Togo
Short description
Togo recounts the 1925 serum run to Nome, Alaska, where an outbreak of diphtheria threatened the town's children and the needed antitoxin lay hundreds of miles away across dangerous terrain. With a severe storm closing in, the town relies on sled dog musher Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog, Togo, to cover the most difficult stretch of the relay and bring the medicine through.
The film is directed by Ericson Core, his third feature after Invincible and Point Break, from a screenplay by Tom Flynn and produced by Kim Zubick. Willem Dafoe plays Seppala, with Julianne Nicholson as Constance Seppala, Christopher Heyerdahl as George Maynard, Richard Dormer as Dr. Curtis Welch, Adrien Dorval as Bill Clark and Madeline Wickins as Sally Burdett. It is a Walt Disney Pictures production running 113 minutes.
Togo drew a critics' rating of 7.5/10 from 40 reviews, higher than its IMDb audience score of 5.4/10 from 737 votes, while on TMDB it holds 8.1/10 from 2,366 votes, showing a wide gap between that audience sample and the IMDb one.
What's left behind the scenes
- The animated film "Balto" (1995) told the same story, but Togo led the sled dog team for the majority of the journey. Balto only ran in the lead for the final quarter of the way, but received all the glory. This is reflected in the tagline in the credits: "The true untold story."
- Togo died in 1929 at the respectable age of 16. (That's a long life for a dog who experienced as much as Togo did.) However, the longest-lived dog among those who participated in the serum run was Fritz, who died in 1932 at the age of 18.
- Togo was named after Admiral Togo Heihachiro (1848-1934) of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
- Seppala trained dogs for polar explorer Roald Amundsen, also Norwegian like himself. Amundsen was preparing for an expedition to the North Pole, but it was later cancelled. After the trip for the serum, Amundsen will present Togo with a gold medal in New York.
- Seppala is Norwegian, with a father from the Tornedalians and a mother from the Kvens. The Kvens are an ethnic minority living in Norway, descended from Finnish peasants and fishermen who migrated from northern Finland to northern Norway in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Tornedalians are descendants of Finns who once settled in the areas of modern northern Sweden.
- The speech delivered by Leonard Seppala to the dogs is a slightly altered version of the famous speech from William Shakespeare's (1564-1616) play "Henry V" (1599).
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
