Fly Away Home (aka Your House Is On Fire And Your Children Are Gone)

I've touched on this a few times in the past, but Hollywood doesn't make animal pictures the way it used to, not least because nowadays it barely seems to make animal pictures at all (real animals, not CGI monstrosities). When I was growing up, live action family films about overbearing St Bernards, demonic mice and romantic affairs between dolphins and terriers were a ubiquitous part of the multiplex experience. And true, few of these films were what you'd call prestige projects, with "animal flick" typically being code for undemanding kiddy fare (for every Babe, there were at least three Gordys), but every now and then you'd get a feature that conveyed a genuine fascination and affection for the animal in question. Fly Away Home, released in September 1996, is one such film, the subject in focus being Canada geese and their magnificent migratory techniques. It was directed by Carroll Ballard, whose previous directorial credits included two really outstanding animal features, The Black Stallion (1979) and Never Cry Wolf (1983), and he applies the same elegance and sophistication to this story about a flock of hand-reared geese finding their wings. It's another film from my childhood that I feel doesn't get anything close to the recognition it deserves. It sounds, on the surface, like a self-consciously quirky children's story that has to cling to its "but it really happened...kind of" testimonial for any guise of credibility. In other words, it could have gone the way of Andre (1994), one of the weaker animal pictures of the era. Fly Away Home, though, is a surprisingly hard-hitting experience. The film is pervaded by a strong sense of sadness and vulnerability, starting from the opening sequence, which shows a car crash from the perspective of its occupants to the sounds of Mary Chapin Carpenter. After a quieter middle, in which the characters lick and mull over their largely unspoken wounds, it builds to a transcendent third act where we experience the world from a birds' eye. I can't think of another picture, certainly from this ilk, that quite captures the thrill and the poignancy of personal growth and discovery with such dazzling use of perspective. I was fortunate enough to catch it in is theatrical run and there's a part of me that's always been a little haunted by it ever since. 2021 marks the film's 25th year, and it was always on my agenda to pay tribute to it. I probably would have waited until closer to the anniversary date itself, but it was such a good fit for the Home Sweet Home Blogathon being hosted by Realweegiemidget and Taking Up Room that it wound up being bumped to the front of the queue.

The plucky heroine of Fly Away Home is Amy Alden (Anna Paquin) a young adolescent whose contented existence with her mother (Deborah Verginella) in Auckland, New Zealand comes to an abrupt close when the two are involved in a road accident that only Amy survives. Amy is relocated to Ontario, Canada to live with her estranged father Thomas (Jeff Daniels), an eccentric sculptor who dabbles in aviation on the side. Amy initially struggles to readjust to her new environment, and to the notion of life having to resume some form of normality following her traumatic experience; she's resistant to the idea of attending school in Ontario, or of the prospective new family unit offered by Thomas's partner Susan (Dana Delany) and his brother David (Terry Kinney). Amy finds renewed motivation when she rescues a clutch of abandoned Canada goose eggs from the wreckage of a partially-bulldozed wilderness (pending development on which is the subject of great contention among the local community) and creates a family unit of her own by hatching sixteen goslings. The goslings dutifully follow Amy everywhere she goes, thanks to the phenomenon of filial imprinting, by which baby birds accept whatever being is waiting to greet them in their newly-hatched state as their mother. This creates a quandary when the time comes for her brood to fly south for the winter, for geese learn where to go by following their parents; otherwise, they end up all over the place and become a public nuisance, something local wildlife warden Glen Seifert (Jeremy Ratchford) is at pains to point out. When Seifert's proposed solution to pinion the birds doesn't go down well with Amy, Thomas devises a bold, potentially injudicious alternative; he'll build a custom ultralight aircraft for Amy and she can personally show them the route from Ontario to North Carolina. It's a solution which, finally, gives Thomas and Amy the opportunity to unite over a common goal...provided Amy doesn't break her neck en route, of course.

It was this aspect of the picture that raised some eyebrows among viewers, not least because, at the time of release, it had the misfortune of being overshadowed by a real-life tragedy. Contemporary critics, while largely enthusiastic about the film, noted that Amy's story bore an ominous resemblance to that of Jessica Dubroff, a seven-year-old girl who was killed only a few months prior while attempting a record-breaking flight across the United States with her father (media pressure to meet deadlines is deemed to have played a part in Dubroff's death, and perhaps this gave the portions of Fly Away Home where the media gets behind Amy's cause an unintentionally dark undertone back in 1996). On the film's DVD commentary, Ballard himself acknowledges that, of course, no parent in real life would expose their child to the level of risk that Thomas does Amy. But then to get too hung up on this point would be to subscribe to too literal a reading of the scenario, which is, in the end, best understood as a metaphor.

Fly Away Home is based on a true story, although the character of Amy is entirely fictitious. Thomas has a real-life equivalent in Bill Lishman, a Canadian sculptor and naturalist famed for his studies on imprinting and bird migration. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lishman conducted a number of experiments in getting imprinted geese to follow him in an ultralight aircraft, efforts that were depicted in the 1990 PBS documentary C'mon Geese. In 1993, Lishman was able to lead his geese on a successful migration, before expanding his attentions to whooping cranes and founding Operation Migration, a project dedicated to establishing a migratory route for the cranes between Wisconsin and Florida. Watching C'mon Geese, there is something incredibly, beautifully cinematic about the footage of Lishman taking flight with his geese, so it's hardly surprising that Hollywood wanted to utilise a piece of that magic to their own ends. The challenge came in dramatising Lishman's work in a narrative better suited to the needs of conventional storytelling. Hence the introduction of a younger protagonist, so that the visual splendour of the goose migration serves as an analogue to a coming of age story, in which Amy navigates her way both from childhood toward adulthood, and from loss to recovery.

 C'mon Geese (1990)

Fly Away Home formed part of a spate of pictures from the mid-1990s focusing on unlikely connections between troubled children and imperilled wildlife, the template for which was provided by the 1993 hit Free Willy. Here, the plight of the titular whale, abducted from the wild and held captive in a tiny pool in an amusement park, is echoed in the domestic trials of young hero Jesse (Jason James Ritchter), a juvenile delinquent struggling to come to terms with his mother's abandoning him, and to life with his long-suffering foster parents (Jayne Atkinson and Michael Madsen). The unruly child and disobedient whale bond, it's implied, through an intuitive sense of mutual displacement. At the end of the film, when Willy is returned to the ocean, so too has Jesse been restored to his own rightful place - not with his biological mother, as he had long hoped, but with his foster parents, whom Jesse now accepts as having filled the void left by his mother. The final line of the film, spoken by Jesse's adoptive parents, is "Let's go home", reinforcing the idea that Jesse's reinstatement to a family unit has been the end-goal of our journey all along. His acceptance of his foster parents, meanwhile, demonstrates that he has embraced change over a regression into the reassurances of childhood and is on route to becoming an adult, with his ability to part ways with his beloved whale signifying the final stage of his progression from alienated street kid to confident and responsible young man (albeit one rebellious enough to bust an orca from an aquarium). Therein lay the paradox of such pictures - they thrived on the charm and the spectacle of their human-animal interactions, yet the ultimate signifier of the child's growth typically came in their recognition that the animal was better off with its own kind in the wild. It was definitely a more sensitive rite of passage than that of old school Disney kid-and-their-animal pics like The Yearling (1946) and Old Yeller (1957), where the protagonist would demonstrate their emerging maturity by killing their four-legged companion, not least because it pointed to a world where humans and animals could co-exist, if not necessarily in close proximity. Other films within this category included the aforementioned Andre, Born To Be Wild (1995), Alaska (1996) and, in a handy intersection of the decade's eco-sensitivity and nostalgia for mid-century television, a cinematic reboot of Flipper (1996). To say nothing of the sequels and TV spin-off spawned by Free Willy (conveniently, Willy and Jesse had a habit of bumping into one another). It (1990) director Tommy Lee Wallace even tried his hand at the genre on the small screen, with a kinda-sorta sequel to the 1966 classic Born Free, Born Free: A New Adventure (1996). In this regard, Fly Away Home might be regarded as something of a formula picture. The basic elements are certainly all there - an alienated young protagonist from a broken or troubled home, a dislocated animal who provides the opportunity for healing and, above all, an emphasis on the need of the animal in question to remain wild and free, through which it doubled as a sort of totem to the newly-liberated spirits of its human cohorts. David Ingram, in Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, likewise identifies Daniels' character as part of "a trend towards a more sensitive, less brutally macho type" of male hero in environmentalist pictures, while acknowledging that this often served as "an ideological ruse" to convey more conservative messages about the ascendancy of patriarchal power. (p.38) I suppose you can accuse Fly Away Home of both adhering to and inverting that trend. On the one hand, it centres heavily on a withdrawn father rediscovering and embracing his patriarchal prowess, after his erstwhile slackness on the matter caused his family to disintegrate. But it also diverges from tradition as it nears its conclusion, in suggesting that it is qualities gained more implicitly from her mother's influence that have enabled Amy to get as far as she has.

