Paul Fierlinger and Sandra Fierlinger’s “My Dog Tulip” unreels fourteen years in the life of man and dog. Man has the murmuring voice of Christopher Plummer; dog has an owner who finds “touching that she should find the world so strange and wonderful.” The minimal, stylized watercolor and pen-and-ink animation is melancholy in a way that suits bittersweet reminiscence. (The film was hand-drawn on a computer.) Based on J. R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir of sharing a dog’s life of food and shit and sex and affection, the words are wise and playful and Plummer’s sometimes plummy delivery wonderful, and I know at least one dog-lover who will surely heave with sobs upon seeing “My Dog Tulip.” The gorgeous animation will sate others’ appetites. With the voices of Isabella Rossellini as a veterinarian who knows the central source of Tulip’s ills, Lynn Redgrave, Peter Gerety, Brian Murray, Paul Hecht, Euan Morton. 83m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)
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