 Day 28, the plague dog suggested by Rook 256 and seconded by 33 people. So that's at least 34 folks. I'm gonna disappoint with this one. For a frankly absurd amount of my life, I thought that I had been attacked by a dog when I was really young. And I mean, violently attacked. It wasn't until I was in college that I realized that this memory couldn't have been real because my throat doesn't have any scarring from this supposed mauling. But the belief in the dream, I guess, has colored the way that I see the animals. For a long time I was irrationally afraid of them and then I lived with a pair that I didn't particularly like and that got me over the fear but didn't help with the appreciation. And now I've just kind of ended up lukewarm. I like Channing Tatum, but I could not be less interested in his upcoming movie if I tried. And so seeing the name of today's selection didn't excite me. But at least it promised plagues alongside the canines. Plagues are interesting. I hoped maybe that could get me through it. Unfortunately, the plague dogs is all dog no plague though that is hardly its biggest problem. I'll start with nice things because it's not like I hated this movie. First up, it looks good. The drawing style which largely issues outlines is distinct and I liked seeing how the characters and their backgrounds were animated. There is a lot of camera movement. You've got the usual animated 2D pans of course but there are also like rotations and other tricks that make it feel more shall we say cinematic. I'll admit that I haven't watched that much animation in my life and especially Western animation but I haven't seen anything that looks quite like it and I appreciate that. Narratively I thought that the choice to literally give one of our dog heroes snitter PTSD was fascinating and the general way that he and his companion Ralph deal with humans after the suffering they were subjected to at the hands of researchers makes a lot of sense. There's so much cruelty in the research. The film's opening shows Ralph literally drowning as the white coats whose faces we never see because we never really see any human faces in full and only rarely even in profile assess something. It is deeply unpleasant to watch and you immediately hate the people putting Ralph through it. Similarly we see Snitter Skull all bandaged up from a brain operation meant to disconnect him from reality. I wish we saw him lose his sense of place more than he does though both because it's a cool visual effect and because it seems like if they literally fucked with his brain for that reason it should just happen more than a couple times over the dozens of days he's out in the wild, whatever. There are two versions of the Plague Dogs and I think I'd have much preferred the one I didn't see simply because it's 17 minutes shorter. At 103 minutes the original cut is just too long. There are a number of sequences that feel extraneous at best and the fact that it does fade out at the end of nearly every scene makes them feel like disconnected vignettes as opposed to events that build on each other to an inevitable conclusion. This is made even weirder by the fact that sometimes there are title cards marking the day but it's obvious that days are passing between the cards so I don't understand what purpose they're supposed to serve. Had the fade-outs been used more sparingly and intentionally maybe it would have been clear that one scene was days or weeks later instead of mere minutes. It also would have kept the energy up between these closer scenes. I'm supposed to be watching the story of dogs fighting for their survival. How did they manage to make that so fucking boring? And maybe the book it's based on is boring too but then why make it a movie? I think this mostly stems from the decision to put a bunch of humans into the broader narrative while committing to the aforementioned aesthetic that de-emphasizes humans. Instead of seeing key conversations play out we get voiceover from researchers or journalists or whomever while we watch Ralph and Snitter do whatever it is they're doing. There are times when major revelations come from people we cannot see and I get the artistic choice to not show people but it feels like breaking the nose to spite the face because these scenes often just don't have any impact as a result of this disconnection. I didn't sign up for a radio play and the images we're actually seeing rarely if ever advanced the plot themselves. So why? I think you could cut every part of voiceover from the movie both the audio and the images they play over and no one would know the difference. Maybe that's what they did to get it to 86 minutes. In this month of reviews I've never been as confused by a suggestion as I am by this one. I genuinely don't know why someone recommended it nor why so many people liked that recommendation but I'm sure they'll tell me. 5.5 out of 10. Thanks so much for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons. My mom, Hammer and Marco, Kat Saracota, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I am the sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindies, Andrew Madison Design and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video that's great, if not, oh well. If you wanna see more, please subscribe. Got two more videos this month. We're almost done. Thank God. Bye.