Beautifully animated and featuring the voices of Christopher Plummer, the late Lynn Redgrave, and Isabella Rossellini, My Dog Tulip is a bittersweet retrospective account of author J. R. Ackerley’s 16-year relationship with his adopted Alsatian bitch, Tulip.

The distinguished British man of letters, Ackerley hardly thought of himself as a dog lover when, well into middle age, he came to adopt Tulip – a beautiful, yet intolerable 18-month-old German shepherd. To his surprise, she turned out to be the love of his life, the “ideal friend” he had been searching for in vain for so many years. In vivid and sometimes startling detail, the film reveals Tulip’s sassy, often erratic behavior (and very canine tastes) and Ackerley’s fumbling but determined efforts to ensure an existence of perfect happiness for her.

A profound and subtle mediation on the strangeness that lies at the heart of all relationships, My Dog Tulip was written, directed and animated by award-winning filmmakers Paul and Sandra Fierlinger and is the first animated feature ever to be entirely hand drawn and painted utilizing paperless computer technology.

About J.R. Ackerley and the Memoir

Author J. R. Ackerley (1896–1967) was the literary editor of the BBC magazine, The Listener, for many years. His works include three memoirs, Hindoo Holiday, My Dog Tulip, and My Father and Myself, and a novel, We Think the World of You (all available from New York Review Books).

Originally published in England in 1956, My Dog Tulip is now published in the United States by New York Review Books in their Classics Series and is the series’ best-selling book.

“One of the greatest books ever written by anybody in the world.” –Truman Capote

“Virginia Woolf wrote a biography of Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. And John Steinbeck wrote a book about traveling across America with his French poodle Charley.

Lesser known – to Americans, at least – is the story of Tulip, an Alsatian belonging to the writer J. R. Ackerley, who immortalized her in My Dog Tulip – an odd [and charming memoir], praised by E. M. Forster and Elizabeth Bowen… [His] descriptions of Tulip have the power to shake up our sentimental preconceptions about dogs, and dogs’ relationships to men; and they twinkle with the electricity of felt compassion and love.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“In its own quirky fashion, Ackerley’s wry valentine to his beloved pet is as much a book about the difficult art of living and loving as it is a dog story.” –Publishers Weekly