Year: 1983
Director: Martin Rosen
Country: US
Language: English
Animation that exists solely to make adults feel bad about themselves is quite rare, so when the opportunity comes to watch it one must pounce on it as the characters in The Plague Dogs pounce on poor defenseless sheep. Anybody who has seen his earlier adaptation, Watership Down (1978), knows that Martin Rosen's animation style is as bleak as it comes.
In this, two dogs escape from a laboratory and are hunted as possible carriers of the bubonic plague.
The film opens with a Labrador named Rowf (Christopher Benjamin) being drowned in a controlled experiment by the white coats. Yep, it's that nihilistic. Though anthropomorphised, the animals don't behave in a human-like way, as they would in a Disney feature. Rather the dogs behave like dogs and have very instinctual dog-like motivations. Their main goal throughout the run-time is to simply survive.
In interviews Rosen has claimed that the film wasn't made to send a "message" or to give any looming moral lesson, but jeeze, if you didn't think animal experimentation was bad before this picture you will now. The Plague Dogs offers none of the comforts we are accustomed to in our animation; even the book's original ending has been altered to be far more bleak.
While Watership Down (1978) is the better picture, Rosen's second directorial effort proves to pack quite a punch to the gut. Its attraction, being the fact that its downbeat, unfortunately means that it is often overlooked and will never fit in with the mainstream. I am very grateful to have seen this wonderful work of art.
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