New Zealand's first feature-length animated film,[4] it was released in November 1986 in New Zealand by Kerridge-Odeon, and opened in Australia on 9 April 1987.[5][6][7] The film grossed $2.5 million at the New Zealand box office (making it one of the most successful local films of the 1980s).[2] In Australia, it grossed $4.3 million.[3]
Plot
Set in a rural environs outside the fictional town of Raupo in New Zealand, the film centres on sheep and cattle farmer Wal Footrot (John Clarke) and his border collie sheepdog named Dog (Peter Rowley). Wal is assisted on his farm, Footrot Flats, by his nature-loving neighbour Cooch Windgrass (Peter Hayden), local boy Rangi Jones (Rawiri Paratene) and Wal's niece Pongo Footrot (Fiona Samuel).
Wal and Cooch are menaced by their unpleasant neighbours, the Murphys, comprising patriarch Irish (Peter Hayden) and his two sons Spit (Brian Sergent) and Hunk (Marshall Napier), who attempt to steal Cooch's deer and stag. When the Murphys buzz Wal's shearing shed from their "deer slayer" helicopter, Dog is stampeded into a sheep dip and starts to drown. This prompts a flashback sequence in which Dog recalls being given as a puppy to Wal by Aunt Dolly (Dorothy McKegg), and first meeting his future girlfriend Jess. After the flashback, Dog is saved and resuscitated by Wal.
Wal's two non-farming preoccupations are his girlfriend, local hairdresser Cheeky Hobson (Fiona Samuel), and impressing a selector for New Zealand's national rugby team, the All Blacks. Dog opposes Wal's relationship with Cheeky, but has problems of his own when Jess is swept away in a flood and ends up at the Murphys' farm, where she is threatened by rats and ferocious "croco-pigs". Dog saves Jess from the rats, but the two dogs are then hunted by Irish Murphy. Meanwhile, Rangi has managed to get Wal away from a rugby game and over to the Murphys' farm. Dog and Jess end up floating out toward the sea on a raft with the fearless cat Horse, who has been shot by Irish. Rangi and Wal rescue Jess, but Dog and Horse are swept out to sea. Wal, Rangi, Pongo, Cooch and Jess rush to the beach but cannot see Dog or Horse. The two are given up for dead, before surfing in on a giant wave that dumps them ashore. The film ends by showing the Dog and Jess as proud parents of a litter of puppies.
Irish-born filmmaker Pat Cox, who had moved to New Zealand in 1973, was an early fan of the Footrot Flats comic strip and felt that it would make a good animated film.[8] In 1981, he contacted Murray Ball and suggested the comic be made into a feature-length movie.[9] Ball initially rejected the idea but was later persuaded.[10] The two subsequently met and began working on a story. The process of developing the comic strip into a film took almost six years.
Scripting
Ball's cartoonist friend Tom Scott was called in to co-write the script, as Ball had never written a script before, whereas Scott had previously written a teleplay. It took them one year to plot a rough storyline, as they were both busy with their regular work. Scott recounted in his 2017 memoir that Ball's fertile imagination resulted in a manuscript "bulky enough to derail a train".
Murray was astonishingly fecund. With every new plot suggestion he would sketch out on the spot more sight gags than we could possibly use. I soon realised that my major role would be to pare back the flood of material accumulating each scripting session and keep the storyline moving forward.
Scott suggested using some jokes from published strips, but Ball was adamant the film should be all-new material. Ball created a new character, Vernon the Vermin, the King of the Rats, to give the movie a new villain. Scott, who suffers from a fear of drowning, came up with the suggestion for the storm and flooding, and the climactic scene of Dog and Horse being washed out to sea.
After the first script outline was completed, Cox provided considerable feedback on pacing and structure. Ball and Scott then spent almost another year completing the storyline.[11] They had received a $1,500 script development grant from the New Zealand Film Commission.[12] The film's working title, which was just a joke, was Raiders of the Lost Dog Kennel: A dog's life.[11]
Financing
The project stalled following completion of the script, as Cox initially had trouble obtaining financing. He finally secured funding from newspaper group INL and teamed up with New Zealand producer John Barnett, who convinced merchant bankers Fay, Richwhite to underwrite the film.[8] According to Cinema Papers magazine, Barnett and Cox raised the entire NZ$5 million budget in 10 days from 600 investors, with INL having a 20% stake.[6]
Animating
Animation director Robbert Smit was flown over from Sydney to Auckland to ensure the story was right from an animator's point of view. Animation took 15 months and comprised 100,000 individually hand-drawn and painted animation frames. About 200 animators worked on the film in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.[10]
"We knew nothing about film animation," Tom Scott said in 1987. "I think that has really helped in achieving our unique animation style. We didn't set out at all to be like Disney. We wanted it to be just like opening up the comic strip — then someone taps a magic wand and the scene floods with colour and the characters start to walk and talk."[12] Much of the animators' work (done in Sydney) was critiqued or edited by Ball (in Gisborne) by facsimile.[13]
Casting
A major challenge facing the producers was to get the voice casting right so that audiences who had created their own voices for the characters through the comic strip would not be disappointed. This was tackled by employing a cast of New Zealand's top comedy talent at the time.[14]
On 21 January 1986, it was announced that the film would be released in cinemas by Christmas 1986[citation needed], with Murray Ball as director, while John Barnett and Pat Cox would produce it through a company called Magpie Productions Ltd., Dave Dobbyn, who was living in Sydney at the time, was invited to compose the music.