There is an eco-friendly message regarding the encroachment of human development on wild habitat, although in practice this exists primarily as a device to drive the narrative at two distinctive points. The initial threat comes from preliminary efforts to clear the local marshlands, which leads to the eggs being abandoned, and provides a couple of early scenes in which Thomas makes a stand for the surrounding wilderness, but as a narrative thread basically fizzles once it has fulfilled its purpose (although the lack of definitive resolution may well be the point). Later, we learn that the wildlife preserve in North Carolina where Thomas and Amy intend to lead the geese is also under threat from developers, and will be bulldozed if the geese do not arrive by a specified date. This turns Amy's climactic quest into a race against the clock, which is all well and good from a dramatic perspective, but also the point at which the narrative feels most conspicuously determined by the conventions of Hollywood formula. The suggestion that the geese may eventually end up with nowhere to fly to or from provides a slick thematic parallel with Amy's own displacement, and illustrates the omnipresence of the problem, but the final conflict ends up feeling rather arbitrary, with Ken James' developer becoming something of a stock antagonist, with too little presence or development to have much impact as a character. More effective in the villain seat is Ratchford as Seifert; he provides the film with yet another obligatory Hollywood beat when he abducts and impounds the geese on the night before take-off, forcing Amy and her family to pull off an adrenalin-baiting jailbreak the following morning. He also has minimal presence throughout the film, but in what little screen time he has conveys an unctuous, understated menace, which bubbles queasily to the surface through his wielding, of all mundanities, a pair of nail clippers.

What enables Fly Away Home to excel above most other pictures of its ilk is the cinematography, which is spectacular. The low-key performances, moody direction and endearing goslings are certainly enough to keep us engaged for the first two thirds of the narrative. But when Amy climbs aboard her custom aircraft and jets off for North Carolina, the picture really takes flight (pun intended) and becomes something else entirely. The succession of aerial images showcasing the North American landscape from above are an experience unto themselves - exhilarating, awe-inspiring, haunting and poetic. The excitement of the flight sequences, and the imagery of the formation of geese flying alongside Amy's aircraft capture the splendour and astoundment of Lishman's true-life experiments, but they are also a powerful illustration of the participants' own progression as characters. Appropriately, the narrative structure mirrors that of the geese's natural development - down-to-earth and unassuming for the first two acts, before taking to the air and realising its true potential. The dramatic new perspective speaks of Amy and Thomas's desire to rise above the pain that has weighed them down, and make their way to a better, more hopeful state of being. Which, of course, is the real purpose of the journey we're on. Not that the film doesn't convey a tremendous passion for the beauty of airborne avians, but it is clearly the underlying domestic drama that's driving this formation.

In part because of the sheer number of them, we don't get to relate to the geese as characters as we do Willy, Flipper and Elsa. In general, the film avoids anthropomorphism (the scene where Amy gets one of the geese to fly by berating it via radio is about the furthest it veers in that direction) and while there's an inevitably high adorability factor to the footage of them as ickle goslings, has little interest in coaxing AFV-style pet tricks from them (aside from one moment where a gosling loses its balance atop a toilet seat). Although Amy gives each of the geese a name and knows them all as individuals, only one goose, Igor, is given distinguishing characteristics from the viewer's perspective. Born with a limp, he lags behind his siblings and makes a reluctant flyer, eventually getting himself injured and necessitating that he make the journey strapped to the back of the aircraft. (Igor apparently existed and was injured in real life when Lisham landed his aircraft on top on him.) Igor plays an important role in ensuring that we maintain some sense of personal familiarity with the geese (particularly as they mature and their cuddliness inevitably wanes), but otherwise the geese exist largely as symbols, the beauty and majesty in their taking flight serving as additional manifestations of Amy and Thomas's newfound liberation, with their occasional skewing toward danger (such as when they become side-tracked by a flock of wild geese and fly frighteningly close to a group of hunters) signifying the risks and challenges that come with taking any bold leap. To fly is, of course, to put oneself in grave danger. This is the paradox facing Thomas, who understands that his means of redeeming his bond with his daughter also has the potential to go horribly wrong. (This is something that Thomas deliberates on, and his rationale, when challenged by Susan - that one is safer in the air than on a highway - doesn't exactly put our anxieties to rest, for the reasons cited by Roger Ebert: "I think the statistics he's thinking of apply to scheduled commercial airlines, not to planes that come in a box and you put them together yourself.") When viewed in a less literal sense, however, we might comprehend Thomas's willingness to allow his daughter to pilot her own aircraft as an acceptance of the risks that must be taken in enabling her to go forth and develop into her own person. We see shades of this in an earlier sequence where Amy objects (with the ferocity of an actual mother goose) to Seifert's attempts to clip her goslings' wings, and is not won over by his insistence that pinioning is for the good of the goose. Keeping the geese grounded would enable them to remain in her care forever but, as signified in the grotesqueness with which the act of pinioning is here represented (as Ballard acknowledges on the DVD commentary, it's made all the worse for being carried out with something as mundane as nail clippers), it amounts to breaking the spirit of the goose, denying them the opportunity to develop into the creatures they are destined to be. Amy gets to dwell more consciously on the difficulty of letting her adopted offspring go their own way, when she suggests that they combat the geese's instincts by keeping them in the barn during the winter, which Thomas points out would be little different to clipping their wings. The urge to fly will come regardless. This also applies to people and their metaphorical clipped or unclipped wings.

The film's working title was Flying Wild, and this title stuck for long enough to be featured in early trailers and promotional material (if you own a copy of the original US VHS release of Jumanji, for example, you can glimpse the Flying Wild trailer there). "Fly Away Home", though, feels like a better fit in terms of the film's central themes and its more implicit narrative, which concerns Amy's odyssey to recover her sense of personal belonging. It recalls a popular nursery rhyme - albeit one about insects, not birds - evoking imagery of domestic disruption, childhood vulnerability and parental absence: "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home/your house is on fire and your children are gone." The burning house in the rhyme might be linked to the threatened marshlands favoured by the geese, to Amy's fractured psyche and to the familial discord between Amy and Thomas. The reference to absent (or dead) children suggests the estrangement that existed between Amy and Thomas for years, and Amy's lingering alienation. The ladybird, meanwhile, evokes both the robust maternal urges of Amy toward her adopted brood, or a call to arms to Thomas to step up and take charge of the daughter he has ignored for so long.

We never learn exactly what caused the relationship between Amy's mother and father to break down, a question that has long haunted Amy. The best explanation is that they were driven in fundamentally different directions - Amy had heard from her mother that they were both artists, and artists tend by nature to be selfish. There are two items in Thomas's barn that appear to symbolise the turmoils of the family's past - a tire swing, which Amy can vaguely recall being pushed in by her mother at age 3, and the large and imposing model that overlooks it, a life-sized replica of the lunar lander module. The tire swing, which provides Amy with a hazy connection to a time when her family were together, symbolises a lost innocence, but her attachment to it is double-edged. When the present-day Amy is seen swinging upon it, she does so with a dissatisfied vigour that is indicative of her frustration and desire to outgrow her disrupted childhood and take flight (literally and metaphorically). The lunar lander, while it is the crowing achievement of Thomas's work as a sculptor and has attracted a number of lucrative offers from prospective buyers, is the haunting embodiment of the family's estrangement. Probably not coincidentally, Thomas was compelled to build the ridiculous artefact around the time that Amy and her mother left, his rationale being that, "They left [the original] there. It's parked. So we needed another one. So I made an exact replica." We sense that the passion and energy Thomas poured into this project was redirected from the energy he was unable or unwilling to put into salvaging his relationship with his wife and daughter, but it also stands as a testament to his desire to make himself unreachable in the aftermath. Toward the end of the film, when Amy asks Thomas why he never came to visit her as a child, he tells her that New Zealand is a long way from Canada, which she retorts is a lame excuse. But then to Thomas, being parked on the moon and being situated on the other side of the Pacific ocean amounted to much the same thing. He found the gulf of the separation, physical and emotional, unendurable, and in lieu of attempting to repair those broken bridges, he wrote them off as gone and immersed himself in a substitute in the form of his work. He maintains his emotional wall even when Amy re-enters his care, ensuring that she's fed and attends school but generally keeping himself to himself in his shop and leaving Amy to amble around the property by her lonesome. When Thomas resolves to assist Amy in flying her geese to North Carolina, he finances his new project by selling the lunar lander, a sign that he is finally starting to emerge from his own proverbial shell and assume responsibility for Amy, not merely as a caregiver but in actively repairing the wreckage created by her upheaval and their decade of estrangement.

