[5] This film marked the second Oscar nomination for Plympton, his first being the animated short Your Face at the 60th Academy Awards.
The film is a humorous and surreally-violent answer to the question "Why do dogs bark at such innocent creatures as pigeons and squirrels?"
and gives the audience a window into the paranoid mind of a loyal guard dog as it imagines farcically depicted dangers, from harmless flora and fauna on a walk through a neighborhood park.
Each potential threat, from flower, butterfly, and grasshopper, to bird, squirrel, and rope-jumping girl, is treated to its own improbable and often bloody vignette.
The eponymous Guard Dog has gone on to be featured in three more Bill Plympton short films to date,[6][7][8] and appears in cameo in his feature films Idiots and Angels (2009), Cheatin' (2013) and the Weird Al Yankovic music video TMZ (2011).