My dog Tulip

J.R. (Joe) Ackerley is usually described as a "man of letters"; he worked for the BBC for 31 years until 1959, as arts editor of its Listener magazine from 1935. He's also well known for having been openly gay and long seeking an "Ideal Friend". He found her in 1946, when an occasional gay lover asked the 50-year-old bachelor to take care of his Alsatian bitch while he was in prison.

Ten years later, he wrote about his experiences with the dog in My Dog Tulip (a new name his publisher recommended using, as Ackerley's friend had actually named his dog Queenie). It's been filmed, brilliantly, as a computerised and hand-drawn animation by Americans Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, mainly employing New Yorker-style sketches.

British film buffs may recall that Ackerley's only novel, We Think the World of You, was filmed in 1988. It told the story of a working-class gay (Gary Oldman) who asks a middle-aged acquaintance (Alan Bates) to look after his dog. Thus immortalised twice in his books, Queenie/Tulip was indeed the real love of the writer's life, the Ideal Friend to whom he devoted his loyal attention until her death in 1961.

She was a socially-clumsy, over-enthusiastic lover, wildly determined to protect her saviour and owner, always ready to bark at and attack any threats to their relationship. After struggling comically to cope with her toilet training, he then needed to find a vet whose handling she would accept. Her struggles with, and victory over, his sister (one of Lynn Redgrave's voices in her last film) during a year of shared residence produced Ackerley's next set of canine misadventures. Her disaster-prone behaviour provided another series of comic tableaus when they went to stay with an indolent old army colleague on a small farm.

The writer imagines a sequence of wry explanations for Tulip's failure to mate with any of the chosen Alsation studs, whose owners are delightful vignettes of middle-class English manners. He'd wanted Tulip to know sex and maternity, and ended up having to let her let the next-door mongrel runt do the deed and present him with eight puppies to handle. The whole set of humourous marital tales is mostly portrayed in a primitive hand-drawn stick-figure manner, its crude artistry discreetly diminishing the images of sexual activities.

Such a parade of animal bodily functions is very unlikely material for a cartoon movie, one that could only expect to be appreciated by adults and dog-lovers. Ackerley's wry, dry, very English and misanthropic (and naturally misogynist) comic style is conveyed perfectly by the commentary voice of Christopher Plummer, reading directly from the adoring memoir. The book is reportedly a minor classic, and I'd like to think its animated version will also become a cult classic.