PRODUCTION
Directors: Paul and Sandra Fierlinger
Co-Producers: Howard Kaminsky, Frank Pellegrino and Norman Twain
Production Company: Norman Twain Productions
Based on novel by: J.R. Ackerley
Original music score and sound design: John Avarese
FILM DETAILS
Genre: animation
While most animation is for children, this film is being directed toward the adult sensibility.
RELEASE DATE
My Dog Tulip began voice recording August 16th, 2006 in New York City and has been in production since May 16th, 2006.
The film is financed independently.
CAST
Isabella Rossellini
Euan Morton
Lynn Redgrave
Peter Gerety
Paul Hecht
Brian Murray
Christopher Plummer
Synopsis
Producer Norman Twain spearheads this independent animated film adapted from British author J.R. Ackerley's 1956 novel detailing the fourteen year friendship shared between the author and a German shepherd he once rescued. With vocal contributions by Christopher Plummer, Isabella Rossellini, Paul Hecht, and Lynn Redgrave, and animation by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, this adult-oriented tale of friendship offers a touching testament to the bond between man and beast.
Source: All Movie Guide
About the author
Ackerley, J. R. (1896-1967)
A twentieth-century British editor who fostered the careers of a number of important gay writers. From 1935 until 1959, Joe Randolph Ackerley edited The Listener, BBC's weekly literature and arts journal, so skillfully and so eclectically, that he came to be recognized as "one of the most brilliant editors of his generation." Under his editorship, the journal counted not only E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Herbert Read, and Clive Bell among its regular contributors, but also such new talents as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender. Spender commented that Ackerley "cared immensely about what books were reviewed--and by whom--and what poems he published. He encouraged young writers."
J. R. Ackerley also wrote a small but significant body of gay literature that includes a novel, drama, and memoirs, among which My Father and Myself and My Dog Tulip (best read in tandem). My Father and Myself is the coming-of-age story of a clever wag who slept with some "two or three hundred young men" in a matter of years, and for whom, in the long run, "love and sex... failed to meet." Yet Ackerley was always searching for the "Ideal Friend" who would be a source of unconditional love, and he found her at the age of 50 in the form of a female Alsatian.
In My Dog Tulip, the focus shifts from Ackerley's sex life to that of his dog Queenie. The dog's name was changed to Tulip when the editors of Commentary, who had purchased an excerpt, became concerned that using the dog's real name might encourage jokes about Ackerley's well-known homosexuality.
Adapted from: www.glbtq.com, www.wikipedia.org and www.villagevoice.com
The book
After the original publication of My Dog Tulip in England in 1956, and after it was brought out by a small press in America in 1965, readers divided neatly into those who loved it and those who loathed it. [...] My Dog Tulip is a dog story quite unlike any other dog story. Indeed, with all the dogs that have gamboled through literature, it is astonishing how few have emerged as more than appendages or household fixtures. [...] In My Dog Tulip, Ackerley grants his Alsatian bitch her dogdom on her own terms and then, like Boswell, sets out to record it as intelligently and sympathetically as a man might do.
Tulip is a love story, in which the object is honored by being observed as herself. [...] Ackerley tells of Tulip's beauty - her mosaic face, her incandescent ears, the shadow across her forehead, her sable tunic of the texture of satin - her London walks and visits to the vet, and then, because she is a biological creature, her eliminations and urinations (''Dogs read the world through their noses and write their history in urine''), her heats and, when he determines to find a ''husband'' to ''marry'' her, her matings. MORE than half of this book is a sexual history of nine years of courtship and contrived matings, set eventually in the birch woods of Wimbledon Common.
Source: www.nytimes.com
Click on the thumbnails !
My Dog Tulip, book cover
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All the images of the book used on this page were downloaded from Amazon.com.
Buy this book on Amazon.com
Characters played by Euan
• a cyclist
• a veterinarian
Very special thanks to Deanna at www.tulipthedog.com for the information.
Latest news
There is now to date, 68 minutes of My Dog Tulip completed. The total completion of the film, projected to be one hour and 22 minutes, including scoring, coloring and finishing the sound requirements is now projected to be October 1st, 2008. The producers are presently weighing offers for foreign sales representation and a tentative decision has been made to have the world première of the film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May, 2009. updated!
Source: www.tulipthedog.com
Video
Click on the thumbnail new!
CAST IN CLIP:
Christopher Plummer as J.R. Ackerley
Euan Morton as a cyclist
Video courtesy of www.tulipthedog.com.
