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).
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