Still Life with Animated Dogs

In STILL LIFE WITH ANIMATED DOGS we meet Roosevelt, Ike, Johnson and Spinnaker, the canine companions who helped shape Fierlinger's evolution as an artist and as a man. Vivid animation illustrates the adventures of the endearing dogs who shared their owner's 40-year journey from despair to wonder. Living in Stalinist Prague, Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, a young artist named Paul Fierlinger was angry, depressed and rebellious against the political regime where the Communist government had been in power since the end of World War II. Roosevelt Fierlinger drew attention to himself by being overtly different in a place where sameness was the law of the proletariat. Living in his unlocked attic apartment was illegal. He grew a beard, which was unusual and therefore suspicious on a young man. The "strange paintings" he created were disdained because art was supposed to be realistic. And he owned a dog at a time when only peasants had dogs for barking at strangers. To make things a little harder, he named his Scottish Terrier Roosevelt. While Fierlinger was loudly belligerent, Roosevelt learned how to stay out of the spotlight. He taught Fierlinger a valuable lesson in civil disobedience: "When it comes to authority, get sneaky and do everything under the table. It never failed [Roosevelt] 'till the day he died." Fierlinger eventually sought freedom using this important lesson as a tool. Ike Johnson After Roosevelt passed away, Fierlinger heard of an "uncontrollable" dog in need of a new home. A woman gave him a feisty and beautiful dog with boundless energy, who Fierlinger promptly called Ike. In order to take Ike everywhere, Fierlinger created a badge that falsely certified himself as a seeing-eye dog trainer. "Having to take care of a dog made me hold on to the last trace of decency and self-worth left in me," he said. Though commercial dog food was nonexistent and meat was scarce, some of the finest restaurants in the city served Ike choice leftover meats because of his special badge. The man and dog never separated for one minute in six years, until Fierlinger escaped from Communism's choking grip. By forging documents to trick the Ministry of Internal Affairs into granting him an exit visa, Fierlinger finally found an opportunity to leave the country in the late 1960s. Not surprisingly, the artist soon found another loyal companion after he settled in the United States. Johnson, a charismatic and quirky Boston Terrier and his first dog as a "free man, " introduced Fierlinger to a part of himself he never knew existed. Once, when a client he was meeting for the first time approached Fierlinger's car at the train station, he commanded Johnny off the front seat, growling, "Get in the back!" The client, who resembled Hitler's stronger brother, meekly whispered, "Oh, oh, all right...sure," opened the car's rear door and slithered in next to Johnny. "I now knew that I possessed commanding powers over people," Fierlinger mused. Spinnaker At the film's completion, Paul Fierlinger is an award-winning animator living in the Philadelphia suburbs, where he owns a much-loved terrier named Spinnaker, who came to live with him after it was picked up by a woman on her way to a Dog Rescue Society picnic. "Spinnaker registers every nuance of my behavior, especially when it has to do with his own desires or fears," says the artist. Through his daily walks and on sailing trips, Fierlinger muses about the unspoken bonds between animals and humans and about the divine powers of nature. Dogs have always animated Fierlinger's life, reminding him to love in even the bleakest of times. At once a portrait of the artist, an historical perspective, and a meditation on the wonders of nature and intimate connections between species, STILL LIFE WITH ANIMATED DOGS is a playful and moving ode to man's best friend.

My Dog Tulip

A Dog Film That's Actually About a Dog

New Yorker Films

The British author J.R. Ackerley, voiced by Christopher Plummer in the movie My Dog Tulip, was well into his 50s when he acquired Tulip, and in this ebullient animal the distant Englishman encountered the ideal friend for whom he had been searching all his life.

New Yorker Films

A Tender Love Story Between Man and Dog

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: August 31, 2010

Those words, spoken in devotional tones by the film’s British narrator, distill with an elegant succinctness the bond between human and pet when the human is a lonely gay man who has all but given up on finding the longtime companion that the narrator calls his “ideal friend.”

That narrator, voiced by Christopher Plummer, is J. R. Ackerley (1896-1967), the British man of letters whose 1956 memoir, “My Dog Tulip,” chronicles his 15-year-relationship with Queenie, a German shepherd renamed Tulip for the book.

When Ackerley was “quite over 50,” and Tulip was 18 months old, he acquired her from a family that had kept her imprisoned indoors. The slender volume is a classic of animal literature for the refinement of its prose, its dry wit, and its close, unblinking attention to the subtleties of human-animal interaction.

Consider this observation, by the discreetly misanthropic Ackerley as he marvels at his new pet’s exuberance: “It seemed to me both touching and strange that she should find the world so wonderful.”

The film’s hand-drawn animation by the directors Paul and Sandra Fierlinger (they are married) and Mr. Plummer’s understated conversational voice combine to make “My Dog Tulip,” which opens on Wednesday at Film Forum in the South Village, one of the most sophisticated dog movies ever created.

The animation, consisting of 58,320 drawings, involves four graphic concepts: finished-looking color drawings that portray Mr. Ackerley’s day-to-day life; simpler drawings in the elongated style of a New Yorker cartoon that evoke Mr. Ackerley’s fantasies; black-and-white line illustrations of his distant memories; and fanciful yellow-pad scribblings.

The movie only fleetingly succumbs to anthropomorphism in line drawings that show a half-human Tulip in a dress, holding court. John Avarese’s agreeable light-jazz score, which occasionally dips into a classical mode, lends the film a jaunty buoyancy.

Besides Ackerley, “My Dog Tulip” (whose title character is mercifully never given a human voice) is peopled with eccentrics, each given an astutely chosen actor and a sharply drawn personality by the animators. Lynn Redgrave, who died in May and to whom the movie is dedicated, plays Ackerley’s sister Nancy, who moves in to be Tulip’s daytime caretaker while Ackerley is working and competes with her brother for Tulip’s affection.

A veterinarian of astonishing empathy with animals is voiced by Isabella Rossellini. Examining Tulip for worms, she gently explains to Ackerley: “Tulip is a good girl. You are the trouble. She is in love with you.”

Brian Murray plays the dual roles of Ackerley’s indolent World War I army buddy, Captain Pugh, whom he visits at his country farm with an unruly Tulip in hand, and Mr. Blandish, a dog owner whose proud German shepherd, Max, is rebuffed by Tulip.

With its meticulously detailed observations of Tulip’s excretory rituals and anatomical changes when in heat, “My Dog Tulip” might almost be called a dirty movie. It unblinkingly observes the messes Tulip makes and shows her being mounted while in heat.

One of the most embarrassing messes takes place in front of the store of a green grocer whose wife (Redgrave) is so irate that she refuses to thank Ackerley even after he cleans it up. Another is made in an off-limits area of Ackerley’s home after Tulip finally produces a litter and senses that Ackerley intends to kill the pups. Their father ends up not being a male with a pedigree but Dusty, the “disreputable dirty ragamuffin” from next door.

In a final printed statement scrolled across the screen, Ackerley contemplates a dog’s frustration at trying to understand the human mind. As his imagination soars, he wonders if thousands of years ago, humans came under the protection of dogs, which tried to tame them and failed.

Directed and animated by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger; written by Mr. Fierlinger, based on the book by J. R. Ackerley; music by John Avarese; produced by Norman Twain, Howard Kaminsky and Frank Pellegrino; released by New Yorker Films. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. This film is not rated.