Movie Thoughts: Call of the Wild (1993)

• Released: 25 April 1993
• Directed by: Michael Toshiyuki Uno
• Running time: 1 h 37 min
• Rating 2.5/5

Synopsis

A dog named Buck is taken north to become a sled dog during the Yukon Gold Rush, where he meets a friendly gold seeker named John Thornton. 

My Thoughts

Next installment on my journey to watch all Jack London adaptations. Let's see if it's any good.

Story-wise, this movie takes a lot of liberties. Our protagonist first and foremost is Thornton. Buck is still central to the story, but Thornton takes central stage and is given a backstory where he travels north to defy his father and prove him wrong. He comes across Buck on the boat to Skagway, and they already befriend one another there rather than after he frees him from Hal and his crew. They are separated when Buck is sold, though, and from there the story pretty much follows the events of the book, though with Thornton's parts of the story expanded upon.

There's also some additional characters in the story, most notably my favorite of the entire movie: Charlie, a Native American friend of Thornton's that isn't really a mentor, but still a close ally of the character. Maybe he could even in a way be the father figure that Thornton misses, as his relationship with his own father is rotten these days.

Buck doesn't have that much personality in this adaptation because the story really centers around Buck. He is shown being beaten and becoming submissive, but there is no real moment where he "breaks". He doesn't show really any personality during his time as a sled dog, and by the time he meets Thornton he just becomes a regular loyal pet. 

The movie also has a very annoying narrator. Thornton is basically telling us the story, but his voiceover is used an obnoxious amount of times, even sometimes practically describing what we're already seeing on screen. The narration could've been used to describe the changes Buck went through (to give the dog more personality or at least more insight into him), but rather it's just narrating what's going on on screen or what the viewer could easily put together. 

Buck in this adaptation, like in others before, is portrayed by a German shepherd. I'm still not a huge fan of this depiction on him this way, I prefer the more Saint Bernard-like depictions of him in the 2020 and 1997 adaptations, such as using a (CGI) mutt or a Leonberger. I know that in the book he's supposed to resemble a huge wolf with brown splotches on his muzzle, but seeing what his parental breeds are should let one know that the real offspring that would result from that wouldn't look anything like a wolf. The wolves in this film also were played by actual wolves, and they were used decently, so that's nice.

This adaptation also suffers from the frequent problem wolf/wolfdog movies have where they can't get the animal in question to howl, so instead they resorted to having the dog simply looking up with his mouth open while a howling sound effect plays. I'm not a fan of this technique, but in this movie they at least did a decent job of covering it up (often using shots of the dog at night).

The pacing of this movie also was too fast at some points. It slowed down later on, but the first few scenes went by really fast. We get about a minute of introduction to Buck before he's already sold off to the dog traders. Just slow down a bit, please.

I guess this is a decent movie, though it falls a bit short as an adaptation of the book. The focus shifting over to Thornton makes Buck feel less major, when he is the real protagonist of this story.