Christopher Isherwood hailed J.R.
Ackerley’s memoir of the decade and a half he spent all but married to his
Alsatian bitch, Queenie, a classic animal book. Paul and Sandra Fierlinger have
applied their Sesame Street technology – a hand drawn, paperless animation
style that produces images with the texture and subtly of watercolor painting –
to give filmgoers a kind of interactive Ackerley where the drawings are
cleverly supplemented by the author’s text to flesh out the story of an openly
gay bachelor, resigned to never finding his human “perfect friend,” who learns
to his amusement and chagrin how to satisfy a very demanding canine companion.
The Fierlinger’s palette –
seamlessly shifting from muted to robust color depending on its lead
characters’ mood and location – is amplified by stellar voice work: Christopher
Plummer provides a wry, witty view of a literary man’s struggle with dog poop,
the hilarious saga of looking for Queenie’s perfect mate and the existential
question: is this all there is.
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For those new to Ackerley, this
celebrated if minor British writer embodies the tribulations and paradoxes of
queer men in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Born out of wedlock to a
father who was later discovered to have kept a second family, aware of his
sissy disposition but uncomfortable with the messy specificities of sex, served
honorably in the Great War but forever haunted by the death of his brother, got
uncomfortably close to a gay Indian prince, was wildly promiscuous but seldom
content and finally at the end of his life found a measure of literary fame and
enough money to kill himself on an “oceanic” diet of gin.
For those leaving My Dog Tulip with
the feeling that Ackerley found a compensatory doggy nirvana, this passage from
his only novel, We Think the World of You, should give some
pause.
“I have lost all my old
friends, they fear her and look at me with pity or contempt. We live entirely
alone. Unless with her I can never go away. I can scarcely call my own soul my
own. Not that I am complaining, oh no, yet sometimes as we sit and my mind
wanders back to the past, to my youthful ambitions and the freedom and
independence I used to enjoy, I wonder what in the world has happened to me and
how it all came about…But that leads me into deep waters, too deep for
fathoming, it leads me into the darkness of my own mind.”