New Zealand musician Dave Dobbyn scored the music for the film and its soundtrack. The soundtrack's first single, "Slice of Heaven" (featuring Herbs), was released before the film and topped the charts in New Zealand for eight weeks from 5 October to 23 November 1986.[15] It also went to number 1 in Australia for four weeks in May/June 1987.[16][17] A second single, "You Oughta Be in Love", reached number 2 in New Zealand.[18] The soundtrack also contains "Let's Get Canine" performed by Dobbyn, Betty-Anne Monga and Ardijah, "I Dream of Rugby" performed by Dobbyn and Sacred Heart College Choir, "Vernon the Vermin" performed by Dobbyn and Ardijah, and "Nuclear Waste" performed by Dobbyn and Herbs.
Reception
Opening at 28 cinemas in New Zealand in November 1986, Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale drew the largest opening week box office of any movie release in the country at the time with a gross of NZ$600,000.[19][20] The film grossed NZ$2,500,000 at the New Zealand box office,[2] surpassing Goodbye Pork Pie to become the top grossing local film until The Piano in 1993.[19][21] In Australia, it grossed A$4,317,000[3] at the box office, making it the most successful animated film in Australia, a position it held until Disney's The Lion King in 1994.[22]
The film received generally positive reviews, with The New Zealand Herald giving it a four and a half stars out of five and The Australian giving it four out of five. A review by The Age newspaper praised the film for being faithful to the spirit of the comic strip, saying its "bucolic rough-house charm ... should bring it considerable success". The review was more critical of the plot, noting:
The film is jerkily plotted and tends to spin out incidents – a rugby match, chaos in the shearing shed, a raft ride down a flooded river, and so forth – for more than they are worth. But it has a consistent geniality; the drawings are good (much of the animation was done in Sydney), the entertaining characters boldly established and the dialogue humorously coarse without being foul. The whole thing is put together with affection and an endearing willingness to please.[23]
Cinema Papers magazine criticised the producers' decision to follow the Disney convention of incorporating musical numbers into animated features. Reviewers R.J. Thompson and Sue Turnbull wrote: "The songs add little to the essential narrating, but at the same time twist the film into something else -- a series of alternations which don't speak to each other, an interrupted replica of a Hollywood musical, neither lyrical nor ironic." They also criticised the voices of Dog ("too tentative and young") and Cheeky ("too refined"). They said John Clarke does wonderfully well as Wal but should have been cast as Dog, the most articulate and cynical of the characters. They declared the film is cuter than the comic strip and largely fails because it has turned the strip into a film about humans who own animals. "As everyone knows, that should be the other way around."[24]
The Canberra Times' reviewer Dougal McDonald wrote that while Murray Ball had devised enough gags and situations to sustain 72 minutes of animated film in the constrictions of a coherent plot line, he had "kept the ingredients but not the flavour". He said the result is "Saturday matinee, school holidays stuff, no matter how devoted you may be to Ball on the printed page". He also noted the absence of a few of the comic strip's characters: Prince Charles the corgi, Cooch's cousin Kathy and Cecil the ram.[13]
When Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale screened in Los Angeles, California, in 1987, film critic Charles Solomon gave it two-and-a-half stars out of four, saying: "Based on Murray Ball's popular Australian [sic] comic strip of the same name, "Footrot Flats" centres on Wal, a well-intentioned slob of a sheep rancher, and his intelligent dog, Dog, who narrates the film. The raunchy humor of "Footrot Flats" - an alarm clock falls into a chamber pot, sheep defecate on things - may surprise American audiences accustomed to the sanitized jokes of Saturday-morning kidvid. The limited animation and the basic design of Dog suggest that the film makers have been studying the American "Peanuts" specials. While hardly a great film, "Footrot Flats" contains segments that adults will enjoy which puts it several notches above the recent American animated features devoted to toy characters.[25]
The film received a limited re-release in New Zealand cinemas in 2011, at which time co-producer John Barnett ruled out the possibility of a sequel, saying the time had passed.[26]
Home media
Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale was released on VHS. It was later released on DVD on 9 April 2004 for its 18th anniversary. It was re-released on DVD and for the first time on Blu-ray on 12 January 2011. It is also available for purchase and streaming on Amazon. A copyright warning at the end of the film states: Anyone caught pirating this picture will be eaten by The Murphys' Hellhounds.[27]
A tie-in book, Magpie Productions Presents Footrot Flats - The Dog's Tail Tale by Murray Ball and Tom Scott, and featuring animation stills from the movie, was released in 1986.[29] A more detailed book, Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale, The Making of the Movie by Lesley Stevens, was published by Inprint in 1986.[30]
Dilbert is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Scott Adams, first published on April 16, 1989. It is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office with engineer Dilbert as the title character. It has led to dozens of books, an animated television series, a video game, and hundreds of themed merchandise items. Dilbert Future and The Joy of Work are among the best-selling books in the series. In 1997, Adams received the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award and the Newspaper Comic Strip Award for his work. Dilbert appears online and as of 2013 was published daily in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries and 25 languages.
