The Plague Dogs is a 1982 animated film based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Richard Adams. The film was written for screen, directed and produced by Martin Rosen, who also directed Watership Down, the film version of another novel by Adams.
The film’s story is centered on two dogs named Rowf and Snitter, who escape from a research laboratory in Great Britain. In the process of telling the story, the film highlights the cruelty of performing vivisection and animal research for its own sake (though Martin Rosen said that this was not an anti-vivisection film, but an adventure), an idea that was only recently coming to public attention during the 1960s and 1970s.
The theme song, Time and Tide, was composed and sung by Alan Price. The song, as well as dialogue from the film, was sampled by the Canadian industrial group Skinny Puppy for their single, “Testure”, from the 1988 album VIVIsectVI.
Plot
The story doesn’t shy away from depicting the violence and cruelty the dogs encounter throughout the story.
Rowf (a labrador-mix) and Snitter (a smooth fox terrier) are two of many dogs used for experimental purposes at an animal research facility in the Lake District of north-western England. Eager to escape the tortures of life inside the facility, an escape is managed. Initially relieved and eager to experience their new freedom the dogs are soon faced, not only with the realities of life in the wild, but with another more terrifying realization — they are being hunted by their former captors.
Differences between the film plot and the book plot are numerous and have substantial bearing on the outcome of the film. The most significant is that the survival of the dogs at the end of the film seems very unlikely, whereas in the book they are rescued and returned to Snitter’s original owner, who in the book has survived (in the movie he has not, making Snitter a true orphan.) Other differences are linked to the alteration of certain characters and to an overall compression of the time sequences and series of events outlined in the book.
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