The implicit narrative of Fly Away Home deals with Amy's quest to find her own way home, the home in question being a metaphorical one pertaining to identity and affinity. The life she knew with her mother is now gone, the life she once had with her father is only a faded memory; where is she to roost in the present when she has nothing solid to which to hold? But there is another dimension to this implicit narrative, regarding Thomas's own quest for redemption. It is hard to miss the parallel between the gosling's predicament and Amy's, signposted particularly prominently in Seifert's warning that, "Without parental influence they'll get the urge to fly but won't know where they're going." (For as unsettling as he is, Seifert provides us with a heck of a lot of invaluable exposition.) He's talking about the geese, but his words are also evocative of Amy's estrangement, and how the respective absences of both her mother and her father has left her emotionally adrift. Thus, when Thomas leads Amy and the geese on their daring journey across North America, he is actually showing her the way, not simply to North Carolina, but out of her grief and despondency toward a renewed sense of purpose and connection, much as a goose would teach its offspring how to thrive in a turbulent world. Thomas's aviator callsign is "Papa goose", and it seems that he is indeed entirely worthy of his title. Amy, naturally, answers to the callsign "Mama goose", which is indicative her role as surrogate mother to sixteen anserine devotees, and much more.

Home for Amy ultimately represents a purer state where she is able to maintain a firm connection to both her mother and father. This is not equivalent to the innocence represented in the tire swing, something that belongs to an altogether different time, when Amy was small and her family was still physically united. Instead, Amy finds her new emotional pillar through her repaired bond with her father, and a renewed sense of her mother's continued presence in her life. As much as the flight has pivoted on the bond between Amy and Thomas, in the end it proves to be the figurative recovery of Amy's mother that enables her to complete her journey. Things go awry toward the end when Thomas's plane crashes, leaving him stranded in a field with a dislocated shoulder, and he tells Amy that she must complete the last leg of the journey alone. Amy panics, believing that she cannot find her way without her father, but Thomas assures her that she won't be without parental influence - her mother will be guiding her. This takes us into the only point in the narrative in which Amy explicitly ruminates on her feelings of bereavement, and Thomas finally assists her with coming to terms with her loss. The understanding of death as being followed by renewal, with each new generation carrying the anima of the old (literally or metaphorically), is evoked when Thomas tells Amy that her mother is in the geese she has nurtured, and also when he calls to mind the extent that Amy has become her mother's successor: "She was brave...she went off, followed her dream. Nobody helped her. You have that strength in you too." Although the journey has largely functioned as a means of re-establishing the bond between father and daughter, and reaffirming Thomas's role as the leader of the family he had once allowed to go stray, it ultimately serves a very different purpose, in enabling Amy to take her first steps toward womanhood and discover her own independent ability to pilot her way through hardship, thanks to the knowledge and attributes she has gained from each of her parents.

Fly Away Home concludes with a sequence depicting the geese splashing animatedly around their new grounds in North Carolina while bathed in a golden sunlight that evokes both the triumphant preservation of their intrinsically wild, unbound nature, and a sense of optimism regarding the future of their territory, which Amy has not only led them to but also secured for them through her efforts. As with Free Willy, the film ends with a stealthy reminder as to whose journey we have really been following, by settling on a freeze frame of Amy and Thomas, the former's head rested upon on the latter's shoulder, proof that their bond has been restored and that Amy now has a secure bedrock from which to define herself going forward. There is, however, a non-dialogue epilogue that plays over the closing credits, in which Amy, now back at her father's house in Ontario, awakens one morning the following spring to find that her geese are returning. This was the dual victory of Lishman's endeavors - once the geese had been shown the migratory route, they were able to make the journey back on their own, which in the context of Amy's story, serves as an additional affirmation of her newfound independence (Thomas, notably, is absent from this sequence). More significantly still, we close the picture with another cycle renewing itself in the form of a joyful reunion, which is evocative of something lost being recovered. The epilogue is thus indicative not only of Amy's success as a mother goose, but also of her own mother's symbolic return. Throughout the film, we catch only fleeting glimpses of Amy's mother - she appears briefly in the title sequence, after which she exists only hazily, in snippets of memories, photographs on walls and in Amy's attempts, in one scene, to recreate her by dressing in her clothing. But she has such a haunting, underlying presence through what goes largely unexpressed that we sense that this has been the real end-goal of Amy's journey all along - to locate and preserve her mother by giving her some form of tangibility in the present. It seems only appropriate for her free-spirited mother to have the last word, albeit in the form of sixteen Canada geese, as Thomas had promised us she would.

Balto (aka The World Loves An Underdog)

There was a brief window, back in the late 1980s, when it looked as though Steven Spielberg might be the one to breathe new life into Hollywood's flagging animation industry. At a time when the future of Disney's animation department seemed in question, he had rocked the boat by teaming up with ex-Disney animator Don Bluth and producing a couple of box office successes, An American Tail (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988). He also served as executive producer for the live action-animation hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which went some way in making cartoons seem hip and appealing to adult audiences again. In the long-term, though, I think it's fair to say that Spielberg procured the greater animation legacy in television than in film. Amblimation, his short-lived attempt at establishing his own feature animation department to rival Disney, just didn't click with zeitgeist the way Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs did. The London-based studio, which was formed in 1989 after Spielberg and Bluth parted ways, lasted only eight years, during which it was inevitably doomed to live in the shadow of the Disney Renaissance. Three pictures saw the light of day - An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991), We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993) and Balto (1995) - before the studio was formally closed in 1997 and its employees migrated to the then-fledgling DreamWorks Animation. (The general public was reminded of their existence, briefly, at the tail-end of 2019, when several commentators made note of the fact that one of their abandoned projects was a feature adaptation of the Broadway musical Cats.)

The Disney Renaissance caught just about all of Hollywood off of guard. Around the middle of the 1990s there was suddenly a mad scramble among studios to set up their own animation departments, once Disney had demonstrated just how amazingly lucrative they could be, and in the latter half of the decade we were treated to an entire flurry of Disney wannabes attempting to ride the animation gravy train (which, unlucky for them, was already in the process of slowing down, at least as far as traditional animation was concerned). The early 1990s, however, were a different story, for Disney had very little in the way of serious competition. Bluth had disappeared into the wilderness following the dual box office failures of All Dogs Go To Heaven (1989) and Rock-a-Doodle (1991), and the most high-profile contenders hailed mainly from Amblimation, Turner Entertainment and Hanna-Barbera, none of whom had Disney's knack for convincing audiences that cartoons were for anything other than the juvenile set. When I tell you that Balto, debuting in December of 1995, was by far the strongest non-Disney animated feature to have come out of a major studio this far along into the Disney Renaissance...it should give you some indication as to just how poor Hollywood's animated output was outside of Disney throughout the first half of the decade, because Balto is still a long way off from Disney's league. It's definitely a film that gets a lot more right than it gets wrong, but what it gets wrong is still fairly damning, its two greatest shortcomings being its weak and belabored comic relief, and a villain who manages to be astoundingly nasty but also too ridiculous to ever appear legitimately threatening. There is, nevertheless, a lot to recommend Amblination's final picture. When it's taking itself seriously (and, in spite of all that comic relief, it takes itself a good deal more seriously than the studio's two preceding efforts) and the drama and adventure of the story are allowed to shine, the results are very engaging. The music is generally good (by which I mean the James Horner score, not the insipid Steve Winwood power ballad that plays over the end credits). Its most impressive element, however, is that it conveys its moral centre in a way that's thoughtful and genuinely moving. Not bad for a studio who only two years prior had produced something as narratively and semantically incoherent as We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (on which Balto director Simon Wells also served as co-director). I'll probably end up talking about We're Back! in greater detail at a later time, because I have a similar kind of love-hate relationship with that film as I do with Rock-a-Doodle, although the "hate" part probably factors in more heavily here. We're Back! is an absolute joyride if you happen to get a kick out of mindless kids' entertainment with little to no sense of internal logic and a narrative momentum that better resembles an ungodly fever dream than an actual story. It's such a hopelessly, mind-bogglingly witless film that it's almost endearing. At the same time, it contains some of the most thoroughly muddled, insultingly facile and bizarrely judgemental moral messages I've ever seen in a family film (among them, the idea that there's something inherently wrong and depraved about getting off on your own fear). So it comes as a pleasant surprise that Balto not only has a very strong and resonant moral message, but that it delivers it with great maturity and a clear respect for the intelligence of its audience. 

