Retro Review by Seth Troyer
Watching Martin Rosen's 1982 film The Plague Dogs feels like stumbling upon something found in a dusty studio vault. The old janitor decided to take you down there. All the executives have left the building to do cocaine or whatever it is they like to do. It's just the two of you here now, and your companion leads you through isles of forgotten films, eventually stooping down to pick up a water damaged canister. He blows away dust, and gives you a toothy grin. “Ya wanna see something weird?”
It is a film that has the dubious reputation of being one of the rare PG-13 animated features. It was not the only boundary pushing animated film of its time, but even in the world of alternative animation, it seems forever doomed to be the true black sheep of the family.
The countercultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s seeped into just about every pop medium. Even cartoons became mutated in the new atmosphere of change. Irreverent, acid eating cartoonist like R. Crumb and his contemporaries during this time often injected familiar talking animal trope comics with juxtapositions of sex, dugs, and violence.
Ralph Bakshi’s X-rated adaptation of Crumb's Fritz The Cat helped push the controversial trend into the public eye. Similarly gritty animated films like Street Fight and Heavy Traffic followed, as well as surreal European films like Fantastic Planet. While all of these were fascinating and even masterful in some cases, it was obvious from the start that these “adult cartoons'' would probably never escape the X-rated theaters and basement film clubs, to find a more mainstream audience.
As the 70s gave way to the early 80s, Bakshi's attempts at finding a middle ground between animated shock film and the kid friendly cartoons that dominated the industry, came about in the form of his adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, and the rock and roll odyssey American Pop, but neither truly succeeded in finding much of a foothold for new kinds of animated film.
Bakshi and others attempted many different combinations to legitimize adult animation, but in hindsight, Martin Rosen’s 1982 film, The Plague Dogs sticks out from the rest. The film may indeed offer talking animals, but it refuses to pander to younger audiences. It displays gritty realism, yet its scenes of bloody violence never seem thrown in for simple horror thrills. It is an undeniably emotional experience that will shock adult viewers and children alike.
The film is an adaptation of British author Richard Adams’s tale of two dogs escaping the tortures and imprisonment of an animal testing sight. The duo escape certain death and set out across the highlands in a brutal race for survival, eventually returning to their ancient roots as untamed predators.
Their horrific experiences at the testing lab, which are shown to the audience in painful detail, have left both dogs damaged, and much of the film is about them attempting to find hope and healing in the aftermath of these events. The larger dog, Rowf, begrudgingly follows the lead of Stitter, a very determined and driven terrier. Rowf acts as a wonderful foil for Stitter’s mystical optimism, often combating him with a world-weary nihilism. Stitter, who is voiced to perfection by John Hurt, has a crown of bandages on his head. His brain appears to have been experimented on during his time at the lab, and as a result, he suffers strange visions. Are these dream-like flashes simply hallucinations, or are they prophetic visions that will lead them to safety? As with many things in the film, this question is left for the viewer to consider.
Rosen is clearly not afraid to ask a lot of his audience. He lingers in ambiguities and grey areas within a scenario that already forces you to be in constant, painful dialogue with depictions of innocence being threatened by indifference and cruelty. It is hardly difficult to see how a world raised on Bambi was ill prepared for this onslaught.
The themes of tainted innocence are brought into sharper focus as the film reaches its conclusion, where we begin to realize that even our heroes’ noble quest to escape the animal testing facility has its consequences. Through a succession of brilliantly integrated voice over discussions between scientists, reporters and government officials, we slowly learn that Stitter and Rowf, may be the result of a chemical weapon experiment and may in fact be releasing bubonic plague upon the world.
The final climactic scene poetically links itself to the film's painful opening. It essentially gives the audience an ambiguous scenario that asks whether you are a Stitter, who believes that there is hope even in dark places, or if you are more of a Rowf, who doubts that there is a light at the end of this dark tunnel.
Animals are often used in films because they instantly appeal to viewers. A slasher audience may laugh at the sight of human characters getting butchered, but they will cry out at the faintest notion that an animal character may be in danger. In Rosen's film, anthropomorphic animals are not used to delight children or to shock adults, but instead are there to direct a viewer's eye to humanity's many sins against nature. The film does this with compassion, and miraculously, without an ounce of preachiness, allowing everything to first and foremost be in service of the characters and their journey. These dogs are not silent Old Yellers looking cute in the background, waiting for their big tear jerker death scene; Stitter and Rowf are given the dignity of having distinct personas that have a truly primal animal quality to them despite the fact that they were crafted by human storytelling.
The film was not Rosen's first adaptation of Richard Adams' work. In 1978, he adapted Adams’ most acclaimed novel, Watership Down. This film is also a masterpiece in its own right and continues to be similarly divisive with audiences, but by comparison it does not reach the unique heights of The Plague Dogs. While Watership Down approaches its talking animals with a serious tone that often depicts brutal altercations between anthropomorphic rabbits, the film never reaches the maturity of the film that would follow. It displays more of an epic fantasy tone, with a large cast of cute characters, an obvious villain and a happy (yet very untraditional) ending. The Plague Dogs clearly took it all to another level, and in the end seemed to be the nail in the coffin for animated films of this kind. It was divisive and ultimately condemned for its uncomfortable material.
There would be no revolution for serious, adult oriented animation in America and England like there had been across Europe and Asia, with the increasingly multi faceted popularity of Anime. By the end of the film's poorly attended theatrical run, Investors had lost thousands, and Martin Rosen would go on to never direct another animated feature again.
We all enjoy modern classics like Toy Story, but I don't think it's hyperbolic to claim that mainstream animation appears to be stunted. There have been a handful of wonderful exceptions in the west, but over all, animation studios seem forever distracted by the big money that can be made when animation boosts its colors and fixes its aim on a young audience.
Naturally, expecting something as intense as The Plague Dogs might be a lot to expect from the industry at large, but it's hard not to get excited about the possibilities. It seems like it could hardly be deemed a risk, for a financially stable company like Disney to make something a little more off the beaten path with the funds they would ordinarily funnel into making one of the three unneeded remakes they throw at us each year. Surely such a hub of talent, if encouraged, could create something refreshingly new. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much hope of this happening anytime soon, and this rather unfairly leaves the work of pushing the medium forward, on the shoulders of struggling artists and indie filmmakers.
Rather than being a doubting Rowf about the matter, I personally would rather be more of an optimistic Stitter, clinging to the hope that things will change and a brave adventurous era for theatrical western animation may be out there on the misty horizon. Until that time comes, though, we have Martin Rosen's final masterpiece, a powerful film that may indeed be the last of an extinct species.