympathetic
of human characters are barely identified as individuals. Whether intentionally
“anti-vivisection” or not, Rosen’s adaptation of The Plague Dogs will, if nothing else, remind us that such
cruelties had only just begun to surface in the public eye at the time of its
original release, serving as a powerful example to the effects of a blind eye.
The Plague Dogs is
not as well known as Watership Down –
it did not receive its own television serial and it tends not to be a film
festival or midnight movie favorite. Its
themes are dark, and it does not contain the mystical, “fairytale”-like quality
of its predecessor. But where it lacks in hope and optimism, it bares the ugly
truths of the cruel, feral side of Nature with distinction and with stark
beauty, a reminder to those who pay attention that to live sometimes means to
kill – and a harsh truth is a truth nonetheless.
-Dana Culling
Like this review? Please share.
