Reviewing the Balto sequels: Prelude

Of the countless OVAs I grew up with, the single most memorable one was... Dragon Hill. But since no one else knows about it, I'll talk about the Balto sequels instead.

It's one of those cases where I watched the sequels before I knew about the original. Hell, I don't even know if the first Balto had any official release in Portugal, theatrical or otherwise. That tends to happen.

The first movie was released in 1995 by Universal Pictures. It was conceived by Amblimation Studios, which also graced us with An American Tail: Fievel Goes West and its follow up Newgrounds-before-there-was-a-Newgrounds tv series, We're Back! A Dinosaur's Tale, a special about some penguin that the creator disowned and finally Back to the Future: The Animated Series.

As you can see, most of their pre-Balto work was very wacky, barring a few slasher movie sequences that appear out of nowhere in We're Back. As such, Balto was to be their first serious project, aiming for a more epic atmosphere and more dramatic writing. Their first movie that was actually meant to be good.

Did it succeed? Well, eh?

After actually watching the first movie for the first time in 2008 I had some pretty mixed feelings, feelings that, shock of all shocks, reflect those expressed by critics back then. As well as critics more recently, and yes I'm bitter about it.

At any rate, Amblimation did succeed at the epic atmosphere, boy did it ever! The animation is beyond spectacular, to the point that I'll argue that it's one of the most majestic and distinctive animated flicks of the 90's. In my personal opinion it's more vivid and more fluid than contemporary Disney movies, and makes Balto worth watching by default.

The soundtrack isn't all that bad either. Like most animated movies at the time it also got its own single, "Reach for the Light" by Cynthia Weil and Steve Winwood, which is a bit corny and clearly meant to be this movie's version of "The Prayer", except it wasn't oohh. Balto is notably also one of the few american animated movies in the 90's to not be a musical, which in and of itself is a pretty ballsy move.

However,  the writing is where everything falls apart. It's pretty much every single cliché of the time tuned up to eleven, from the misunderstood outcast protagonist to the shallow love interest to Gaston dog to the pwecious widdle sick gwurl to the DEATH OF ALL COMEDY. Keep in mind that this movie is supposed to be based off the Nome serum run of 1925. Apparently a story about saving lives was just too boring, so the writers felt the need to "spice it up" with the wolf-dog nonsense. 

At least the goose dad was accurate.

In many ways, Balto actually resembles Disney's Pocahontas. Both were more or less released in the same year, both had stellar animation but poor writing, and both were very, very, VERY loosely based off historical events. Hell, they even feature the same cast!

However, while Pocahontas at least made some money at the box office, Balto... didn't. To my knowledge there's no statement on Balto's actual budget, but given that the theatrical gross of over eleven million dollars  was universally - geddit - considered a failure, I'm going to take a wild guess and say that it didn't make back its budget at all.

There are many possible reasons why Balto didn't hold up very well when it had its theatrical run. Some speculate that it simply didn't do well against Toy Story, then revolutionary as one of the first feature-length CGI flicks and overall just a more well written movie, while others have pointed out that there was very little advertising, with only one syndicated trailer.

Regardless, Balto's lackluster box office performance had enormous consequences. It pretty much killed off Amblimation, and with it many similar mature animation projects that were being developed there at the time. In turn, Amblimation's staff was relocated to DreamWorks Animation, which in turn lead to the cascade of events that would kill off traditional animation in the west. It's amazing how one movie's poor performance at the box office had such an amazing impact, that clearly leads us to the worst timeline.

That said, Balto did prove profitable in the long run. Its VHS run is considered to have been pretty decent, reportedly making back its budget, even though we still don't know what that budget actually was.  Too late for it to truly matter, but enough to give Universal Pictures some... ideas.

You see, the 90's and 2000's saw this... thing where everyone and their mother made an animated Direct-to-Video sequel. The whole thing is just weird and pointless, to the point that Disney ceased the practice altogether when John Lasseter took over in 2007.

Many different animation studios got in on the action, but with just a few years it became an arms race between Disney and Universal. Since Universal Pictures still releases a Direct-to-Video sequel every once in a Blue Moon I guess it can be considered the ultimate "winner" - more like weiner, ammirite?

When it was still on this sequel race, Disney had the upper-hand in that it had a massive library of successful animated movies to pick from. All it really needed to do was give each one a single sequel, though a few got more and even spawned spin-off series.

Universal, by contrast, had a much smaller library. And within it only a meager three films can be considered financial and cultural breakthroughs, four if you count Balto's home video release. To compensate for this, Universal's main strategy was to basically spam the market with The Land Before Time sequels, resulting in an infamously long, long line.

But Universal isn't anything but... experimental, and also tried harvesting the souls of their other animated franchises. An American Tail got two OVAs after Amblimation closed down, and so did Curious George, the second sequel of which having been released as recently as 2015. Even Charlotte's Web, which was originally produced by Hanna-Barbera and didn't really make that much money in its theatrical run, got its own Universal Pictures sequel, because no corpse is too sacred.

And, of course, so did Balto.