Balto 2 Review Part 1

And with all this said we dive into Balto: Wolf Quest. Or Balto II: Wolf Quest. I guess this is being a sequel is optional. Wise choice.

This was my gateway to the franchise as a whole. Like I said, the original Balto doesn't seem to have gotten any official release in Portugal, so watching this movie back then was a pretty surreal experience. Not as much as Dragon Hill, though. Seriously, what?

As a kid this movie left a mixed impression on me. I remember feeling very confused, yet drawn in nonetheless. I really enjoyed the characters for some reason. However, the bittersweet ending was just a little too much for child!me to handle, so for a while I avoided this movie like the plague. Yes, I know I'm a fragile little wallflower, and trust me it was even worse back then.

So before we start the whole "pick a random scene and make a joke about it" routine I should probably talk about the animation. Yes, it is a massive downgrade from the first movie's. No, I won't blame the movie or anyone behind for it. 

Even if the budget was somehow the same - like with the first movie there's no official statement about Wolf Quest's budget - the fact that it was animated by an entirely different studio means that the style just wouldn't match anyways.  It was animated overseas by Wang Film Productions, which are also responsible for the animation of most of Universal's post-Amblimation works as well as many of the Disney sequels.

This is nonetheless pretty unfortunate. Like I said the first movie was just so excellently animated, so jumping into Wolf Quest after watching the original feels all the cheaper. Now, in the movie's defense there are some visual choices I can defend. The palette is rather bright, as opposed to the original which had Amblimation's signature gritty filter, which can make it look less nuanced but still visually appealing. It also fits given that most of the plot takes place during spring and summer months, though the scenes that do take place in winter just look... boring.

Where the animation really falters is in regard to, well, the actual animation. Its has its moments of fluidity, but it's stilted and awkward looking at times. This is not helped by the character designs, which are often blocky and generic. Notice that the original movie has this strong apreciation for curves, which facilitate and enhance movement.

Wolf Quest, by contrast, aims for more "realistic" designs, when it clearly didn't had the resources or at least skill to fully breath life into them. The most hilarious part about this is how the original movie's character designs had to be square-pegged into this new style, which if anything made them more complex and harder to animate. I think that, if Wolf Quest had followed the design conventions of the original, it probably would have been able to overcome this problem. Other Universal sequels did that, just sayin'.

Finally, there's the use of CGI backgrounds. The original Balto had CGI enhancing for snow and some other layering effects, but Balto: Wolf Quest throws them out on a dime. This a problem shared with most Wang Film Productions, most notably the Land Before Time sequels. It's bad enough that the ocean is apparently made of mercury, but then we have this monstrosity. The former I understand,  but really, your budget was so low you couldn't draw a totem? Nearly every other background is drawn, so I don't see the need to mimic the actual Wolfquest.

Like I said, I don't really feel like harping on the animation is particularly fair, especially given a few details about this movie's production. So lets harp on the plot!