Balto might have been a marked improvement on We're Back!, but it fared no better at the box office. Amblimation's complete non-reputation likely didn't help matters, but it was also a victim of poor timing. 1995, as we know, signalled a critical turning point for mainstream animation - Disney's latest offering, Pocahontas, made a handsome enough bundle, but was widely considered a disappointment coming off of the previous year's monster smash The Lion King. Meanwhile, Pixar knocked it well out of the park with their debut feature Toy Story, the first fully computer animated feature, and there was a lot of speculation as to what this could mean for the industry (all the same, I doubt anyone predicted that it would take less than a decade for traditional animation to be all but dead). Amid all the excitement, barely anybody noticed Balto, which limped into theatres a month after Toy Story and slunk back out with very few notes in its g-string. It did, however, go on to amass a sizeable following among the online animation community - certainly, there was a time, back in the mid-00s, when you couldn't turn around for all the Balto fan arts and tribute vids. The most gruesome side-effect of the film's sleeper status (aside from those two direct-to-video sequels it garnered) is that official Balto merchandise, of which there is little due to the low demand in 1995, now gets listed for truly extortionate prices on eBay, including the revoltingly cheap plastic toys made for promotional tie-in with KFC. These aren't mint in the bag either.

Balto is based on the true story of a dog who helped to save the Alaskan town of Nome during a diphtheria outbreak in 1925, although it goes without saying that the film offers a heavily fictionalised treatment of history. The truth behind the story is that in 1925 the population of Nome was threatened by diphtheria, and harsh weather conditions made it impossible to deliver the life-saving serum by aeroplane. Instead, the serum was transported to Nome by a relay of sled dog teams (an event popularly termed The Great Race of Mercy), a task that could not have succeeded if not for the incredible endurance of the dogs. Balto, the lead sled dog of the completing team, was honored with a statue in Central Park and has since gone down as one of history's most celebrated canines, although anyone with an interest in the event will tell you that, actually, the greatest stretch of the journey was fulfilled by a different team led by a dog named Togo. Furthermore, there exists some contention as to whether Balto was even the lead sled dog of his own team, or if he was simply pulled out for the press because he was the more appealing dog from a publicity standpoint. The decision to immortalise Balto and not Togo in bronze has long entailed its share of controversy, and though I understand why Leonhard Seppala, Togo's musher, felt sore on the matter, something tells me that neither Balto or Togo themselves gave a toss which one of them got the statue, so long as their bellies were filled after their arduous journey. If it's any consolation to Togo's admirers, he went on enjoy by far the better twilight years. He did some publicity touring, retired from sledding and was put out to stud, siring many puppies and producing a lineage that continues to this day. Balto, on the other hand, had been castrated at a young age, so going out to stud was out of the question in his case. He wound up as a sideshow attraction, where he and his companions languished in very poor conditions until businessman George Kimble purchased the dogs and had them relocated to the Brookside Zoo in Cleveland, Ohio.

Amblimation's film opens and closes with live action bookends set around the statue of Balto at Central Park, in which an elderly woman (Miriam Margoyles) explains the significance of the monument to her granddaughter (Lola Bates-Campbell). There is a twist reveal at the very end that connects the bookends more directly to the events of animated narrative - it's predictable enough that you could probably guess it from reading the synopsis alone, but still effective. We do, however, have to overlook the fact that the animated Balto bears little resemblance to the animal represented in the statue, and as it turns out there's good reason for that. The real Balto was a Siberian husky, but Amblimation reimagines him as a less orthodox hybrid animal - this Balto (voice of Kevin Bacon) was the product of a frowned-upon union between a male husky and a female wolf, and has grown up to be an outsider to both worlds, shunned and ridiculed by Nome's dog population and wary of the wolf packs that roam the surrounding wilderness. His only friends are an irascible but wise Russian snow goose with the deeply unfortunate name of Boris (Bob Hoskins), who regularly attempts to convince Balto that his mixed heritage is nothing to be ashamed of, and a couple of orphaned polar bear cubs named Muk and Luk (both Phil Collins), whose aquaphobia creates a social barrier between them and the rest of their species (that, and unattended polar bear cubs get cannibalised). Balto falls in love with Jenna (Bridget Fonda) a sweet Siberian husky who's more open-minded than her peers, and foul of alpha dog Steele (Jim Cummings), a bullying Alaskan malamute who fronts Nome's hottest sled team and also has his sights on Jenna. When the town's children (including Jenna's owner, Rosy) are struck down by an outbreak of diphtheria, Steele's team sets out to retrieve a supply of medicine and bring it back to Nome, but harsh weather strikes and the team gets lost on the return journey. With time running out for the sick children, Balto sets out on his own daring mission to locate the lost team and help bring them home; initially he's accompanied by Boris, Muk, Luk and Jenna, but is eventually required to complete the last leg of the journey by himself. Before they part ways, Boris advises Balto that a dog could not possibly hope to make it through the wilderness alone...but maybe a wolf could.

The decision to make Balto a dog-wolf hybrid provides the film with its pivotal conflict, although not without attracting its share of criticism. Derek Malcolm of The Guardian (quoted in Halliwell's Film Guide) felt that The Great Race of Mercy was here "grossly sentimentalised as the triumph of an unwanted mongrel", while Halliwell's themselves deemed it a "rather dull animated film that attempts to make some point about miscegenation". Yes, you could interpret the film as a commentary on ethnicity, if you so chose, but I think the point it's making is a whole lot broader than that. Balto tells the story of an outsider who yearns to fit in and wishes he were like everyone else but ultimately discovers that sometimes not being like everyone else is a tremendous blessing. In some respects it's a fairly conventional underdog story dealing with society's hostility toward those who do not conform to its standards, and an outcast whose own particular deviation is not appreciated for the remarkable gift it is until a critical moment - if you're familiar with Dumbo or Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer then you'll know the drill. What's compelling about Balto's take on the formula, however, is the implicit narrative regarding the protagonist's uneasy relationship with his undesired wolf half. In his unending quest for acceptance amongst a culture that scarcely tolerates him, Balto has buried a part of himself, at the expense that he doesn't get to experience the complete creature that he could be.

Dogs might give Balto the cold shoulder on the grounds that he is only half the critter they are, but wolves, it seems, are an altogether different story. Wolves are pivotal to the narrative of Balto, yet they have precious little onscreen presence - we catch only fleeting glimpses of wolves at two points in the film, and they exhibit none of the anthropomorphic traits of the dog characters, a deliberate tactic to preserve their status as the wild Other. The wolves have a mystique, and an animal-ness about them, which emphasises not only the extent to which they are different to dogs, but the extent to which Balto has purposely distanced himself from his own heritage as a wolf hybrid. The first of these lupine encounters occurs early on, when Balto and Boris are making their way back to their den, a disused boat on the outskirts of Nome, and a group of wolves appears on the horizon and attempts to communicate with Balto through howling. Balto shrinks away, wanting nothing to do with them, and the wolves go their own way. The wolves in this scene are vague, distant figures, which is indicative of the gulf that Balto has imposed between himself and his origins. The script is extremely vague on the details of Balto's early life; it's never explained, for example, how he came to be in the company of a goose and a couple of polar bears. We do, however, learn that the wolf in Balto's parentage was his mother (as confirmed by an early line of dialogue from Steele), which is by no means arbitrary, as it points toward Balto having been born a wild animal. Later, when Jenna questions if Balto can survive on his own in the wilderness, he tells her that "It wouldn't be the first time." If we read between the lines, we might conclude that Balto is a member of that class of heroes particularly favoured by Disney - the orphan. Regardless of what became of his mother, it's evident that Balto was disconnected from her, whereupon he ventured out of the wilderness and vowed never to return, despite the all-round reluctance of civilisation to acknowledge him as one of its own. What's important is that Balto has turned his back on the wolf half of his identity by choice, as to him it is nothing but a hindrance that keeps him from being accepted as one of the dogs. Thus, we know that the most hair-raising thing Balto is going to encounter in the wilderness, when he's finally prompted to return, is that fragment of his own identity that he left out there.

