Hope Allgoode I am an artsy, worldly person, but I was creeped out by the ever present toilet humor and the smut, even though it was animated. This movie started out appealing because it was animated, had pleasant music and was set in England. It seemed charming, creative, and well-spoken at first, especially for dog lovers and anglophiles, but it became unpleasant and offensive with graphic animated canine and human sexual functioning and toilet and menstruation humor. It was smutty. You should know this before you watch it in mixed company. It is a definite NO for children and not a date night movie either. I watched the special feature about the making of the film and I am not surprised that it was animated by a middle-aged recluse couple who appear to enjoy what they see as sticking it to middle class values, but it was creepy. And I was horrified by the scene when the main character was preparing to drown puppies. Be forewarned, that just because it is animated does not make it benign or wholesome. It is neither.

marymorrissey JR Ackerely is one of my very favorite writers, one of the great stylists of the 20th century and way ahead of his time with his concerns for the homosexual, animal rights etc. Although he didn't think much of himself as a poet he produced a small body of brilliant verse. He also wrote a short play that kicks arse. His use of language and his humor are outstanding as a matter of degree - so funny, so beautiful as impressive as anybody else's work that ever wrote anything, are his books. His bittersweet oddly sympathetic misanthropy, his audacious lack of shame/total honesty are however incomparable/one of a kind. I've read "My Dog Tulip" at least 4 times and it's not my favorite of his works by any means.First of all, I'm disappointed that the lack of creative imagination in this effort resulted in a script consisting of nothing beyond excerpts simply cut from out the book and strung end to end which are delivered as voice-over to images which despite the not entirely uninteresting style of the drawings, serve merely to illustrate the spoken text in a straightforward/pedestrian manner that serves only to subtract from what the mind's eye would see sitting down with the text. What horrifies, mystifies and utterly confounds, though, is that a book that is so LOL funny, and so transcendent / touching happy/sad is thus reduced, somehow in the performance, I think, notwithstanding the addition of so much window dressing (which is frankly at its worst perhaps, actually, in the sequences in which it attempts to do a wee bit more than simply depict in 2 dimensions what we're reading flat out - as for example in the sequence in which Tulip marking her territory urinarily is depicted as a kind of ballet dance which I suppos o u g h t to be funny (especially, I suppose, if you find those pfeiffer "here is a dance to..." comic strips to be funny) but simply falls flat as a loose stool), to coming off as no more amusing than it'd be to be stuck listening to some old codger who has absolutely nothing to say but to blab incessantly, humorlessly, without much enthusiasm/verve at all in fact, enough to put you to sleep, if you wanna know the truth, about his beloved pooch (this, of course, a direct result of the reader's digest treatment the book gets in "focusing" it). As an example, his writing about the battle between his sister and Tulip over the territory that is JRA's bedroom is just too hilarious on paper, but on screen it barely elicits a smile from this viewer.I don't suppose that "My Dog Tulip" was the best subject for film treatment, yet it might have worked beautifully and surely would have played better as a plain old "movie movie" (ie a narrative film/story) than to serve up this ultimately lazy kind of multimedia presentation of 'highlights' resulting in a show and tell snoozefest. I'm sure there actually IS a 3 act drama in there to be divined, written afresh, shot and shown. This movie most assuredly is not it dammit!Disclaimer - after about an hour I packed it in. "We Think the World of You" is another film that does an abysmal job taking what his most popular novel offers in the way of dramatic material and turning into a movie. So sad.

Steve Pulaski A dog is a man's best friend. And sometimes a dog can substitute a woman in a man's life. My Dog Tulip was a book written in 1956 by the English writer J.R. Ackerley about how he rescued a female dog named Tulip from an abusive home. Tulip went on to give J.R. the best fifteen years of his life, and quite possibly the best thing in Tulip's life was J.R. Both had instant chemistry and expressed a strong love for each other. Coming from a cat lover, My Dog Tulip was beautiful in every category.The animation was not CGI, it was hand drawn on a tablet which wound up to be over 100,000 still drawings. I've never seen a film done like this and I've never seen a film quite like this. The animation is scratchy, but it manages to capture the beauty even without it being polished and glorified. It doesn't need to be. It is a complete throwback, and if it would've been made with CGI it would ruin the film.J.R. Ackerley was an openly gay man and often expressed that he was in his writings. He admitted he was after his parents died because of the time period he grew up in where being gay was the absolute worst thing that could've happened to you. Thankfully it isn't like that now. J.R. never found the right partner, but told us in the movie and in the novel My Dog Tulip that it was Tulip who served as his mate.Tulip's behavior would become increasingly protective when another woman came to see J.R., mainly his sister Nancy, Tulip would bark uncontrollably and demand undivided attention from him. She didn't like J.R. with other women. Tulip wanted J.R. to be his only.My Dog Tulip could easily be mistaken as a movie for a young child. One between the ages of four and nine. It is not. The film is totally geared towards adults, or understanding adolescents. It is equipped with dry British humor and a very soft spoken voice. The narrator is always calm, even at the most tense of times.The film deals with topics like love and the menstrual cycle of dogs. It is something many children will not get or even be interested in. They will just want to see the doggy.Compared to a film like Marley & Me, My Dog Tulip holds up a lot better most likely because it is true and not a work of realistic fiction. Marley & Me was nice at showing how bad a dog can be, but My Dog Tulip shows how good and sweet a dog can be to a human. Two totally different films, that are both nicely done in their own way.We all know what happens at the end, it isn't suspenseful. Tulip grows old and dies at fifteen after giving birth to several puppies. Tulip's story is very sweet and soft, even at it's saddest. J.R. died at the age of seventy in 1967. His spirit will continue to live on in his books and this heartwarming and caring film. Easily overlooked for the animation category in the 2010 Academy Awards.NOTE: My Dog Tulip was actress Lynn Redgrave's final performance before passing away on May 2, 2010. R.I.P.Starring: Christopher Plummer and Lynn Redgrave. Directed by: Paul Fierlinger.

pairslife An utterly charming and delightful film which provides a mostly joyful and honest perspective on the trials and tribulations of being owned bya dog. The mores and geography of a time and place from England's recent past are portrayed from a middle- class perspective, with very effective attention to detail. You'll leave wanting to get home right away to your canine, and give him/her a reminder of how much you care.The graphic styles are a great fit for the setting and the sentiments of the story. We left curious about the book's author, and wondering how he fared after the end of the period covered in the film. The last few years of Tulip's life get little-to-no coverage in the film, which short-changes the audience a little. The dog's youth is engagingly well covered, it would have been even more of a delight to get some rich visual story-telling about Tulip's middle- and old-age.