| A beautiful black Labrador retriever struggles helplessly to keep afloat in a tank of water, as a pair of white-coated scientists look on and take notes. Finally, the dog’s strength runs out and he sadly sinks to the bottom. The scientists make note of the time ("Six and a half minutes longer than Wednesday’s test… and about 12 minutes longer than the one before that"), and fish the poor animal out with a hook. After a brief session with a defibrillator and a stomach pump, the dog is returned to its numbered kennel deep inside the research facility, to await the next test.
This is the opening scene to the animated feature The Plague Dogs (1982), and the grim tone established in these opening moments is sustained throughout the entire story. It’s a remarkable film based on the novel by Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, itself made into a successful movie in 1978 by the same animation team. Sadly, The Plague Dogs never approached the fame of its predecessor and remains quite obscure to this day.
It hardly played in any theatres at all, and only a measly 8,000 videotapes were made and distributed in the U.K. Years later, it got a belated North American home video release – in an edited version shortened by more than 12 minutes – without any significant advertising. It seems wrong that such a high quality motion picture should be distributed so carelessly, but I suppose the film’s overwhelming air of tragic desperation might have something to do with it. This movie makes Watership Down look like Tiny Toon Adventures.
Rowf (Christopher Benjamin), the Sisyphus-like victim of the water tank, escapes from his kennel, accompanied by Snitter (John Hurt), a fox terrier on whom the scientists have been performing experimental brain surgery. The two find themselves in the unfamiliar landscape of England’s Lake District, and begin killing sheep for food, angering the local farmers. A wily fox who calls himself "The Tod" (James Bolam) befriends them, teaching the pair how to stay alive in the wild while avoiding man’s guns. Eventually, the sheep are put away for the winter, leaving the dogs starving and desperate. To make matters worse, word gets out to the media that part of the facility the dogs escaped from is being used to research the bubonic plague. The plague research was going on in a completely separate section and the dogs are uninfected, but the rumours are sufficient to justify a determined hunt for the animals by the military. Soon, the dogs are running from sharpshooters, jeeps and helicopters.
It’s unusual for a film to actually be darker in tone than the book it’s based on, but producer-director-screenwriter Martin Rosen wisely drops Adams’s original sudden and unconvincing "happy" ending for something much more realistic and heartbreaking. Re-watching the movie now, I’m surprised that when I first saw The Plague Dogs as a youth, I was naive enough to consider the ending ambiguous. Mind you, part of that perceived ambiguity is the fault of the edited-down 85-minute version, which is the only one currently available. The excised footage apparently includes moments of comic relief, character development, Rowf’s increasingly violent temper, the true fate of that clumsy sharpshooter after the starving dogs find his body at the bottom of the cliff, and, of course, the final shot. Viewers interested in seeing the complete version will have to track down the rare and out-of-print PAL videotape in Great Britain, for no other unedited version was ever made on either tape or DVD.
The short version can currently be found as a $3.99 no-frills disc in the bargain bins at Music World, but I suggest that it’s high time somebody put out the uncut version of this moody classic. After all, audiences are no longer as narrow-minded about the tone of animated films as they were back in 1982.
The animation of this film is magnificent and every frame of it is hand-drawn. It’s a shame that after The Plague Dogs, Rosen never attempted such an ambitious animation project again. Fortunately the film provided valuable experience for the team of animators, including a young Brad Bird, who went on to write and direct The Incredibles (2004). |
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