In Case You Missed it Monday… ‘The Plague Dogs’

Martin Rosen’s adaptation of the Richard Adams novel, ‘The Plague Dogs,’ is an underrated film, a hidden diamond of animation that doesn’t get as much love as Rosen’s other film, ‘Watership Down.’  ‘The Plague Dogs’,’ though not exactly a film you want to watch to brighten your day, is unflinching and Rosen’s animation is flawless.

Released in 1982, ‘The Plague Dogs’ was released during the latter years of a particularly noteworthy movement in animated films lead by the works of Ralph Bakshi. It was ten years after ‘Fitz the Cat,’ but animated films continued to move out of the Disney/family-oriented realm and into darker and more adult territory.  ‘The Plague Dogs’ is no exception.  It’s not R-rated.  In fact, it is rated PG-13, but that doesn’t necessarily put it into the “child-friendly” category.  Far from it.  When PIXAR released ‘Up’ last month, one thing that surprised me, and a few other critics, I might add, was the inclusion of a character bleeding at one point in the film.  If that is surprising now, imagine the shock on people’s faces in 1982 when they witnessed a dog accidently causing a shotgun to blow some guy’s face off.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Based on the Adams novel, ‘The Plague Dogs’ centers on Rowf, voiced by Christopher Benjamin, and Snitter, voiced by John Hurt, two dogs who are being tested on in a small laboratory in north-western England.  Early on, and through the good fortune of human error, the dogs are able to escape.  Finding themselves in the wild, the dogs attempt to survive, seeking a master but, ultimately, fearing all humans for the actions the “white coats,” as they are called, have done to them.

As with Adams’ novel, the dogs are the main characters here, and they are given human qualities such as communication and reasoning. In fact, Rosen goes out of his way to make the human characters of the story as much of the background as possible. We rarely see a human’s face, and, when we do, it is typically in shadows or angled so that we cannot make out any identity. Through Adams’ story and Rosen’s animation, we are put in the role of an outside, helpless as we watch the humans, at first, try to recapture the dogs and, later, make an attempt at hunting them down. Through this feeling of helplessness, Rosen and Adams have crafted an extremely pessimistic view of the world and what it means to be human.

At times, the dogs question their place in the world. When they first escape from the labs, they make an attempt at herding sheep, but they are quickly run off by the real sheep dogs. “They belong where they were,” says Snitter about the sheep dogs who run them off. Snitter and Rowf don’t belong anywhere, and their attempt at finding a place in the world grows more and more futile as the story progresses.

It is Snitter who has less of a sense of place in the world than Rowf. Snitter was once a part of a family, but his actions indirectly killed his master, and he was sold to the laboratory. The scientists there performed a number of surgeries on Snitter’s brain, and he is left in a constant state of perplexity. The surgeries have melded his conscious with his subconscious, and Snitter continuously questions what is real and what is only part of his imagination.

Rosen’s way of showing this sense of mystification in Snitter is brilliant, at first showing us one of the dog’s dreams. In Snitter’s dream, the world is black and white, he and his owner are in color, and, through his dreams, we witness the accident that took his owner’s life. Later on, Snitter’s surroundings being to flash in and out of different locations, and we even begin to wonder what parts of the dog’s environment are real and what is all in his subconscious.

However, even though his mental state is questionable, Snitter is the more upbeat of the two dogs. Rowf is the pessimist, always cynical and questioning of the world and those the two dogs encounter. This comes into play when the two bring a third animal into their party, a fox named The Tod, voiced by James Bolam, who knows the ways of the wilderness.

The Tod is an untrustworthy character. There are a number of times in ‘The Plague Dogs’ where it seems as if he is only out for himself. The only reason, as far as outer appearances go, he stays with the other two is to see what else they can do for him. Like Rowf, we question The Tod’s motives, and Rosen and Adams do an incredible job of keeping those motives from us until the latter moments of the film.

‘The Plague Dogs’ is a film that should be watched, and it should be commended. Not only does it tell an incredibally engaging story, but the animation in ‘The Plague Dogs,’ hand-drawn and without the usage of rotoscoping, is simply a masterwork. These were the days before computers made animation a much smoother art form, as it is today, and Rosen’s crew have done a flawless job here. Adams’ story is heartwrenching as it is delicate, and Rosen’s adaption of the story into film is equally adroit.

Though Adams’ original novel was no sunny walk in the park, Rosen’s film is much more pessimistic. Without giving anything away, I will say the ending credits, when they pop up, literally take your breath away.

There are two, different cuts of the film, an 82-minute cut and a 103-minute cut. The film did not garner much success in the worldwide box office, and it was edited greatly for release in the states in 1984.

When it was first released on VHS (only 8000 copies were made) in 1982, it offered the full 103-minute version of the film. However, in subsequent years, many cuts were made to the film. These cuts were mostly made for the sake of the running time, but there were a few scenes cut that showed some of the more graphic depictions of violence. One in particular was of a man who has fallen from a cliff to his death and who has been eaten upon by the starving dogs. The longer version of the film was released in 2008 on Region 2 in the UK. The film is attainable on Region 1 DVD, but it is the heavily edited version.

Unfortunately, Martin Rosen has not made another, animated film since ‘The Plague Dogs.’ He directed a live-action drama in 1987 called ‘Stacking,’ but, other than that, he has not helmed a film since. We are left with ‘Watership Down’ and ‘The Plague Dogs,’ two films based on novels by Richard Adams, and two, animated films adapted for the screen with unparalleled flair. ‘The Plague Dogs’ is a film that you should set upon yourself to seek out and watch. Forgotten for the longest time, it is one of the finest pieces of hand-drawn animation from the last 30 years.

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