The Plague Dogs

The Plague Dogs is Martin Rosen's second animated film, adapted from a novel by Richard Adams, and features the voices of Sir John Hurt and Sir Nigel Hawthorne; his first was Watership Down (1978).

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The film's ending is far more tragic than the book's. This is because director Martin Rosen was given the story in its original manuscript version, before publishers persuaded Richard Adams to soften the ending. In the book, Snitter's owner is alive and rescues him and Rowf from the army after a fishing boat picks them up. The monkey in the isolation room also appears in the book.

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The film was made entirely without rotoscoping or computers. It was completely hand-drawn.

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The first release was issued on VHS in only eight thousand copies.

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It is the longest British animated film.

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A young Brad Bird (director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles) worked as an animator on this film but was fired during production.

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Jeremy Irons originally read the role of Rowf.

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Until 2008, Australia was the only country to have the film's original 103-minute cut released on DVD. The original VHS release of the film's full theatrical version premiered in the UK in 1982 by Thorn Productions, but only around 8,000 copies of that version were made.

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It was Dandy Nichols's (Phyllis) last cinema film before her death in 1986.

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Along with The Last Unicorn (1982), The Secret of NIMH (1982) and Watership Down (1978), this film is one of the darkest and most violent animated films of the twentieth century. Such films were rated PG and G, as in the cases of The Secret of NIMH (1982) and The Last Unicorn (1982). This film, however, was not submitted to the MPAA until 2004, when it received a PG-13 rating.

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Snitter is a Fox Terrier.

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It is the fourth animated film, after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Animal Farm (1954) and The Lord of the Rings (1978), to complete cut scenes before its release.

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The number of the dog kennel accidentally left open at the research facility is "732". Though entirely coincidental, there was a secret biological and chemical warfare research facility called "Unit 731" (under number 1) that conducted horrific experiments on innocent people, similar to the research facility in this film.

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Released in America at the time, this film was the last cinematic animated film rated PG-13 or R by the MPAA until the R-rated South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999).

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Patrick Stewart voiced a role in a theatrical film for the first time: he later voiced the Adventure Book in The Pagemaster (1994), Seti in The Prince of Egypt (1998), King Goobot the Yolkian Alien in Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001), Mr. Woolensworth the sheep in Chicken Little (2005), Max Winters/Yaotl in TMNT (2007), William Shakespeare in Gnomeo & Juliet (2011), the Narrator in the Ted films, Ariscratle the squirrel in Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012), the old tree Tugg/Tank in Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return (2013), Captain in Spark: A Space Tail (2016) and the Poop Emoji in The Emoji Movie (2017).

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The film's first scene, showing Rowf failing to stay above water in a water barrel and beginning to drown, foreshadows how the film ends.

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