Plague Dogs is Bitchin’!
Jan 9th, 2008 by milo
Like many of my generation, Martin Rosen’s Watership Down (1978) remains an indelible part of my formative years, second only to birth and pubescence in terms of its impact on my psyche.
It’s difficult to pin down exactly what elevates a cartoon about rabbits to one of the best children’s films even made, and what must be - along with Animal Farm (1954) - the pinnacle of British feature animation.
Probably it’s the result of painstaking animation, painterly backdrops, intelligent storytelling, and a top-tier voice cast including John Hurt, Richard Briars, Ralph Richardson, Michael Hordern and Zero Mostel(!).
But let’s not forget Rosen’s direction, which uses animation as a means to tell the story, not as an end in itself. The careful composition of each scene, and the way the camera moves effortlessly from the grass-height world of the rabbits to the endless rolling hills of the English countryside is truly masterful.
Like the best Pixar films, Watership Down reinforces my belief that animation is one of the purest expressions of cinematic language.
Well, Rosen went on to make one more feature animation, the criminally underlooked Plague Dogs (1982), also based on a book by Richard Adams.
If you thought Watership Down was a bit hard going, you ain’t seen nothing yet - incredibly, Plague Dogs ups the ante with a tale so bleak and disheartening it could have caused a generation of kids to slit their wrists with sharpened Crayola.
This time, the story is about of a pair of adorable dogs who escape from an animal testing facility, only to find that the outside world is just as brutal and uncaring. Snitter, a terrier, has survived invasive brain surgery and suffers constant hallucinations; Rowf, a labrador, was subjected to a series of drowning experiments and is terrified by the sight of water.
Together they hunt sheep on the bare hills of the Lake District, but when rumours spread that the pair have been infected with the bubonic plague, the army is called in to exterminate them.
As you might expect, the animation and the backdrops are exquisite, the voice cast (featuring John Hurt, Nigel Hawthorne and Patrick Stewart) is top notch.
Thankfully, the new DVD release from Optimum contains the longer, ‘uncensored’ version of the film (distributors chopped 20 minutes off Rosen’s original cut). This is the first time the longer version has been available in the UK (albeit in unrestored form), and by golly, you can see why it was cut.
Fans of animation, animal lovers, and budding Animal Liberation Front suicide bombers would be well advised to check it out - we’re only in January, and Plague Dogs is already one of my top DVDs of the year.