Cinematic Canines: Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film

Afterword: Dogs at the Digital Divide

235 Afterword Dogs at the Digital Divide ADRIENNE L. McLEAN The problem with the puppies is that we could only use them for two weeks at a time, so you do get a bit attached to them and they have to go; they’re too big. —Alice Evans on DVD extra, 102 Dalmatians (2000) I wish you could talk. —Boy to dog in Marmaduke (2010) In the introduction to this book I made reference to MGM’s “Dogville Barkies,” a seriesofnineshortsproducedbetween1929and1931.Thefilmswere“acted”entirely by trained dogs, in full costume and even makeup, that were “ventriloquized” with the voices of humans (see the photo on page 17). The shorts spoofed feature films of the time: the musical The Broadway Melody (1929) became The Dogway Melody (1930), the war film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) became So Quiet on the Canine Front (1931), the adventure film Trader Horn (1931) became Trader Hound (1931), the prison film The Big House (1930) became (naturally) The Big Dog House (1930). And so on. As of this writing, several of the shorts are available on YouTube, and the cable channel Turner Classic Movies also runs them from time to time. I first came across the “Barkies,” however, in a magazine article entitled “Hollywoof Babylon” (Bud Boccone, AKC Family Dog, November/December 2010, 236 • Cinematic Canines 48). As the article put it, “Few sights captured on celluloid are as bizarre, some might say grotesque, as the Barkies. An insomniac stumbling upon a Barkie on late-night TV, and seeing a Bulldog and a spaniel in evening dress dancing a rhumba, might get the feeling that someone laced his Ovaltine with LSD.” While marveling at the “ingenuity and production values” that went into making the nine shorts—all of the detailed and carefully crafted costumes, sets, and props were scaled to “dog size”; the hand grenades in So Quiet on the Canine Front spread “fleas instead of shrapnel”—the writer also notes that the Barkies “veer from appealing to appalling. They were made long before the treatment of animals on movie sets was regulated. The dogs were often manipulated with wires, like marionettes, and the costumes and hot lights must have been terribly uncomfortable. Thanks to the implementation of strict rules concerning the treatment of animals on movie sets, and the advent of computer-generated special effects, today’s film dogs needn’t suffer such indignities for their art.” In this afterword I want to consider the place of dogs in the digitized mediascape, both in terms of whether CGI (computer-generated imagery) in fact means that dogs truly are no longer “suffering for their art”—it is really, again, our art, not theirs—and in relation to the ongoing proliferation of animated dogs, especially talking dogs, in films that are not, properly speaking, animated . That is, cel animation, in which images are painted or printed on pieces of acetate (originally celluloid) and combined in a camera stand, of the sort used in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp (1955) or its first 101 Dalmatians (1961), can very easily make dogs fly, do the rhumba, or speak (cel animation can also be combined with newer digital technologies). And most audiences are aware of how powerfully expressive full-scale digital animation can be; there are few characters more appealing than the talking dog in the 2009 Disney/Pixar film Up, for example. Paul Wells, in his book The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons , and Culture (2009), writes that, “At a very simple level, whenever an audience is confronted with an animated film, it recognizes that it is different from live action—its very aesthetic and illusionism enunciates difference and potentially prompts alternative ways of seeing and understanding what is being represented ” (5). The sort of films that I explore here, however, do not present themselves as “different from live action” but as potent and sometimes ambiguous mixtures of live action, animatronics, and CGI.1 Why do we need the “magic to be real” now rather than traditionally animated? What is so powerful about the stories these films tell that they still require the solid presence of “real” dogs, in addition to digitized canine avatars or electronically controlled puppets? One of the first such films that I watched while researching the subject matter of this book was a 2004 made-for-television movie called Karate Dog, which advertised itself as being about “a new breed of action hero!” (the Briard-like dog on the DVD case wears a...