Balto received a split vote from Siskel and Ebert, who had one of their most entertaining television debates over this film (albeit less so than their infamous headbutt over Benji The Hunted). One felt that it compared poorly to Disney's recent winning streak, the other agreed that it wasn't on a par with Disney, but that it was perfectly respectable family fare, and you can probably guess which was which. Once again, I side with the latter while seeing where the former was coming from. The animation is nowhere near as strong as Disney's Renaissance standard, or even a lot of their pre-Renaissance output (during the confrontation with the Kodiak bear, for example, I can't help but be distracted by how inferior the whole thing looks to the extremely similar sequence from The Fox and The Hound - and in both cases, a moment of silence for the poor bear who had his day ruined by assholes and got drowned for it). But it's not a bad-looking film by any stretch. The $31m budget doesn't allow Amblimation to give the Alaskan wilderness the same degree of awe-inspiring grandeur as the African savannah in The Lion King, but it captures enough of its formidableness, and that's all that's needed to fuel the adventure elements of the story. It's not a particularly showy film, but perhaps its modest look is entirely befitting for a film that celebrates the triumph of the unassuming underdog. Elsewhere, Balto avoids some of the trends that were popularised by the Disney Renaissance (there are no songs, outside of the fluff that plays over the end credits) while syncing up with others. By 1995 we weren't particularly far into the era of stunt celebrity casting in animated features - even the full ripple effect of Robin Williams' acclaimed turn as the comic sidekick in Aladdin had yet to be felt at this point. All the same, I think it's fair to assume that Kevin Bacon was cast on the basis of name recognition rather than talent. Because while Bacon is a fine actor in live action projects, voice-over work is an entirely different beast and he doesn't quite have it mastered. Bacon's voice does have a nice gravelly quality that might have lent itself well to accentuating Balto's hidden ferality, but for the most part it plays like a fairly stock good guy voice-over - serviceable, but it denies Balto the privilege of a particularly strong or distinguished personality. In fairness, he's really no worse than Matthew Broderick as the adult Simba.

As noted, the comic relief is by far the weakest aspect of the picture, which gets by so much better when it isn't hung up on trying to be funny. Steele supplies the script's most adult-orientated gag, when he comes on to Jenna with a naughty bit of innuendo ("I know where all the bones are buried"), but the humor in Balto is largely comprised of the kind of broad slapstick comedy that was endemic to animated pictures from this era (before fart jokes and pop culture supplanted it as the norm), so we get an endless succession of pratfalls, characters getting hit on the head and at least one instance of a keister in the furnace. I appreciate the need for levity in a story that involves the lives of an entire town's worth of children being at stake, but the humor detracts from the film more than it does enhance it, making the final product seem less sophisticated than the drama demands. I don't have a particular problem with the goose. Boris is loud and garrulous, sure, but Hoskins plays him with a likeable enough energy that he seems more lively than obnoxious. Those two Phil Collins-voiced polar bears, on the other hand, are absolutely bewildering. I'm going to assume that they were added into the film fairly late on in development, because in general they're just kind of there. They make exactly one functional contribution to the narrative, by saving Balto from drowning in a scene that feels as though it were purposely conceived to justify the presence of these otherwise useless characters. I would hazard a guess that they were brought in to make the movie a bit more kid-friendly, but the question remains...why Collins? Seriously, he's such a baffling choice. Only one of the bears (I forget which one) speaks in an intelligible language (the other speaks in a whimpering bear language, and there's a running gag that he's apparently quite articulate in that tongue), and the voice Collins supplies sounds way too jarringly adult to pass for that of a callow bear cub. So much so that, as a 10-year-old, I honestly didn't get that Muk and Luk were supposed to be children - I thought they were just very infantile adults of diminutive size (an interpretation that might as well be canon, given that they're still "cubs" in the DTV sequels, long after Balto and Jenna have raised a litter to maturity). Muk and Luk are a conspicuous example of the kind of dead weight comic relief that gets tacked onto a story hopelessly unsuited to it by executive decision, but they're also way too head-scratching for me to feel very much antipathy toward them. No, the film's most obnoxious comic relief is situated firmly within the villainous camp, with Steele's three brown-nosing lackeys Nikki (Jack Angel), Kaltag (Danny Mann) and Star (Robbie Rist) yielding some truly ghastly attempts at a vaudeville-style routine. Steele also has a couple of groupies (both Sandra Dickinson), a gossipy Afghan hound named Sylvie and an air-headed puffball named Dixie (according to Wikipedia she's a Pomeranian, although something tells me she's not a pure-bred), the latter of whom would probably annoy me more if her appearances weren't so sparing. Also, she's not exactly comic relief, but Rosy, the young child who acts as our representative for the town's infected children, is precious in a way that's more irritating than endearing - not so much so that you root for the diphtheria, but I think there is a darker part of you that's secretly grateful to it for putting her out of commission for most of the story.

My second, and potentially more controversial quibble has to do with Steele, who is ultimately too overbearing in his villainy to work in the film's favour. You certainly feel the weight of his nastiness all throughout, and he is an infinitely stronger antagonist than Drake from the same year's The Pebble and The Penguin (who is basically a lamer variation on the exact same thing), but a little nuance would have gone an awfully long way with this dog. In part, this has to do with some late revisions that were made to his character. Steele's voice-over was initially supplied by Brendan Fraser, with the idea that he would be modelled upon the archetype of the high school jock. That changed in production, however, with Spielberg wanting to emphasise the fundamental brutality in Steele's nature, which Fraser's lighter, goofier take on the character had tended to downplay. The result being that Fraser was eventually swapped out with veteran voice actor Jim Cummings, who certainly makes Steele sound sufficiently mean and brutish (despite occasionally veering a little close to his Tigger voice). Unfortunately, that high school jock DNA is still very prevalent in his final characterisation, meaning that even at his nastiest, Steele is too much of a dumb blowhard to be taken seriously. He isn't like Gaston from Beauty & The Beast, who also had something of the high school jock in him, but had developed into a very credible threat by that film's climax - in his case, there was more of a cumulative effect, with the character becoming increasingly monstrous as a parallel to the Beast's regained humanity. On top of which, Gaston was dangerous because he knew how to use his charisma to manipulate the masses into doing his bidding. With Steele, I'm actually not too clear on how much of his sway over the local dog population (and their knock-on hostility toward Balto) is rooted in genuine admiration, or whether they go along with him out of sheer intimidation. Sylvie and Dixie seem sincere enough in their fawning, but there is an early moment establishing that Nikki, Kaltag and Star take a very different view of Steele behind his back. Either way, Steele is so upfront and unsubtle about his ugly nature from the start that the sequence where he and Balto are drawn into a head-on collision and Steele finally shows his "true colours" to the other dogs inevitably rings hollow.

Which is not to say that Steele doesn't have an amazingly dark character trajectory. When Balto finally locates the missing sled team he finds them in disarray; they took a wrong turn, fell down a ravine and, in Star's words, "our musher hit his head and he didn't get up". (That sounds like a kid-friendly way of indicating that he's dead...listen closely, however, and you can actually hear him murmuring, "Good boy", when Balto nuzzles him and, at the end, a couple of townspeople confirming that he'll be okay, both of which I suspect were added to the soundtrack late in the game.) Under the circumstances, Nikki, Kaltag and Star are prepared to put their prejudices aside and co-operate with Balto, but Steele is entirely resistant, not wishing to see anyone upstage him. The other dogs eventually tire of Steele, realising that he cares more about his own status than in getting the medicine to Nome, so they ditch him and allow Balto to lead the way. Balto's strategy was to mark the trees he'd passed, clearly indicating the route back to Nome, but Steele gets ahead of the team and marks several random trees, nullifying Balto's path and causing him to lose his way. Think about this - Steele is so determined to hold onto his position as top dog of Nome that he goes so far as to actively sabotage the medicine run. Had he succeeded, he would have doomed not only Balto, but his musher, his sled mates and the entire young population of Nome, all because he can't bear the thought of having to share his spotlight. That's just cold. All the same, Steele never develops into a fully convincing threat as Gaston did, leaving his arc to effectively fizzle. Once he's made it back to Nome he ceases to be a threat at all, since all he can do is lounge around with his groupies, concoct one flagrantly ridiculous lie after another and assume that everything went to plan. That the other dogs are prepared to swallow his self-congratulatory fibs is probably a testament  more to their gullibility than to Steele's manipulation skills. Personally, I feel that Steele would have benefited from being a little reserved with his viciousness, so that he was more understatedly cutting than outright brutish. That way, the point where Steele finally loses his cool, gets physically rough with Balto and jeopardizes the medicine might have had greater clout.

Fortunately, although Steele has a domineering presence throughout the film, he's largely peripheral to the central conflict, which has to do with Balto's internal struggle with the seemingly contradictory aspects of his identity. This is resolved in a sequence so haunting and powerfully done that I'm honestly prepared to overlook whatever reservations I've thus far expressed and declare the film a triumph. Balto, now as hopelessly lost as Steele was before him, becomes separated from the rest of the team and falls down a chasm along with the medicine supply. He comes around to find himself in the company of a large white wolf who, like those wolves he encountered earlier, attempts to communicate with him by howling and turns away when he does not respond. Balto then realises that all hope is not lost, for the medicine crate is still intact, and he wonders if he is physically capable of hauling it back up to the top of the chasm. Balto remembers the parting advice he received from Boris, that a wolf may succeed where a dog would surely fail, whereupon he stands up and finally answers the call of the white wolf. From atop the chasm, Nikki, Kaltag and Star hear the howling and initially fear that wolves are closing in on them, but become aware of Balto making his way back upward with the medicine crate, and encourage him to keep going until he reaches the top. The white wolf, meanwhile, is nowhere in sight.

