It's from the director of 'Watership Down' so that should give you an idea of what you're in for. If you want to let your kids know what a dark, horrible and hostile place the world can be: let them watch this film (or Watership down). If you want them to be ignorant, happy saps who think the world is a colorful place where nothing bad can happen and everything will turn out okay let them watch a Disney flick. But I guess it can't hurt to see both sides, that'll teach 'em realism instead of naive positivism right. I admire that they didn't water down the film just to reach a larger audience. Unfortunately this second movie is also the last one this direct ever made.

Very rarely is a movie better than the book it's based on. This is one of those rare exceptions.Richard Adams is known mainly for his novel "Watership Down." A tale true to nature, about rabbits trying to survive. He also wrote "The Plague Dogs," another parable involving talking animals, but is much darker and more harrowing than Adam's best known work. It is also, unlike the latter, NOT for children."The Plague Dogs" is set in the Lake District in North West England, in an animal testing facility. It tells the story of two dogs who live therein. Snitter (voiced by John Hurt), is a Fox Terrier who has had a lobotomy performed on him. Rowf (voiced by Christopher Benjamin) is a Labrador mix who has been drowned and resuscitated regularly to see how long a creature can swim before drowning. Snitter knows humans can be good, for he had a master, before he died and the terrier was sent to the facility. Rowf was born in the facility, and sees humans, whom he calls "White Coats" as evil.The pair escape the facility by chance, with Snitter wanting to show Rowf that not all people are evil. However, due to their time in the facility they do not know how to survive in the wild, and revert to killing sheep. Despite the help they receive from a cunning yet well meaning Fox, the Tod, they are eventually hated by the rural community. It does not help when a rumour emerges from the facility that the dogs knocked over a vial containing the Bubonic Plague during their escape. This sets England on fire, and suddenly the navy, army and local farmers are out to kill the animals.The film is as bleak and depressing as it sounds, yet it is beautiful and captivating. The animation, fully traditional and done without the help of computers, is astonishing, so realistic and engrossing that you are with these animals, traveling around Yorkshire, joining them on their perilous journey. The voice acting adds a layer of humanity to the characters, as does the way they are animated; you feel their suffering, you sense the fear and desperation. The music, which is minimal but used at the most poignant times, strikes the heart. The opening lines and bars to the end title song will stir something primal within.This is a story of ambiguity, of terror and the pure evil that us as humans can inflict. We see these animals suffering and pining for justice, and curse ourselves as a species. Rowf cries that he is a good dog, why are they treating him like this? Snitter experiences seizures and horrific flashbacks and hallucinations due to his lobotomy. One dog becomes a feral wild animal, the other withers to a fearful, vulnerable mess.It's important to note that the film is NOT meant for children. This is an adult tale for the adult mind. This is an adventure story in which we fall in love with those at their most desperate, and come away with a different mind-set. In this film, the animals are more human than we are.An underrated gem.

Um… This is a really really odd show. Rather silent and made my skin crawl just a bit, especially how they show a dog being killed by downing in an experimental room. I'm not spoiling anything there since the show starts out with that.This show is so depressing, so sad that it made me want to curl into a ball and cry. It's about dogs who want to find masters that will not torture them with tests. It turns darker as they don't find a master and become wild dogs pretty much and do as they need. A little bit of surreal stuff does seem to come up because one of the dogs seems to have had work done to his brain. I think its also interesting to note that we see a lot of what happens when someone has the plague since both of them show signs as the days go on.The story actually felt rather boring for the most part, and it felt like it was going way to slow without really any reason for it. The only thing somewhat entertaining was watching the dogs try to catch frogs in desperation to have something to eat.The art style is rather odd, very dark and detailed. When you do see the people, you can see almost every line in the face. The animals all look pretty real and add to how scary the show really is. They really watched how dogs really act because everything they do isn't humanoid. The animation is pretty fluid, and works well with the story.The voices are hard to hear a lot, they talk rather softly and then the music would blar when I had my volume up. Their British voices also are a bit hard to tell what is being said. They sometimes also talk a bit scatter brained and mix up. Now also, even when we do not see the humans, we do hear them talking about the dogs escape.Now, this show was written because of the problems with testing animals and also working with illnesses and bioweapons that could become a national problem if they get out. This show was a creation from a book by Richard Adams that wrote a lot of different sad books about animals in bad conditions.

A couple of days ago I could finally have a copy of THE PLAGUE DOGS in my own hands (my DVD contains the 85 minutes version). I waited years to finally watch this film (read about it here in IMDb) and I even had a problem with eBay since its first copy I ordered never arrived to my place. It was all worthy since there's anything quite like it, or better said, I have not seen anything like it. There are much more animated films that are not AT ALL for kids, with depressing themes (like GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES), but this one is certainly unique: it's an animated film with talking dogs (and a talking fox too – it gained my attention how we basically don't see the humans but just hear their voices) that can be described with a word like *agonizing*. It's about a couple of dogs (voiced by John Hurt and Christopher Benjamin) that are trapped victims of an animal research facility. Paul Thomas Anderson said that THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE is not about finding the actual treasure but about what happens after finding it. I would say that, to reference what Anderson said, THE PLAGUE DOGS is not about surviving, or finding a way out of, the animal research world but about what happens once the two dogs are free. According to the tagline, and how they sold the film, that thing is the "adventure of a lifetime". But this isn't quite an adventure, in the good sense of the word. It's pure agony, a story with no hope that truly surprised me; I mean, there's a specific scene, featuring one of the dogs and a man with a handgun, which is the kind of brutal I never imagine I was going to find here (even when I did know the premise of the film). I'm not going to watch THE PLAGUE DOGS very often, but it sure is a great, very touching (single lines will move you, like for instance when one of the dogs says that why he is in the animal research facility if he is not a bad dog) and perfectly animated piece of work. *Watched it today