As adapted from the 1956 memoir of the same title by Briton J.R. Ackerley, the independently produced animated feature My Dog Tulip emerged from the joint efforts of an American couple, Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. The U.S. origin of the film itself may surprise audiences, given the apparent effortlessness with which it captures a quintessentially English comedic paradigm. Recalling similar tonal contrasts in Monty Python and other U.K. programs, it generates laughs from the chasm between anemic narration by Christopher Plummer (portraying Ackerley) and a story that invokes gleefully off-color details of canine urination, defecation, and breeding.
As the title suggests, Tulip recounts Ackerley's experiences raising, attempting to train, and eventually mating the titular "Alsatian bitch," in an English village, during some unspecified timeframe. References to Ackerley's well-publicized homosexuality are as muted as they were in the original text; sans any male or female human companions, he's portrayed as a soft-spoken loner with a quiet desperation for a loving friend -- who finds that fulfillment in the 15-year presence of his beloved but temperamental purebred.
Without question, Tulip's primary strengths are aesthetic. The Fierlingers employ a style that is offbeat ad extremis, made up of two alternating onscreen worlds. The most common (done with a full color palette) uses backgrounds with an apparent combination of pen and ink and watercolor paint fills, which provide impressionist tableaux of English hamlet life. The Fierlingers drop deliberately shaky animated figures into these landscapes, and the coupling of the unusually tall, lanky characters and the controlled crudeness of the animation itself suggests some sort of cross between Yellow Submarine and Comedy Central's Dr. Katz. The effect is as arresting and beautiful as it is eccentric. The movie also interpolates cutaways to monochromatic landscapes, where more imaginative versions of the characters (including hilariously anthropomorphized versions of a skirted Tulip and her doggie friends) play out surrealistic riffs on the details established in Plummer's voice-overs. At times, the two visual spheres intersect, as when the monochromatic drawings function as effective indicators of Ackerley's own mental flashbacks.
However, the humor in the picture feels uneven. There are occasions early on when the raunchiness is a bit shocking but doesn't really deliver the hilarity that it should (as in a sequence where Ackerley mumbles a gross jingle about Tulip's rear and an English choir echoes his words on the soundtrack). The Fierlingers seem to merely be straining for outrageousness, to little effect. At other times, though, the movie lands on target. A bit about a pooch complacently receiving a veterinary exam not only generates huge laughs, but feels impeccably blocked given the razor-sharp timing with which the Fierlingers visually obscure the gag and then reveal it at the last moment, a second or two after the raunchy meaning of Ackerley's observations dawns on us. The picture's most inspired bit, however, is also its least crude; it involves a subplot with a nutty ex-marine who spends hours a day attempting to order bewildered cows around in military formation.
It may be inevitable, given the theme of the central story, that the Fierlingers would weave in sentimental undercurrents tied to the bond between Ackerley and Tulip. But it's surprising and commendable to witness the subtlety with which the filmmakers bring this friendship across. True to the character's nature, the script seldom has Ackerley declaring his love for Tulip forthright; instead, as we witness him undergoing one tribulation after another for the sake of the animal (capped off with a series of initially problematic attempts to get her pregnant via several male dogs), that persistence communicates a deeper level of respect and devotion than could ever be conveyed verbally, and we walk away immeasurably touched by the film.