My Dog Tulip – review

Beware of the dog: this ain't no Marley and Me. Nor, in spite of the cartoon pooches, is it a top ticket for canine-mad kids. Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's version of the JR Ackerley memoir about the redemptive powers of a rescue Alsatian called Queenie (renamed for the film) is a good fit for those who like their New Yorker funnies, and like them good and sour. Christopher Plummer does a nice job voicing our misanthropic yet smitten narrator, and there's irrefutable beauty to the understated animation (hand-drawn plates, in a variety of sketchiness). But such a graphic and unrelenting interest in the contents of Tulip's tum, and in Ackerley's attempts to pimp her out ("The application of a little Vaseline to the bitch...") smacks first of obfuscation, then of extreme anxiety.