Happy Dox

Spanning 25 years of marriage, Pickle is an accounting of the wide range of pets collected by a couple with a penchant for rescuing animals. For no particular reason, most of the creatures in Tom and Debbie’s menagerie suffer from unusual medical conditions. Many of them meet a tragic, unexpected demise, and ironically, they are too often the casualties of attacks by other animals. Occasionally they far outlive normal life expectancy, making them both lucky and unlucky. The film’s namesake, Pickle, was a fish born without the ability to swim. He spent his existence propped up in a sponge to keep him from sinking to the bottom of the aquarium. Pickle was lovingly tended to, along with an obese chicken, a cat with a heart condition, a non-buoyant goose, and a paraplegic possum that fancied scrambled eggs for dinner. Pickle explores the human capacity to care for all creatures throughout their sometimes greatly protracted lives until their occasionally sudden and unfortunate deaths.