Review: MY DOG TULIP - A Great Animation & It's Not From Pixar!
rating: 4
Last year gave us three animated features of the very highest quality. From Pixar came the brilliant, Oscar winning Toy Story 3, we also had Fernando Trueba's jazz inflected Chico and Rita and finally Sylvain's Chomet's L'Illusionniste adapted from an unmade script by the legendary Jacques Tati. Both stunningly beautiful and melancholic, The Illusionist was an animation for grown ups; an almost entirely silent love story between two outsiders; a French magician whose art is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the modern world and Alice, a young Gaelic girl. My Dog Tulip shares something thematically with Chomet's film. Based on a novel described by Truman Capote as One of the greatest books ever written by anybody in the world it too is a tale of love between misfits a misanthropic writer, J.R Ackerley (voiced by Christopher Plummer), and an abandoned Alsatian named Tulip. Just like the magician and Alice, Ackerley's and Tulip's relationship cannot be expressed through speech. Yet whereas what made The Illusionist so heartbreaking was the protagonists' inability to communicate, the relationship between Ackerley and Tulip manages to transcend mere words. In fact My Dog Tulip is as whimsical as The Illusionist is bleak and is far more likely to make you laugh than to cry.
Now it is worth mentioning the level of dedication which went into this project. According to the press notes My Dog Tulip is the first animated feature ever to be entirely hand drawn and painted made up of about sixty thousand individual drawings; an extraordinary achievement by any measure and it these visuals which really set it apart. It is almost like watching someone pulling a beautifully drawn flick book for eighty minutes or a painting physically coming alive in front of your eyes. While Pixar have been showing us how glossy animation can look, Paul and Sandra Fierlinger have taken their film in completely the opposite direction. There is a tactile, rough beauty to My Dog Tulip which is something unique. As Ackerley is constantly writing his book both inside and outside his imagination these drawings manage to move seamlessly from his present reality to black and white memories to fantastical, and often humorous, scribblings on his yellow pad and everything inbetween. It is a remarkably tough job to make the act of writing cinematically interesting previously one has the choice between the arresting surrealism of Terry Gilliam and David Cronenberg or for animated sequences like those in the recent Howl. While all three films capture something of the spirit of their subject matter, this film brings something which none of these films has, that is subtlety. Multiple layers of imagination and reality merge fluidly and manage to feel truthful in portraying the internal workings of a writer who is always writing whether at his typewriter or just in his mind. 
While the script could never be quiet as extraordinary as the visuals it is nonetheless witty and eredite, just as interested in language as in image. Perhaps it owes something to Umberto D in showing a believable relationship between man and dog. While Hollywood usually shy away from the more undesirable elements of pet ownership My Dog Tulip relishes every misplaced turd and the scenes of Tulip in season seem unusually honest and strangely beguiling. Christopher Plummer's performance as J.R Ackerley is wry and reserved. While not having much to do, the talents of the late Lynn Redgrave and the always excellent Isabella Rossellini, lend an easy air of experience to their voice parts. I doubt that My Dog Tulip will have huge commercial success but I cannot imagine that it will not be one of the better feel-good films this year. These days some of the most interesting work is being done in animation, yet there seems to be a belief that somehow it is an inferior genre epitomised by the huge oversight of Toy Story 3 at the recent Oscars. My Dog Tulip did not capture my heart quite as The Illusionist did but it is yet another example of just how entertaining and visually exciting great animation can be. My Dog Tulip is on limited U.K. release from today.