CHAMPAIGN — J.R. Ackerley's book "My Dog Tulip" wouldn't work as a live-action film, animator Paul Fierlinger said after his animated movie adapted from the book was shown Thursday at Roger Ebert's Film Festival.

"You couldn't do it because there isn't much to tell," he said onstage after the screening at the Virginia Theatre. "Most of the story is really about what's on his mind, his early memories and his wishes."

And though Ackerley, who worked for the BBC and was prominent in postwar British literary circles, was quite good at drawing, Fierlinger went his own way drawing "My Dog Tulip," using loose and simple lines.

His wife, Sandra Schuette Fierlinger, did all the painting, saturating objects with washes and vivid or somber color, depending on where the story takes Ackerley and Tulip.

The Fierlingers each used a stylus and Wacom digital drawing tablet to create "My Dog Tulip" the credits note no paper was used. No assistant animators were either. The 83-minute movie has 24 drawings per second.

The story is about Ackerley, a British bachelor who had not really cared for dogs, rescuing an Alsatian, or German shepherd, from a working-class family who had kept it in a small room, and his tribulations and joys in bringing her along as a companion canine.

"'My Dog Tulip' has no stupid plot, no contrived suspense," Ebert wrote. "Tulip grows old and dies, as must we all. J.R. Ackerley misses her and writes a book about his loss. Through this dog, he knew love."

In the animated film, released to theaters in 2009 and to be released soon on DVD, Christopher Plummer narrates and voices Ackerley. Isabella Rossellini provides the voice of an understanding, caring veterinarian. And in her final role, Lynn Redgrave, who died last year, voices Ackerley's sister and a green grocer's wife.

The Fierlingers, who live in Wynnewood, Pa., wanted British actors to voice the British characters. The couple found them in New York.

As Paul Fierlinger tells it, Plummer was "extremely unfriendly" the first day he was to record the narration. The actor started by reading Ackerley as a "really shaky old man" when Ackerley was only in his 60s.

Plummer didn't really want to see, when offered, the first six minutes of "My Dog Tulip" and bristled when Paul finally read aloud some of his lines.

"The last time somebody read my lines was 50 years ago," the actor said.

The next day, Plummer came to the recording booth with a "totally different attitude" toward Paul Fierlinger, humoring the son of career Czechoslovakian diplomats with stories about Prague, where Paul had lived before immigrating to the United States.

While with "Tulip" three years later at the Toronto Film Festival, Paul Fierlinger told the media about the way Plummer had acted that day in the recording booth, while Plummer spoke in glowing terms about the animator.

When Fierlinger told Plummer he had been sharing with reporters the story about their first encounter, Plummer said, "Good. Keep telling it."

Chaz Ebert told the Ebertfest audience, before "Tulip" was shown, that her husband has wanted a dog since seeing "My Dog Tulip" and perhaps "Umberto D," Vittoria de Sica's neo-realist masterpiece, which Ebert showed on Thursday, before "Tulip."

Released in 1952 and shot in black and white, "Umberto D" is about an impoverished retired government clerk who struggles, with dignity, on a small pension and faces eviction by his landlady. Set in Rome, the story centers on Umberto's relationship with his small dog, Flike.

A couple of the male panelists during the post-screening discussion said they had cried during parts of "Umberto," but Paul Fierlinger, who was part of the discussion, said he didn't think the dog in "Umberto D" was a "good act."

"It was so obvious they don't belong together, and it bothered me," he said.