Chris Sanders' The Call of the Wild

[Disney Duster]

It is true that CGI is the better way to go thanks to what estefan and blackcauldron85 say, but if only it could be more convincing CGI.

[Mooky]

Duster and Amy: That's the thing - any instance of abuse is (and I don't consider these to be spoilers) either happening off-screen or is shown via shadows on the wall. The dogs are never whipped or beaten on-screen, so there's no reason they couldn't have done the same with real dogs in the movie. Not that I would have wanted to see dogs abused, neither real ones nor animated ones. CGI only manages to take away from the realism. Buck's body seems to be made of jelly at certain points as he DOES NOT move like a real dog does. There is also a scene where a dog body-slams another dog, complete with a cartoony facial expression from the loser-dog, which frankly just looks stupid in an otherwise supposedly realistic live-action movie.

Estefan, I agree about the setting and the human-animal bond. In fact, I think the movie excels when it's just animals and nature on-screen, it feels somewhat epic in scope. Everything else, not so much. The parts with humans are what doesn't feel like a Chris Sanders movie and those parts make up the bulk of the movie. The villains are over the top and cartoonish, the humor is not subtle in the slightest, and it all just feels cheap and cheesy.

Honestly, they should have just made the whole movie animated and none of this would have been an issue, for me at least. We're kind of conditioned not to notice stuff like this in animation as everything is exaggerated and heightened anyway.

[estefan]

I will admit that after a while, I stopped viewing the movie less like a live-action movie with animated dogs and more like an animated movie which happened to have live-action humans. The storytelling and feel of "The Call of the Wild" did remind me of an animated film, which probably owes something to Sanders's direction. So I was personally never bothered by how the animals looked.

[blackcauldron85]

^ Yeah, I wonder with Sanders directing how much of that was planned, keeping the animals looking like animated characters... or if the technology wasn't there. Hopefully it was a stylistic choice, right?

[Sotiris]

I hate that they are using Disney characters to advertise The Call of the Wild. Disney should really stop muddling their studios. A Fox character has no business being grouped together with Disney ones. It's misleading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFPevhug1Dc

[Disney Duster]

But Mooky, that's why I said the CGI should be more realistic!

[Mooky]

Oh okay, I guess I didn't get you there the first time. Sorry!

[Disney Duster]

No problem!

[blackcauldron85]

“The Call of the Wild” Gets Early Digital Release on March 27th
https://www.laughingplace.com/w/news/20 ... arch-27th/