Wynnewood couple's life animates 'My Dog Tulip'

'Dogs read the world through their noses and write their history in urine," observed J.R. Ackerley, the late British man of letters, in My Dog Tulip. Few lovers have evoked their beloved with such blunt poetry.

Ackerley's 1956 ode to his unspayed German shepherd is the basis of Paul and Sandra Schuette Fierlinger's movie, which opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse. Tulip, the recipient of ecstatic reviews in New York, was almost entirely produced in their curio-filled cottage on a tree-lined Wynnewood street.

"Isn't it amazing," asks Paul, gesturing to a bank of four networked computers serving as his electronic easel and editing room, "that you can make a feature film in the corner of your den?"

The Fierlingers' gorgeous hand-drawn and painted animation is rendered via computer in a whimsical line reminiscent of Saul Steinberg. The film's mordant tone, however, is more Vladimir Nabokov, and it all comes together in a manner transporting, transgressive, and free of the shaggy sentimentality so characteristic of doggie cinema. (Marley & Me it is not.) Paul made the line drawings, and Sandra, on her own computer bank in the spare bedroom, painted them in what resembles watercolor washes.

The Fierlingers' labor of love took three years of 12-hour days during which they rarely left home. Except to walk their dogs and to record the expressive voices of dog-lovers Christopher Plummer (as Ackerley), Isabella Rossellini, and Lynn Redgrave, they generally didn't need to.

Doggie vocals were handled in large part by Oscar, the Fierlingers' 11-year-old Jack Russell, and Gracie, a "12-ish" shepherd mix rescued by Sandra years ago at an I-95 exit in South Carolina.

The dogs very much reflect the personalities of their owners. Oscar, like Paul, is frisky and yappy, holding court in the center of the den. Gracie, a model for the screen Tulip, is like Sandra: laid-back, quiet, and unusually alert to shifts in mood.

Animating influences

Paul Fierlinger, a Czechoslovakian national born in Japan 74 years ago, is the most famous Philadelphia filmmaker you've never heard of.

"The history of animation is about 103 years, and I've been doing it about half that long," he says.

Teeny Little Super Guy, the boater-hatted kitchen deity on Sesame Street, is the Oscar-nominated animator's best-known creation. Teeny, painted on a plastic cup, still lives on the lazy Susan in the galley kitchen.