In Focus - Doing experiments with an adorable dog

Given that this is the week of Valentine’s Day, it would make sense to look at a love story. How about the love of a young girl and her dog? It’s not romantic, perhaps, but it’s still a genuine connection and it can be moving in the right hands. This week’s selection, The Sparky Book (2006, dir. Mary Lewis), is a film about such a connection, between a dog named Sparky and a girl with a serious heart disease named Brigitte.

A hybrid of live-action and animation, The Sparky Book won the Best Experimental category at the Yorkton Film Festival in 2007, a category which probably makes more sense than anything else. The story is something that would give A Dog’s Purpose and Hachi director Lasse Hallstrom heart palpitations, a loyal dog helps his young, ill owner get through her disease by being an adorable puppy. Together they support each other through trials and the dog, in the end, has a full and rewarding life. Also, there is a goldfish voiced by Gordon Pinsent narrating the story, because if you want gravity, you narrate things with Gordon Pinsent.

This doesn’t sound very experimental, and the bones of the plot could easily be used to build a Lasse Hallstrom movie. The experiment comes in how the film looks, as Lewis jumps between animation and live action, more frequently combining them into a weird mesh of visual styles.

It doesn’t always work, some scenes look like live action footage with a strange photoshop filter on top. Lewis seems dedicated to putting every dog and heart-based image she can conceptualize on screen, even if it doesn’t quite gel together as a whole. That’s the nature of experiments, and every time I found myself scratching my head about what Lewis was attempting to accomplish she would follow it with image that was genuinely moving and beautiful. Visually, at least, you rarely know what you’re going to get from frame to frame and scene to scene.

It’s also to her credit that she isn’t going the easy route. It’s a cute dog and a dying child, which are classic plot points in emotionally manipulative storytelling. She’s even getting that dying child to sing, and then getting the whole thing narrated by Canada’s grandfather. The entire thing could have collapsed into cheese. It doesn’t though, and while I can’t honestly say I like all of her choices, she’s at least not doing anything expected with the story. She’s made a film with a dying child and her loyal dog and somehow avoided doing anything expected, and that’s the biggest achievement of all.