Lovely animated credit sequence for Dean Spanley, premiering in Toronto in a few weeks, starring Jeremy Northam, Sam Neill, and Peter O’Toole.
P.J. O’ROURKE : Always remembering that most books are out of print for good reason, I nominate a sad exception: “My Talks with Dean Spanley” by Lord Dunsany. The nearly forgotten Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 1878-1957) was a member of the Abbey Theatre crowd in Dublin and a prolific writer of short stories. Most of his works were of the elf-and-goblin Celtic-pish neo-gothic horror type, “Silence of the Lambs” with Hobbits. But “Talks” is the story of an Anglican dean who, under the influence of exactly the right amount of Tokay wine, recalls his previous incarnation as a spaniel. It is a brilliant excursion into canine consciousness.