Pongo may refer to:
Footrot Flats, a comic strip by New Zealand cartoonist Murray Ball, ran from 1976 to 1994 in newspapers. Altogether there are 27 numbered books, a further 8 books collecting the Sunday newspaper strips, and 5 smaller "pocket" books of original material, plus various related publications. The strips inspired a stage musical, an animated feature film called Footrot Flats: the Dog's Tail Tale, and the Footrot Flats Fun Park in Auckland, New Zealand. The strip reached its peak of popularity in the mid-1980s, with the books selling millions of copies in Australasia.
Sir David Joseph Dobbyn is a New Zealand musician, singer–songwriter and record producer. In his early career he was a member of the rock group Th' Dudes and was the main creative force in pop band DD Smash. Since then he has released the majority of his recordings as a solo performer.
Adrian Raeside is an author, comic strip creator and founder of an animation company.
John Morrison Clarke was a New Zealand comedian, writer and satirist who lived and worked in Australia from the late 1970s. He was a highly regarded actor and writer whose work appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in both radio and television and also in print. He is principally known for his character Fred Dagg and his long-running collaboration with fellow satirist Bryan Dawe, which lasted from 1989 to his death in 2017, as well as for his success as a comic actor in Australian and New Zealand film and television.
Murray Hone Ball was a New Zealand cartoonist who became known for his Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero, Bruce the Barbarian, All the King's Comrades and the long-running Footrot Flats comic series. In the 2002 Queen's Birthday and Golden Jubilee Honours, Ball was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services as a cartoonist.
Socrates was an Athenian philosopher.
Thomas Joseph Scott is a New Zealand cartoonist. In the 1990s, he won New Zealand Cartoonist of the Year six times, and won the award again in 2009.
Peter David Broughton, generally known as Rawiri Paratene, is a New Zealand stage and screen actor, director and writer. He is known for his acting roles in Whale Rider (2002) and The Insatiable Moon (2010).
The following lists events that happened during 1987 in New Zealand.
Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tail Tale is the soundtrack to the New Zealand animated film, Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale. In February 1987, the album spent two weeks in the top five of the New Zealand albums chart.
"Slice of Heaven" is a single by New Zealand singer-songwriter Dave Dobbyn with the band Herbs, released in 1986 on the soundtrack of the animated motion picture, Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tail Tale. The single reached No. 1 on the New Zealand Singles Chart for eight weeks and on the Australian Singles Chart for four weeks. It appears on Dobbyn's 1988 album, Loyal.
Loyal is a 1988 album by New Zealand singer-songwriter Dave Dobbyn. After the Footrot Flats album, Loyal moved him further away from the pub rock of DD Smash and into contemporary pop rock. The album "confronts love, loyalty and the power of personal politics." The album reached number 9 on the New Zealand music charts.
Michael J. Horton is a film editor who works primarily in New Zealand. He was nominated for an Academy Award for the 2002 film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers that was directed by Peter Jackson.
Where's Wally? is a British series of children's puzzle books created by English illustrator Martin Handford. The books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations depicting dozens or more people doing a variety of amusing things at a given location. Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally and his friends hidden throughout the pages.
"You Oughta Be In Love" is a single by New Zealand singer/songwriter Dave Dobbyn, released in 1986 on the soundtrack of the animated motion picture, Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tail Tale. The single charted at No. 2 in New Zealand.
Peter Rowley is a New Zealand comic actor and writer. He is best known for his television roles, where he has played in numerous popular television series as comic foil and straight man to comedians such as Billy T. James, David McPhail and Jon Gadsby.
Peter John Hayden is a New Zealand actor, and television series writer, producer and presenter. Hayden is known to New Zealand audiences as the writer and narrator of nature documentaries series including Wild South and Journeys Across Latitude 45.
Footrot Flats Fun Park was a theme park on Te Atatū Peninsula, West Auckland, New Zealand. Opening in 1982 as Leisureland, the park rebranded to be themed around the Murray Ball cartoon Footrot Flats in 1984. During the 1980s, it was the largest theme park in New Zealand. In its final year of operation, the park rebranded as Something Different Fun Park, before closing in 1989.
References
↑ "Footrot Flats - The Dog's Tale". Film & Video Labelling Body. New Zealand Film and Video Labelling Body Database. Retrieved 25 August 2017.
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