A dog-sled team in 1925 crosses the wilderness and battles a ferocious blizzard to bring medicine to the diphtheria-stricken city of Nome, Alaska. No, this isn’t the latest documentary on the History Channel, it’s the plot of an animated movie that debuted thirty years ago this Holiday season.
Balto, from Amblimation, Steven Spielberg’s animation studio, told this decidedly different story (based on real-life events), and just before the film’s release, director Simon Wells discussed the creative team’s vision for Balto as an animated feature.
“This is a classic story,” said Wells in 1995. “It has everything you want from animation. It’s very emotional, it’s very dramatic, it has a lot of really good characters that they [writers Cliff Ruby and Elana Lesser] created in the story, and we felt it really struck a chord with us and we petitioned to do it.”
Being animated, the film is, of course, told from the perspective of the dog-sled team. Balto, who is half-wolf, is voiced by Kevin Bacon, Bridget Fonda is Jenna, the Siberian Husky who is Balto’s love interest, voice acting icon Jim Cummings is the villain, Steele, Bob Hoskins is Boris the snow goose, singer Phil Collins (four years before penning the songs for Disney’s Tarzan) voices two polar bears, Muk and Luk.
To bring the film’s backdrop to life, Balto director Simon Wells and members of the crew undertook an actual dog-sled trip, not to Alaska but to Finland. “The general environment was going to be similar, and what we really wanted to do was study the dogs,” Wells said in a 1995 interview. “You can get an awful lot of the sense of what long shots look like from photographs and so on but actually being involved in what it’s like being on a dog-sled team, we thought we wanted to experience.” It was so cold on the excursion that the video cameras that the Balto crew brought to shoot reference footage became inoperable thanks to the freezing temperatures.
However, such real-life experiences help add an extra touch to Balto, particularly when incorporating the blizzard conditions in the film. “We wanted the blizzard to be something really special,” said Wells in 1995. “The same way that Backdraft concentrates on getting a lot of variety and flavors to the fire. We wanted to have that kind of diversity of character within the way the snow moved.”
David Morehead, who oversaw the computer-generated imagery for Balto, created the blizzard using a computer “particle system.” “Generating the snow was only part of the battle,” said Morehead in an interview just before the film’s release. “The real battle was being able to implement it in with the rest of our digital processes and make it an easy production tool, where Simon could easily direct it and the animator could easily animate it.”
Also assisting the animators when crafting the characters was that the production studio, based in London, met with a group in Northampton that bred Siberian Huskies. “We had a period of a gap between our last picture, We’re Back and Balto,” said producer Steve Hickner, in 1995. “So, we used that to put all of our animators through a training program of our own design to get them used to animating quadrupeds.”
Released on December 22, 1995, Balto came out a month after Toy Story debuted in theaters. Disney and Pixar’s landmark film was still generating tremendous attention and overshadowed Balto, which unfortunately, didn’t fare well at the box office.
The film did well on its subsequent home video release and garnered two direct-to-video sequels. Balto is also significant because it was the last film from Spielberg’s Amblimation, and that team later became part of DreamWorks, working on that studio’s first 2D animated feature, The Prince of Egypt (1998).
With Balto, Amblimation delivered a well-crafted story that’s filled with great personality animation (particularly the supporting characters Boris, Muk, and Luk) and exciting, dynamically staged action sequences (including one involving a fight with a bear set dramatically against a bright winter sky).
Interestingly, the main character of Balto was based on a real-life dog of the same name, who was part of the 1925 dog sled team and is memorialized in a statue that stands in New York City’s Central Park (and shown in live-action segments that open and close the film).
Of the character Balto, Wells said in 1995, “The town that he lives near doesn’t trust him because he’s half-wolf, he has dubious parentage. He’s not allowed to be part of the dog-sled team, nor is he really trusted by any of the townsfolk, and this is unfair because he’s actually a very good and noble creature.”
For its thirtieth anniversary, Balto is worth a revisit (or visit for those who haven’t seen it) to celebrate this “noble creature’s” unique story.
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
I took a trip to Alaska the summer after “Balto” came out, and one of the many highlights was a visit to a centre for training sled dogs. I’ll never forget the way the dogs ran out to take their assigned positions in front of the sled, waiting to be buckled into the harness. I learned that this exceptional level of dedication and discipline came at a very high cost. I was told that during the gold rush, sled dogs were in such high demand that any stray from San Francisco on northwards would be rounded up and shipped to the goldfields at a hefty profit. Those dogs that failed to pass muster — which was the vast majority of them — were slaughtered, butchered and fed to their more capable peers. It’s probably for the best that this real-life historical background was not incorporated into the plot of “Balto”, though it would have raised the stakes considerably.
It’s a good film, the best of the three Amblimation features as well as the most distinctively Spielbergian. I saw it again earlier this year after a hiatus of over a decade, and I find that it holds up very well. If I ever hear that some enterprising cartoon historian is writing a book on the contributions of Steven Spielberg to the art of animation, I will definitely pre-order it.
“The best of the three Amblimation features…”
I have a soft spot for the other two, having seen all three in the theaters during their original theatrical releases and having a VHS copy of ‘Fievel Goes West’ growing up. This one I saw with my best friend during a sleepover weekend, so that made it particularly memorable. I watched it again recently after many, many years (I remember it was a fixture of Cartoon Network’s ‘Cartoon Theatre’ for a time) and indeed it was just as enjoyable then as it was all those years ago.
Fun fact: Balto was one of those animated films that was traced and coloured digitally (tracing the pencil on paper animation), which means the frames were finished and rendered at 1080p. Then transferred to film. Which means a 4K release is technically upscale. This applies to many many late 90s and early 2000s works. Pretty much every single 2000s movie with digital effects had those effects done at 1080p. Or everything was filed digitally at 1080p. The only benefit to a 4K release of older digitally produced films is 10 bit colour, but that means mandatory unnecessary upscaling. If only we could have 1080p with 10bit colour………. I’m SURE we could have, but someone upstairs decided you must have 10bit and 4K, always together. Can mandatory upscaling just……… go away?
I thought Balto was great. Definetly the best of the three Amblinmation features (although I like We’re Back! as well). It was good they didn’t kill off Steele like originally planned, but had him considered a liar by the other dogs, therefore losing their admiration for him. That it was a box office flop was sad, but I’m happy it performed well on home video & they made 2 direct-to-video sequels to it. Incidently, Robbie Rist (Cousin Oliver from the Brady Bunch) was the voice of Star, the sled dog.
I’m a bit surprised it didn’t fare well at the box-office. When it was first released, my family were planning to go see it, but when we went to the theater, it was already sold out. I admit I still haven’t seen the whole movie since, but I will eventually.
Still haven’t seen Balto but I sure use it a lot when I play a variation of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” where you can only use animation voice over performers.