The Plague Dogs Review

Even when placed amongst other animated films of the time The Plague Dogs is an odd beast. While other films aimed for an obvious niche – generally the college aged, chemically enhanced set – it’s hard to see what sort of target Rosen could possibly have had in mind with this film’s blend of traditional style animation, dark plot, and frequent shocking imagery. The animation style could be a slightly more primitive take on All Dogs Go To Heaven, but on a story level you really wish these ones would, just to put them out of their misery. Show this film to a child if you want to recruit a young but fervent new member of PETA.

Snitter and Rowf are the titular dogs, kept captive in a medical laboratory where they are unwilling test subjects. Rowf is used for endurance testing, Snitter has had some sort of brain surgery. The lab is a grim place indeed - monkeys wired up with electrodes, rabbits caged with only their heads free to move, corpses of dead animals shoveled down the incinerator chute – and when the opportunity presents itself the two dogs are quick to make a break for freedom. Cue the happy ending? Err, no …

Rowf and Snitter quickly realize that the world they’ve entered is not the world they expected. They find themselves in the remote British highlands where the people are few and none seem willing to become the kindly master they desire. And so the two dogs are forced to live wild, roaming the hills and preying on sheep. Ill adapted as they are to life in the wild they would surely have met a quick end if not for the help of a cunning fox who sees the two larger animals as possible allies who can supply him with larger game than he could ever hope to bring down himself. But even their uneasy alliance can’t hold off the angry shepherds forever, and when the media realizes that the wild dogs preying on the local livestock may very well have escaped from a lab where work on bubonic plague is also being conducted then it is only a matter of time before the animals are rounded up and destroyed.

Now when I say that Rosen’s work is somewhat difficult and with no clear audience that does in no way mean that it isn’t worthwhile. This is an exceptional piece of work on many levels. With subject matter like this it would be very easy to lose the characters in the politics but this is something Rosen entirely avoids. Snitter, Rowf and The Tod – that being the fox ally – are all fully realized creatures. Though the animation is at a somewhat lower level than you’d expect to see in a feature film today it is still very good and does a remarkably good job at catching very realistic mannerisms for all of the animals while also matching them to the dialogue. Rosen has managed to keep his dogs purely and recognizably dogs while also bringing human characteristics to the mix, a difficult task and one that deserves recognition. A protest film that refuses to be locked into a particular issue The Plague Dogs is, at heart, a film about desperate and confused individuals forced into extreme circumstances and gradually worn down by the politics of world infinitely larger than them and entirely alien. It’s a film that goes beyond the specific politics of animal testing – which, obviously, it is very critical of – and finds a more universal concern.

The recent all region Australian DVD is, to the best of my knowledge, the best option to see the film. The disc is almost entirely bare of features - containing only a trailer and talent bios – and the transfer is obviously taken from an old print with some fading and significant damage in places but – and it’s a big but – it does contain an version of the film extended some seventeen minutes beyond the original 82 minute cut. While a restoration is both needed and merited the simple financial reality is that the film doesn’t likely have the sort of commercial appeal to make that viable and so this is very likely the best – and quite possibly the only – release the extended cut will ever receive.