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.

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.

On his own, Paul is the Clio-winning creator of US Healthcare ads (in which happy employees process claims while playing keyboards like virtuoso jazzmen). With Sandra he is the Peabody-winning maker of Still Life With Animated Dogs (2001). Their previous animated feature, Drawn From Memory (1995), Paul's memoir of his alienated youth, he calls "the Reader's Digest version of my life."

In that whimsical animation, which makes light of a heavy autobiography, Paul comes to terms with his first authority figure: his father. The elder Fierlinger, a Czech diplomat posted to Japan, left Tokyo in 1939, when Paul was 3, and consigned his son to a series of foster homes in the United States. Newsreels of Fala, FDR's Scottish terrier, won young Paul's heart.

In 1946, the boy, who speaks Japanese and English but not Czech, moved with his father to Prague, his alien homeland, where his uncle, Zdenek, was prime minister. Soon young Paul was sent away to an elite boarding school where his fellow students included future filmmakers Milos Forman (Amadeus) and Ivan Passer (Cutter's Way) and future playwright and statesman Vaclav Havel. Because he couldn't speak Czech, Paul communicated through caricatures, using Fala as his nom de cartoon. In 1967, the year his father died, he defected to the West with Helena, his first wife.

Paul and Helena arrived in the States in 1969, settled in Philadelphia, and had two sons, Phillip and Peter. During the early years of his prolific American career, Paul produced animated segments for ABC and PBS and made It's So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House (1979), the tale of a lupine dog, which nabbed an Oscar nomination for animated short.

In 1989, commissioned to make a film on alcohol and drug abuse, Paul listened to 25 hours of audiotapes with testimonies of recovering abusers. He heard himself in every confession.

"Initially I thought, because I was an alcoholic, I was the perfect person to do the film," he told The Inquirer in 1995. "Then I realized that to do it honestly, I had to stop" drinking.

After weeks of emotional paralysis and insomnia, Paul met Sandra Schuette, a painter and graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in a recovery group. She is 55. They have been together for 21 years, married for 18. Instead of children they have collaborations and dogs. With their matching squarish faces, close-cropped haircuts, spectacles, and puckish smiles, they resemble a Roz Chast sketch of a bohemian couple.

When producers came to them ready to finance a feature-length animation, the Fierlingers suggested My Dog Tulip, a memoirist's memoir by the openly gay Ackerley. Late in life he found his ideal companion in a female shepherd, terror of the neighborhood.

As Ackerley put it, "Unable to love each other, the English turn naturally to dogs."

Tulip (whose name was actually Queenie) was uninterested in other canines, preferring to heel to her doting master. And Ackerley was obsessed with Tulip's mysterious biology and tries, with some success and much anatomical detail, to find her a "husband."

"There's a lot of scatological stuff," admits Paul, in gross understatement. The movie is amusingly graphic about bodily elimination and dog mating. (Is it for kids? I think not.) But mostly My Dog Tulip, both Ackerley's book and the Fierlingers' film, attempts to answer that elusive question: What is love?

"Tulip offered me what I had never found in my sexual life - constant, single-hearted, incorruptible, uncritical devotion, which is in the nature of dogs to offer," Ackerley says in Plummer's warm and crusty voice-over.

These words are made manifest by the Fierlinger dogs, four-legged satellites orbiting Paul and Sandra.

"Dog are whores. They use us to make life comfortable for themselves," Paul says, affecting brittleness. "Dogs are excellent at reading cues. They are selfish. If they see you upset, they console you because they're scared you won't feed them."

Hearing him, Oscar pricks up his little bat ears and looks askance at his master. Returning the dog's gaze, Paul melts a little.

What do we learn from our dogs?

"A lot about ourselves," Paul replies.

From her corner, Sandra speaks up. With a smile she responds, "Patience."