This sequence has an obvious Disney analogue in the portion of The Lion King where Mufasa manifests in the clouds and reminds Simba of his regal responsibilities; both are highly symbolic moments that convey more or less the same idea, and both result in the protagonist finding their way forward by reconciling with a part of themselves they had long abandoned. With Balto, though, it happens entirely implicitly, with the only usage of dialogue at all being in the replay of Boris's words. The significance of the white wolf and its connection to Balto (if any) is never explained, creating some ambiguity as to what, exactly, Balto experiences at the bottom of that chasm. Personally, it never seemed fitting to me for the wolf to be anything other than the image of Balto's mother, which strikes me as the most satisfying interpretation from a thematic standpoint. The question that inevitably raises is how Balto's long-lost (and potentially dead) mother conveniently happened to know when her son was in dire need of moral support, so that she could be in the right place at exactly the right time. Well, here's your answer:

Pay close attention during the wolf's appearances, and you'll notice that when Balto rejects its offer of kinship, it doesn't simply turn and walk away from him - no, it literally vanishes into thin air as it goes. Then, when Balto has his change of heart and calls out to it, it rematerialises out of that same thin air. The spectral qualities of the wolf are a good indication that it is not actually a corporeal being that he happened to randomly bump into at the bottom of the chasm, but a projection of something that had been lurking inside him all this time. Balto is dragged (literally and figuratively) to his lowest point, having fallen down the chasm, and coming face to face with the cursed side of his genetics is, on the surface, the ultimate signifier of his having hitting rock bottom. For Balto, the wolf's only function throughout life has been to weigh him down and keep him from realising his potential as a dog. After surveying the situation, Balto comes to the opposite conclusion - that the wolf is very necessary in order for him to find his way back up and to achieve his peak. The white wolf is a reminder of Balto's origins and of his connection to the wilderness, but it is also his own mirror image and an emblem of his untapped potential (as Mufasa ultimately was to Simba). Embracing the very qualities that define him as an outsider is no small task for a canid who, above all, simply wants to fit in, but Balto has discovered a sense of belonging that extends beyond mere conformity. Viewed up close, the maligned wolf is an impressive and magnificent creature, and he understands that to have this as part of his DNA is a tremendous advantage.

The white wolf leaves behind foot prints, which some might interpret as evidence of corporeality, but I would argue that these too are highly symbolic. Earlier, Balto's large paws were a source of stigma, as even Jenna was initially unnerved by them. By placing his foot in the print of the white wolf and affirming their connection, those large awkward paws instead become a symbol of empowerment. As does the act of howling, something that Steele had earlier derided with the taunting declaration, "I've got a message for your mother". One reason why I find it particularly appealing to look on the white wolf as Balto's mother is that it works as an indirect callback to this scene, where the concept of communication with his mother was openly mocked through the crude caricature howling of the sled dogs. Later on, when Balto reaches out, metaphorically, and connects with his mother half, there is a great nobility in their gesture of kinship, something expressed that goes well beyond the intelligible but often inane chatter of the dogs.

Following his great epiphany, Balto and the sled dogs find their way back to the point where Steele's foul play had previously foxed them, only Balto, by trusting in his wolf senses, is now able to discern the correct route. After that, they face a couple of additional challenges in the form of an ice bridge and an avalanche, but that's basically all filler. Once Balto has overcome his self-doubt and learned to be fully at ease with the wolf within, the major conflict has been resolved and we may as well skip to the big finish, where Balto arrives back in Nome and is welcomed as a hero by its human and canine residents alike. Significantly, he announces his return by howling, indicating that Balto is now out and proud about his wolfdom.

Balto never has it out with Steele on his return; instead he gets a very low-key comeuppance, where he's exposed as a liar and angrily abandoned by his groupies. This is the one thing that Ebert, in his written review, took issue with - while admitting that the non-violent resolution was, in theory, a laudable move on the part of the film-makers, he was disappointed that Steele never got to bear the full brunt of Balto's lupine ferocity: "if ever there was a dog that deserved to have an angry wolf make dog meat out of him, it's Steele. Balto! Attack!" Had things gone in that direction, however, it would have vindicated the general assumption among Nome that Balto's wolf connection made him dangerous. Instead, Balto exhibits something far more commendable in the face of Steele's brutality: sheer tenacity. He rises above Steele's repeated attempts to draw him into a physical fight, while not backing down in his own efforts to see that the medicine crate resumes its journey to Nome. And given Steele's overall peripherality to the film's central conflict, I'm quite happy for him to be treated as a narrative afterthought. Added to which, there is something very refreshing about a mainstream animated feature, from this era, that forgoes the temptation to destroy its villain in a sensational puff of plot convenience, another Disney-ism that I think Balto is all the better for resisting. Historically speaking, Disney villain deaths are a lot rarer than people assume - you'll find that quite a high number of villains from the first four decades or so got to the end in one piece - but from the mid-1980s onward it became standard procedure to off your antagonist during the climax, with the Renaissance era yielding a grand total of three main villains who survived their respective features.* I get that a dramatic character traditionally warrants a dramatic resolution, but there is something to be said for finding a solution that doesn't involve completely wiping another being from existence. Clemency toward villains is fine by me. Watching this in early 2021, however, I do have this lingering reservation about how it all plays out; following the events of the past - I don't know - four or five years, the film comes off as endearingly optimistic in its assumption that people will automatically abandon a liar the instant that concrete evidence of their untruths surface. 

Balto's disappointing box office in 1995 was to be the end of the road for Amblimation - the studio closed two years later, denying us the opportunity to ever know if their take on Cats would have been any better than Tom Hooper's. The distressing glut of DTV animated sequels in the late 90s/early 00s, however, eventually prompted Universal Cartoon Studios to revisit the film and mine it for its franchise potential (after they had already sequelised the living snot out of The Land Before Time) - hence the existence of two straight-to-video sequels, Wolf Quest (2002) and Wings of Change (2004). As a rule, I prefer not to acknowledge Disney's ridiculous line of DTV sequels, and perhaps I'm better off applying the same policy here. To be fair, I never saw Wings of Change, but I can still recall my heart sinking at the start of Wolf Quest when I heard Balto (now voiced by Maurice LaMarche) say to Boris, "You know that the dogs here still tease me because I'm part wolf." What, still? Is there seriously no pleasing you, Nome?

* The surviving villains are: Jafar from Aladdin (who died in the DTV sequel), Governor Ratcliffe from Pocahontas (who died a pretty gruesome death in real life) and Hades from Hercules (who is a god and therefore immortal).

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #32: How To Explain Pixels To A Dead Squirrel (Sega Game Gear)

So, yes. Back in the early 1990s Sega had this downright morbid obsession with featuring dead animals in their advertising. In 1992, UK viewers were alerted to the launch of Sonic 2 with the image of Steven O'Donnell attempting to revive a moribund hedgehog, in a disturbing spot that also functioned as a backhanded PSA for an existing hedgehog charity. In the US, Sega plugged the Game Gear, their rival to Nintendo's better-known Game Boy, with a spot suggesting an alternative usage for a squirrel with rigor mortis. If you thought that licking toads was a good way to get high, that's nothing compared to the psychedelic effects of bludgeoning your cranium with roadkill. This bizarre scenario was topped off by having the re-animated squirrel scream out the company's then-signature battle cry of "SEGA!"

I'm still largely perplexed by that Steven O'Donnell hedgehog ad, but in this case it's not too hard to discern the visual metaphors. The creepy zombie squirrel is an unnervingly offbeat touch, but not to the point of concealing the mean-spirited intentions behind this ad, which formed part of a wider campaign dedicated less to extolling the virtues of the Game Gear than in rubbishing consumers who were satisfied with the Game Boy and its deficiencies in the colour department. The Game Gear's major selling point was that it was more technologically advanced than Nintendo's console, since it supported colour, and colour, so Sega would have us believe, is what all the smart kids respond to. There was a hidden cost to all this colour, however, as the Game Gear boasted dismal battery life compared to the more energy-efficient Game Boy, which was clearly the smarter choice from an economical perspective. Consumers were likewise turned off by the Game Gear's weaker selection of titles and the bulkier size (next to the comparatively sleeker, lighter Game Boy - yes, exactly). As such, the Game Gear never came close to toppling the Game Boy's reign, no matter how many dead decaying animals it threw in your direction - and no, it didn't stop with the squirrel. In another spot the cry of "SEGA!" came from a fly getting its body fried in a bug zapper, the green flickering light of which doubled as entertainment for a mentally-challenged family whose vacuous fascination was likened to that of a Game Boy devotee. The campaign was viciously unsubtle on the whole "monochrome is for morons" narrative, to a degree that frankly wouldn't fly by modern-day standards, but it was also visually repellent in a manner plainly designed to represent the Nintendo-playing experience as utterly squalid.

