USA,
1984, 83 min
Shown in 1984
CREDITS
- dir
-
Martin Rosen
- prod
-
Martin Rosen
- scr
-
Martin Rosen
- editor
-
Richard Harkness
- cast
-
John Hurt, Christopher Benjamin, James Bolam
- prod co
-
Nepenthe Productions, Inc., 305 San Anselmo Ave #309, San Anselmo, CA 94960
-
COMMENTS
Animation directed by Tony Guy and Colin White.
OTHER
Two dogs escape from a government research establishment in England's Lake District, one of them already the victim of experimental brain surgery. They are hunted across a landscape of mountain and stream, in storms and rain, befriended by only a cunning fox. They are pursued by ever-more anxious and punitive authorities and by a grisly trail of mischance. They have a dream of finding a kind master somewhere, an island where they may be safe from pursuit and their own dread. And so, at the end, they are driven towards the coast by a line of troops, half-delirious, half-imagining that they can see their peaceful refuge. It's clearly not in the tradition of wholesome animated entertainment for all the family. Taken from a Richard Adams novel and directed by Bay Area filmmaker Martin Rosen (who made the earlier Watership Down), Plague Dogs is animation as if discovered by Fritz Lang. It is a somber, fateful film, with awful intimations of vindicated paranoia in the faceless authorities plotting on the soundtrack. As heartbreaking as Lassie pursued by the Nazis, but as sinister as 1984, Plague Dogs is a brilliantly sustained narrative, a movie that seems too challenging for popular distribution, but an experience that will move any audience.
—David Thomson
FACTOID #202
At the 1978 SFIFF, Paul Mazursky received a tribute at the Palace of Fine Arts. Apparently, the facility’s janitorial staff had not been notified, and the padlocked doors of the Palace had to be cut so the filmmaker and his audience could be let in.
