Wolf Awareness Week - Day 1

 

Balto II: Wolf Quest

2002

D: Phil Weinstein

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Pros: Decent Animation, Some Touching Moments

Cons: New Age Pseudo-Mysticism

     Yes, Wolf Awareness Week is a thing, and I’ve decided make a review of a wolf movie on each of its days.  It’s no secret that America loves wolves.  We love them so much that a vice presidential candidate supported hunting them, and we were so offended that we turned control of our country over to someone who thinks that abortion should apply to the already born.  There’s something about this creature’s beauty and mystery that captures our collective imagination more than even more formidable animals. 

     I really enjoyed Balto.  Though there was some Disnification involved (such as the inclusion of pointless comic relief characters), it did as much justice to the real event as I suspect an anthropomorphic animal movie would.  It still took the situation seriously and kept the suspense appropriately high.  And like any good animated family film, it inspired a series of mediocre direct-to-video sequels.  While a title like Wolf Quest certainly indicates quality, Balto II surprisingly isn’t that good.  When I watched this, I had to modify my list for Wolf Awareness Week, as it would have been wrong not to include this movie.  Its sheer wolfaboonery is staggering. 

    After the events of the first movie, Balto (Maurice LaMarche) and his love interest Jenna (Jodi Benson) have a litter of six.  Most of the puppies look like Jenna, a purebred Husky who looks like a Border Collie for some reason, but one, Aleu, looks just like her wolfdog father.  In fact, it’s said that she looks even more like wolf than Balto does.  This causes some worry for the parents when they give the puppies away for adoption.  From an anthropomorphic point of view, it is a bit unsettling that the parents would do this.  Nome, however, is depicted in this movie as nothing more than a block of buildings, which implies that they could still have contact with their children afterward.  Unfortunately, this is not conclusively established until the next movie.  Aleu is told not to howl like a wolf (though huskies seem to howl, too) while on display, but she says she can’t help the instinct (even though it seems to be learned behavior, otherwise what’s this guy doing?).  While the puppies that look like Border Collies Huskies get adopted quickly, their more lupine sister is rejected, and it is a little sad to watch.  The movie seems to ignore the fact that, despite their appearance, all the other puppies in the litter are also wolf hybrids and may have unpredictable temperaments.

     Years later, we see a grown Aleu (Lacey Chabert) playing in the woods with her father and the comic relief characters from the last film, Boris (Charlies Fleischer), Muk and Luk (Kevin Schon).  In a conversation with Balto, we find out the latter has yet sit her down and tell her some necessary truths.  She is nearly full-grown and she is under the impression that she still has a chance to get adopted by a human family.  Drama strikes when she encounters a hunter with a Winchester repeater and innocently runs toward him to play.  The hunter responds the way anyone would if he gun and there was a wolf charging toward him, but Balto tackles him just in time.  You’d think he would have taught Aleu some common sense tips how avoid being mistaken for a wolf and getting shot.  Perhaps he thought doing that would just be encouraging the Hunting Culture.  He finally has to tell his distraught daughter that they are part wolf, a revelation that results in Aleu throwing a teenaged tantrum in which she tells Balto that she hates him and runs off.  She should have gone to her mother, who would have probably comforted her by revealing that her own mother banged a Border Collie, but she didn’t.

     Balto, assuming that she just needs to blow off some steam, goes to sleep and has a cryptic and prophetic dream where he is pursuing some cervines over breaking ice and a body of water while being menaced by a ghostly raven.  It starts out not unlike this, only without the awesome music.  The dreams have been occurring throughout the beginning of the movie, and are decidedly repetitive and tedious.  When he wakes up and talks to his friends, he realizes that Aleu has not come back and he goes off looking for her.  He starts encountering the ghostly raven, as well as some symbolic animals seen on a totem pole in his dream.  The first is a vixen (Mary Kay Bergman) who, despite her supposedly being a clever trickster, has gotten her neck and paw caught in an awkwardly-placed trap on a fallen tree over a river.  When Balto frees her, she repays him by shoving him into the rapids below.  While he struggles to swim, the vixen shouts to him that he must help himself.  So, much like a vulpine version of Jigsaw, she just did a pointlessly cruel thing to someone under the pretense of giving him an opportunity for self-discovery.  You know, I should just start chasing people with intent to kill and eat them while giving them a pep talk.  Helping people with their spiritual journeys is fun. 