Hence the emphasis on the dead squirrel, and the flies - they signify grime, decay and degradation. Above all, they're indication of Nintendo as an entertainment dead-end. And they're accordingly unpleasant to look at. The hedgehog in the aforementioned Mega Drive ad looked sufficiently unresponsive, but was blatantly not a real hedgehog. The squirrel here, though, appears to be a genuine ex-squirrel, fresh (or not so fresh) from a date with the taxidermist. The Nintendo-playing sciurine abuser, meanwhile, is played by actor Ethan Suplee, shortly before he launched his movie career with a role in Kevin Smith's 1995 film Mallrats. Here, he's another derogatory representation of the Nintendo-playing crowd, with Sega clearly going for the fat = stupid shorthand that was still very acceptable in the 1990s (it's probably not a coincidence that the Game Gear player has a significantly slimmer body shape). Tellingly, he thinks nothing of lifting a dead animal off the litter-strewn ground (or even positioning himself in such a flagrantly unsanitary venue in the first place) and toying with it, which I'm sure was perceived as the perfect metaphor, in Sega's world, for what Game Boy players were doing on a regular basis.

The squirrel ultimately voices its objections to its mistreatment at the hands of Suplee by screaming out in solidarity with the competition; the name "Sega" represents a flicker of life amid the physical and mental inertia, the means of rising above the putrefaction. Just keep in mind that that ascension requires 6x AA batteries, and even that won't take you particularly far.

Beware The Bad Cat Bearing A Grudge!: Some Notes On Duchess

Let's kick off 2021 with some in-depth discussion around my all-time favourite movie quote:  "Beware the bad cat bearing a grudge." This line originated from the 1995 film Babe, and is spoken by the narrator (Roscoe Lee Browne, whom you might also recognise as the voice of Francis the bulldog from Oliver & Company) in reference to the unsavoury intentions of Duchess the cat toward its titular character, an unprejudiced pig voiced by Christine Cavanaugh. We are informed by the narrator that this is an old adage that one would do well to heed. Why it strikes such a chord with me, I don't know. It's certainly not because I have any particularly strong antipathy toward cats. Rather, I think it has something to do with the delectable ominousness with which Browne delivers the line. He makes the (fairly ridiculous) statement sound so convincingly baleful that I was somewhat disappointed, later in life, to have to conclude that, alas, no such adage actually existed (although I suspect it may be a comical variation on the adage "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts"). Which is perhaps felicitous where cat-kind is concerned. The narrator is at pains to stipulate that most cats are nice and that Duchess is an unusually bad apple, although his feline apologism is arguably undermined by the very existence (in-universe, anyway) of an adage such as "Beware the bad cat bearing a grudge", implying that when cats are malevolent, they're particularly so.

One of Babe's notable features is its lack of any truly obvious villain. To an extent, I think it's a film that's just too warm and open-hearted to want to designate any one particular character to the role of bad guy. There are several minor antagonists, like the feral dogs who kill Maa (Miriam Flynn) and the sheep rustlers who make off with a portion of the Hoggett flock, but none of these characters are involved in the story for long enough to qualify as anything more than plot devices. Rex the male sheepdog (Hugo Weaving), is the character who stands in most direct opposition to Babe throughout, in attempting to keep the pig from upending the established order of life on the Hoggett farm, and he is introduced as a fairly ominous figure - by the end, though, he's demonstrated that he's really not that bad, and seems to have come around to Babe and the radicalism he embodies. Esme Hoggett (Magda Szubanski) spends most of the movie ruminating on Babe's potential as dinner table fodder, yet she's actually quite a likeable character in spite of it - largely because Szubanski gives such a charmingly effervescent performance (also the reason, I suspect, why she was given such an upgraded role in the 1998 sequel). She does, however, bear one of the great iconic signifiers of cinematic villainy in the right-hand cat she dotes on. Duchess is the pampered pet of Esme, and alone among the farmyard fauna in recognising Esme, and not Arthur Hoggett (James Cromwell), as "The Boss". She tells Babe that her designated role is "to be beautiful and affectionate" to Esme, but this is clearly not the full story, for Duchess serves a very different function, both around the farm and for the purposes of the story. And if any character deserves to be singled out as the villain of Babe, it's Duchess. It's easy enough to conclude otherwise, because the true extent of her villainy does not become apparent until fairly late on in the picture, when she attempts to sabotage Babe's confidence on the night before his entry into the sheepdog trials, for no reason other than sheer vindictiveness. This is the only point in the picture where Duchess showcases any out-and-out villainy, so she, like the feral dogs, could be dismissed as another minor bump on Babe's long road to victory. Unlike the feral dogs, however, Duchess has a presence that's maintained all throughout the picture, and it's not an especially warm or endearing one. When she does finally approach Babe and take her shameless little stab at breaking his spirit, it feels as though we're seeing a seething malevolence that's been coming to a brew this entire time. I would posit that Duchess is our villain, though, not so much because she has an underlying disdain for Babe that only fully rears its head in the film's third act, but because she's the personification of the more abstract threat Babe is up against, and to which the naive and trusting pig remains happily oblivious until it walks right up to him and makes itself known.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to suppose that Duchess is the cold spectre of death hanging over the Hoggett Farm - watch carefully, and you'll see that she puts in eerie appearances during both portions of the story where a member of the farmyard community dies. She signifies not the general inevitability of death, but a very specific, omnipresent kind of threat - namely, the threat of death arising from the Hoggetts themselves. One of the paradoxes of the story is that the greatest danger on Hoggett Farm lies at the centre, with the animals' benefactors; the very forces that sustain them could just as easily choose to slaughter them for their own sustenance. Arthur and Esme are warm and charismatic people, yet the ominous little demon that lies nestled within their living room is an uneasy reminder of that darker side of their nature, and of the harsh reality of life on the farm that most of its residents feel they have little choice but to live with. Babe, technically, is in the clear early on - we sense that Arthur feels too great an affinity for the pig to dish out such a fate, even before he gets wise to his potential as a sheep-herder, hence why he is so resistant to Esme's ambitions of broiling him for Christmas lunch. Nevertheless, the very qualities that make Babe endearing - his guilelessness, and his open-hearted desire to see only the best in man and beast - are also slightly troubling, in that it never occurs to Babe that the people in whom he's invested such deep and unwavering trust would have readily devoured him, under slightly different circumstances, and Duchess gives an intrusive voice to that alternate future he narrowly evaded. Her role on the Hoggett Farm is not to dispense beauty or affection, but to enforce the ugly, cold notion that nobody escapes their fate. This is why Babe's entry into the house constitutes more than just a threat to Duchess's cozy spot beside the fireside, for it undermines her entire raison d'etre. When she tells Babe that Arthur is simply having fun with him and that "sooner or later, every pig gets eaten; that's the way the world works", she is obviously twisting the truth to suit her own vindictive ends, but it's also a reassertion of her own being, and everything that she personally stands for.

Duchess is Esme's cat, and as such it's tempting to interpret her as an avatar specifically for Esme's carnivorous intentions toward Babe. This much is certainly implicit by Duchess's first appearance, when we see her wrapped around her boss's shoulders as Esme confides in her the long list of culinary dishes she anticipates preparing from Babe's assorted body parts. The cat seems harmless enough at this point, yet Esme's words, "What would we do with a pig, eh, Duchess?", make her complicit in the hypothetical butchering. In practice, though, it is Arthur upon whom the dispatching duties fall, and as much as he clearly detests the cat, it is he with whom she has the greater symbolic tie. His duality as both nurturer and executioner is emphasised during a sequence where Arthur comes dangerously close to shooting Babe (albeit not for his meat), and Babe goes willfully toward the shotgun because of a vague memory from his early life in a factory farm where long shiny tubes produced food - although, in his morbid naivety, he lands on the truth when he deduces that some great surprise will surely come out of the end.

