The Call of the Wild
Short description
The Call of the Wild follows Buck, a large, good-natured dog living comfortably in a California home until he is stolen and sold into the sled-dog trade during the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s. Transported to the harsh Yukon, he joins a mail delivery team and must adapt quickly to the demands of the trail. The story traces his gradual turn toward his instincts as he moves through a series of owners, among them John Thornton, a man with whom he forms a close bond in the northern wilderness.
The film is directed by Chris Sanders, whose earlier features include Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, and it stands between The Croods and The Wild Robot in his filmography. Michael Green wrote the screenplay, and James Mangold and Erwin Stoff produced. Harrison Ford plays John Thornton, with Dan Stevens, Colin Woodell, Karen Gillan and Omar Sy among the cast. The production combined live action with animation to realize its animal characters.
Released in February 2020, the film runs 100 minutes and was a large undertaking, with a budget of 135 million dollars and a worldwide gross of about 111 million. Audiences were generally warmer toward it than critics: it holds a 6.7 rating on IMDb from roughly 64,000 votes and a 7.5 on TMDB from about 4,000, while the critics' rating stands at 6 out of 10 across 213 reviews.
What's left behind the scenes
- In memory of Jack London (1876-1916) and his love of nature, the creation of this film was made as environmentally friendly as possible. No single-use plastic bottles were used during the film's production, and only biodegradable plates and cutlery were used. Leftover food was given to the needy, solar-powered generators were used, and recycled paper was utilized.
- Each dog in Beck's team, except Spitz, was given features of one of the dwarfs from the classic Disney cartoon “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937): Dolly is Dopey, Pike is Grumpy, Joe is Happy, Billy is Sleepy, Dave is Bashful, Dub is Sneezy, and Sol-Leks is Doc.
- The film features dogs created using computer graphics, which allowed for a wider range of emotions and avoided injuries. Chris Sanders was chosen as the director of this film due to his experience in animation at Disney and DreamWorks.
- Hal’s red and black suit, played by Dan Stevens, was sewn from a piece of fabric woven over 100 years ago before the Klondike Gold Rush.
- Buck's digital model used a scan of Buckley, a dog that director Chris Sanders and his wife Jessica adopted from a shelter in Kansas.
- Wes Brown, who played the police officer, was asked to catch a mailbag thrown to him with one hand, without looking. Brown did just that, on the very first take. However, during editing, someone from the studio management decided it looked too “cartoonish,” so Brown’s hand was replaced with a digital one and the mailbag was made to fall in the snow.
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