YMMV / The Plague Dogs

• Accidental Innuendo:
  The Tod: Keep tight ahold of your meat and good luck go with you.
• Aluminium Christmas Trees: Experiments depicted in the book are based on experiments that happened in real life. All of them.
• Angst Aversion: Though the book was no walk in the park, the Animated Adaptation is widely considered one of the most depressing animated movies ever made. It's not uncommon for those who have seen the movie to warn others that the film's bleakness may make it too unbearable to sit through.
• Critical Dissonance: Currently has a 57% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes in contrast to the 90% audience rating. Though admittedly, the critic score was based on only seven reviews, whereas the audience score was based on over 2000 reviews.
• Misaimed Marketing: The film's cover◊ features the tagline "Escape to A Different World... And Share The Adventure Of A Lifetime!" and "A SPECIAL KIND OF MOVIE MAGIC from the CREATORS OF WATERSHIP DOWN!" Of course, anyone who had actually seen Watership Down might have had an idea of exactly what sort of 'movie magic' they were in for... and still been shocked by just how much bleaker The Plague Dogs manages to be. It's also considered to be Grave of the Fireflies with dogs.
• Nausea Fuel: When the hunter gets shot in the face a TON of blood drips out of his face and you get a very good glimpse of it on his hand. (And if you look closely you can see it got on Snitter as well.)
• Nightmare Fuel: Both the novel and the movie are rife with it, but the movie's deleted scene with the mangled and eaten corpse of the Bounty Hunter is probably the worst.
• Only the Author Can Save Them Now:
  • More explicitly than most — the book seems about to end with the dogs drowning at sea. The Reader protests and cries out for the Author to spare them, claiming that Real Life would end badly but this isn't Real Life. One Deus ex Machina later, the dogs are saved.
  • The animation, in a feat of Grimmification, decides just to stick the realistically bleak ending, and ends with the dogs about to drown but with a shot of an island nearby during the credits. It helps that the director only had his hands on the original draft of the story before Richard Adams was asked to change it.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Patrick Stewart voices the army major in charge of hunting down the dogs.
  • Brad Bird served as one of the film's animators.
• Signature Scene: The scene in which a hunter is killed via an accidental gunshot to the face.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The film, like Watership Down before it — which is actually tame and kid-friendly in comparison to The Plague Dogs — this is mistaken for a kid's movie with shocking frequency (not helped by the case of Misaimed Marketing). The film deals with bleak, mature themes such as animal experimentation, the psychological ramifications of such on the protagonists, and features plentiful amounts of graphic violence, swearing, and a depressing Downer Ending — which the book doesn't feature anymore — to top it off. A children's film this is not.
• The Woobie: Rowf and Snitter go through more mental torture than most characters ever have to. In the end, they're just dogs who just want a home and someone to take care of them.

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