     After some other scenes with other characters, the movie suddenly cuts to a scene in medias res where Balto is surrounded by three demonic wolverines (Rob Paulsen, Kevin Schone and Mary Kay Bergman), who attempt to trash talk him into submission.  When he refuses to back down, the wolverines disappear into a mist (this happens a lot in the movie).  Boris, Muk and Luk try to accompany him, but they are rebuffed by an unknown mystic force.  I’m all for deus ex machinas when they take the comic relief characters out of the movie.

     Meanwhile, Aleu ventures into a cave where she sees a mouse named Muru (Peter MacNicol) playing music that sounds like a church hymn through some magic crystals.  He points out some constellations on the cave walls, and asks Aleu who she is.  When she tells him she is the daughter of a wolfdog and a Border Husky, he says that that’s what she is, and not who she is.  Having made his point and singing a forgettable song, he…becomes one of the constellations.  Okay.  Aleu leaves the cave and is promptly attacked by a demonic bear.  At this point, Balto finally finds her and helps her fight.  When Aleu looks into the bear’s eyes, she “sees its thoughts” and does something absolutely baffling.  She tells her father that they must escape the bear by jumping off the nearby cliff.  When Balto refuses, she shoves him off and jumps after him (there seems to be a theme of Balto’s getting shoved off high places by women).  The movie reveals this:

That's CRAP.

They have landed on a flat surface that was no more than ten feet below the “cliff” which slopes down.  That’s crap.  The bear, apparently too lazy to follow them, disappears into a mist.

     Balto is happy because now he thinks they can go home, but Aleu tells him she has to find out who she is because a pious mouse told her to.  I would agree with Balto that family and upbringing plays an essential part in defining who you are, but the movie seems to be siding with nature over nurture.  They encounter a wolf pack led by Nava (David Carradine), who wants to lead the pack to more fertile lands to find food.  He has his share of obnoxious mysticism, since he can apparently jump into trees and become one with them.  Unfortunately, a younger wolf named Niju (Mark Hamill) wants to usurp Nava and invade the lands of other packs.  When Balto and Aleu get involved, everyone believes Balto will be the one who take over leadership from the aging Nava due to his visions and the fact that latter has never prepared a successor for some reason.  In what is arguably the most absurd moment in the whole movie,  the floating ice on the nearby lake conveniently forms a pathway to another land where there is food. 

It's a bridge of bullshit!

When the wolves attempt to cross the Bullshit Bridge, Niju decides to make trouble, which separates him, Nava, Aleu and Balto from the pack.  At some point in the skirmish, Aleu is goes underwater and apparently ends up in another dimension where space and physics do not apply.

When it’s apparent that Nava cannot swim across to the pack, Aleu realizes it is her destiny to lead the wolves in their new home.  She says goodbye to Balto and swims across to the other wolves.  It’s good that they’re open-minded enough to allow someone who’s  ¾ dog to lead them, especially one with little to no experience.  Now one may wonder: if that was Aleu’s destiny all along, why was Balto the one having all those dreams and going through all that self-discovery described in the fourth paragraph?  Why, to lead audience astray so they can be “surprised” by the not-at-all-predictable conclusion, of course! 

      After Nava leaves Balto to go and attempt to reconcile with Niju, Balto sees a vision of the white wolf similar to the one from the previous movie, which is suggested to be his mother before it disappears into a mist.  He then has some flashbacks to the times in which Aleu was a puppy, which I must admit choked me up a bit.  Unfortunately the movie doesn’t seem to care that Jenna never got a chance to say goodbye.

      Balto II: Wolf Quest is an extremely cheesy movie with about as much pseudo-Native American spiritualism as one would expect.  It’s not too surprising that it was like a film version of a wolf t-shirt.   There’s a lot to dislike about it, such as the pointless stretches of plot made as if to intentionally mislead us while providing obligatory mysticism.  I particularly don’t like its position on the nature vs. nurture question.  Despite this it has its redeeming features.  The comic relief characters were thankfully downplayed.  The scenes with Aleu as a puppy melted my heart because I’m a softie.  Animation is decent and the voice acting is good, too.  I liked Maurice LaMarche’s performance as Balto.  I don’t have a copy of the first movie in order to make a comparison with Kevin Bacon’s voice, but I’m a little biased toward LaMarche since I think it appropriate that voice roles be filled by voice actors.  David Carradine fits well as the wise leader of a wolf pack.  Mark Hamill pretty much uses his Joker voice in his role while Rob Paulsen, Jeff Bennet and Joe Alaskey voice his cronies.  Finally, at its core, Balto II actually has a pretty solid premise: a girl trying to find her destiny and a father who has to find the strength to let go.  If not for the pseudo-mysticism and the pons ex machina, it might have actually been a decent movie.