Simon Wells

(In French, On TV, January 2022) Fans of Jack London’s Call of the Wild will feel in familiar territory in Balto, a dog-in-Alaska story executed as a classically-drawn animated film with a live-action framing device. As far as kid-focused animal adventures go, Balto is nicely executed despite the annoyances—the blend of a rather serious story of adversity in the face of a medical delivery is sabotaged by the comic talking animals shtick that was (and remains) so prevalent in those films… Jack London it isn’t, finally. Still, the adventure can be involving, the animation is squarely in what was the norm before CGI took over, and the pacing is not bad. The framing device feels useless and the facts of the “true story” that inspired the film are to be taken with a great deal of liberty. Director Simon Wells would go on to make better (The Prince of Egypt) and so much worse (Mars Needs Moms) that we would never direct again. Balto makes for an acceptable family film today—nothing groundbreaking (the irony being that it was released the month after the epochal Toy Story, tanking its box-office) but still something reasonably entertaining, especially if dogs-in-the-wild stories are your thing.