Movie Thoughts: White Fang (1997)

• Released: 1997
• Directed by: Michael Sporn
• Running time: 44 min
• Rating 1.5/5

Synopsis

A wolfdog raised by cruel people must find his place in the world and learns what it means to be loved by people and dogs alike.

My Thoughts

Full disclosure, I cannot hate this movie. I grew up with it when I first got into my wolfaboo phase alongside Balto II: Wolf Quest. So despite how bad it is, it has this major nostalgia factor going on that somehow it still hasn't quite lost yet.

This is, like most Goodtimes productions at the time, a 2D-animated movie made to cash in on more popular adaptations such as those by Disney and the like, this time this one being made to cash in on Balto, presumably.

One word to describe this movie? Shit. Yep, it's utter dogshit (no pun intended). The animation looks awful and the characters never stay on model. The backgrounds look cheap. The voice acting is bad and inconsistent. None of the characters are interesting and all of the character development of our protagonist takes place off-screen. The sound effects are bare bones and continuously reused (the same howl and bark is heard so many times). And the songs...god, those songs. Awful would be too nice a term to describe them. There's only one of them that doesn't make my ears bleed, which is "Show me the Way", but even then it's not even worth being called decent.

The only thing about this movie I don't think is remotely awful is the character designs. Yes, they're inconsistent as fuck and most of them look bad, but with a little polish I think they could've at least looked decent. I like White Fang's color palette and markings, the design just needed some refining and structure to it. Same with Kiche and some of the humans. Lip Lip still looks awful, though. 

Yet I still cannot hate this movie. Awful as it is, I cannot. It's up on YouTube, so if you want to amuse yourself with a bad White Fang adaptation, here you fucking go.