Babe was adapted from the 1983 novel The Sheep-Pig by British author Dick King-Smith (in the US it was published under the title Babe The Gallant Pig). In terms of its basic narrative trajectory, it's a very faithful adaptation, with most of the key events (the rustlers, the feral dogs and the climax at the sheep dog trials) deriving directly from the book. The film does, however, expand upon the world of the novel considerably, in adding several supporting characters with their own narrative arcs and niches. Duchess was one of these new additions, along with Rex, Ferdinand and the mouse trio. The film, more so than the book, puts emphasis on the idea that the various animals at Hoggett Farm are expected to know and accept their place, whether the outcome is favourable to them or not, and most of the new additions feed into this theme in some way. Like Rex, Duchess is concerned with upholding the status quo of the farm and shares his hostility toward animals of lower status (in her words, animals without "purpose"). The two of them seem to come at it from somewhat different angles, however. Although Rex does not, at first, particularly care for Babe, I don't get the impression that he actively looks forward to what he assumes will be the pig's fate, more that he accepts it as part of an established order that he has neither the right nor the inclination to question (I also don't get the impression that Rex and Fly (Miriam Margoyles) are a particularly close couple, and suspect that they produce an annual litter out of that same obligation, but that's a discussion for another time). Duchess, on the other hand, seems to regard the standard outcome for those animals without purpose with an almost sadistic relish. She was voiced by the late Russi Taylor (better known as the voice of Minnie Mouse and Martin Prince)*, although she's silent for most of the film and only speaks during the one scene where she talks to Babe, which plays into her generally sinister aura. Prior to that, the only indication we get that Duchess converses with the other animals at all comes from the horse's mouth - he informs his company that he's heard from the cat that this bizarre human ritual is called "Christmas". Which itself links her to death, for Ferdinand the duck (Danny Mann) recognises "Christmas" as another term for "carnage". 

Just like a cat, Duchess has a lethality that gradually creeps up on you throughout the course of the picture. Her first major role in the story occurs early on, when Ferdinand talks Babe into breaking one of the fundamental rules of the Hoggett Farm - that only dogs and cats are allowed inside the house. As noted, Ferdinand is another film-exclusive character, his main narrative function being to emphasise to Babe the rigidity of the existing order on the Hoggett Farm, and provide a cautionary example of the folly of violating that order. Ferdinand is a duck who attempts to perform the morning duties of a rooster in the misguided hope that it will spare him from the abattoir - an approach that makes him, at best, a ludicrous curiosity to the other animals and, at worst, a trouble-maker. When the Hoggetts invest in an alarm clock, or "mechanical rooster", Ferdinand sees this as unwelcome competition and concocts a scheme to sneak into the house while the humans are out and remove it. The greatest challenge comes in getting past the dormant Duchess, and Ferdinand manages to coax the impressionable Babe into undertaking this challenge for him, on the basis that he's allergic to cats. I would have assumed that this was a whopper designed to cover for the fact that Ferdinand is too cowardly to do the dirty deed himself (the narrator seems to imply this, when he describes Babe as "gullible"), except that he does actually sneeze as he gets close to Duchess. Could be psychosomatic, I suppose. Duchess is clearly our antagonist throughout this sequence, but her antagonism is played chiefly for comic suspense, culminating in a Tom and Jerry-esque visual punchline where the cat winds up drenched in paint.

After this, it takes a while for Duchess to come up as a major plot point again, although she does make a couple of lower-key appearances in between which emphasise the more unsettling nature of her presence around the farm. The first of these is following the death of Rosanna the duck, who is slaughtered for the Hoggetts' Christmas dinner when Arthur is able to convince Esme that Babe is off the menu (the sequence is something of a fake-out, as we are taunted with the possibility that the slaughtered duck might have been Ferdinand). Babe, observing the scene from his designated spot beneath the horse cart, sees Arthur emerge from the abattoir, and then sees Duchess slinking out behind him, gleefully licking a paw, from which one of Rosanna's feathers is visibly protruding. This grim sequence comes with a jarring seasonal flavour, as off-screen carollers can be heard chanting "Away in a Manager" as it happens, and I don't think it a coincidence that Duchess's appearance is juxtaposed with the lyrics, "Take us to Heaven to live with thee there." This is surely one of the film's darkest and most understated jokes. The lyrics evoke the inevitability of death, yet the promise of salvation (and the peaceful, tender barn scene described throughout the carol in question) feel disturbingly incongruous beside the carnal brutalities of the abattoir.

The second really ominous appearance from Duchess occurs during the aforementioned scene where Arthur prepares to shoot Babe, erroneously believing him to be Maa's killer. Duchess is nowhere to be seen during the sheep's death per se - after all, Maa was killed by outside forces, so her powers aren't pertinent there - but she does act as a harbinger to the pending catastrophe awaiting Babe. When Arthur first appears with the gun, Duchess is shown, seemingly at random, trotting along in front of him, and one gets the uncomfortable impression that the cat is actively leading him. This, even more so than the above Christmas scene, hammers home my perception that there is something really unpleasantly uncanny about this cat. Fly is able to get the truth from the sheep - that Maa was killed by feral dogs, and Babe defended her - and manages to momentarily distract Arthur by barking. It is, perhaps ironically, Esme who ultimately saves Babe, when she comes with news of a police alert about the feral dogs. Esme and Duchess actually end up being diametrically opposed in this sequence - whereas Duchess was willing him one direction, Esme very pointedly pulls him in the other when she asks him what on earth he's doing with the gun - reinforcing the idea that Duchess is Arthur's dark shadow and not Esme's.

See? So freaky.

Things finally come to a boil between Babe and Duchess during the third act, when Esme leaves for the weekend and Arthur takes the opportunity to play loose with some of the conventions of the farm, including allowing Babe into the house and faxing his entry to the upcoming sheepdog trials. Duchess is disgusted by the development, and expresses her objections by lacerating Babe's snout. The really juicy physical confrontation, however, is between Arthur and Duchess, for he grabs her by the scruff of the neck and turns her out into the rain. Juicy, because not only can you tell that this something he's been wanting to do to this vile cat for a long time, but he's also going to war with an aspect of his own nature. Duchess is only temporarily cast out as opposed to permanently banished, and we sense that, so long as Arthur still has use for the abattoir, and the shotgun, their partnership is not over. But he's sent out the message that she has no place within this particular equation, and that the kind of cold, set-in-stone fatalism she stands for has been overridden by greater forces still. What really seems to fuel Duchess's resentment on the matter is not being cast out into the rain while Babe enjoys the comforts of the Hoggetts' living room, but becoming the subject of mockery from Ferdinand, a character who had, up until now, lived in fear of her and everything she embodies. This is what convinces her that her power over the farm is lessening and swift action must be taken. So she goes back inside and takes great pleasure in being the one to crush Babe's long-standing innocence concerning human-pig relations. Babe is shaken enough to flee the house, while Duchess assumes her spot by the fireplace, a gesture averring, superficially, that the status quo has been upheld.

But of course, she hasn't really won. Try as she might, she couldn't break the bond between Babe and Arthur. Babe has his moment of deep personal crisis, but is reminded the following day of how much Arthur cares for him, and reaffirms his trust. He then goes onto the sheep-dog trials and wins with flying colours. Duchess, though, does not reappear following her intense verbal confrontation with Babe. Which is maybe as good a sign as any that she's been vanquished - her ominousness is given no air at all in the final, triumphant sequence.

It was not, however, the last we'd see of Duchess period, as she makes a small non-speaking cameo in the film's 1998 sequel Babe: Pig In The City, although I don't recall her having a particularly impressive or sinister aura this time around. Indication that Duchess has been metaphorically declawed by Babe's successful subversion of the established order, or one of several areas in which the sequel failed to comprehend what had made the original film so appealing? I admit that, while the original has always been one of my favourites, I've long struggled with the sequel. Dick King-Smith never wrote a direct sequel to his novel (there was a spin-off about one of Babe's descendents, but I remember next to nothing about it), but back in the 1990s it was standard procedure that when you had a successful children's film, you sequelised it, and why would Babe be any exception? Many of these sequels felt as though they were hastily conceived and put into production in order to capitalise on the momentum of the original while it lasted, and frequently settled for recycling whatever had worked the first time - hence, Kevin's stupid negligent parents lost him again, Jesse had to keep on saving Willy's hapless whale hide long after he'd set him free, etc, etc. Babe: Pig In The City makes the less common mistake of going too far in the opposite direction, ie: it manages to avoid retreading itself (although taking things to "the city" was a fairly stock response for a follow-up to a film with a smaller or more rustic scope, eg: Home Alone, Homeward Bound), but is so disconnected from the world and character of the original as to not even feel as though it belongs in the same narrative universe. Babe: Pig In The City has always struck me as a very, very misguided production - nevertheless, it's one of those pictures where I feel obligated by a sense of brand loyalty to periodically revisit it and see if I can, somehow or other, come to terms with its existence. So far...there are things I'll certainly never like about the sequel, such as the chimps in clothing (is there any more perfect metaphor for the film's complete and utter dislocation from the original?) and the near-total lack of Cromwell, but I have come around to the Peter Gabriel song and to isolated instances of its quirky humor. The last time I saw the film in its entirety may have been as far back as 2009, so I suppose in 2021 I am long overdue for another visit. If there are any further developments, you'll hear about them.

 

 * Also Penny Tompkins from The Critic. There are actually a few Critic alumni in the cast. Babe's voice, Christine Cavanaugh, was Marty Sherman, while Doris Grau makes a rare flesh and blood appearance as one of Esme's friends. So many greats no longer with us.