Balto [Blu-ray]

Fantastic classic! Feels very much like a Don Bluth movie!

this was my all-time fav animated movie growing-up. one day I'll get a malamute or husky and name him Balto

Balto DVD is great. True stories are about alive or dead.

Muy buena para ver en familia. A mí hijo le encantó

Was able to share one of my favorite childhood movies with my daughter and younger roommate 💕 you can't put a price on that

This is a review for the Balto blu-ray released on July 4, 2017.Balto is one of my favorites from childhood despite the fact it was overshadowed in its year of release, and never really got the recognition it deserved. Its very loosely based on the true story of Alaskan husky, Balto and his role in carrying diphtheria medicine to Nome in 1925. The film itself takes many liberties with the real story, including the fact they say Balto is half-wolf, when he never was. This was not meant to be a historical documentary, it was meant to be good family fun, and it succeeds in that department.Now for those blu-ray fans....what did Universal give us?Video is somewhat grainy, but this is not a bad thing in itself because it means that Universal did not do what Disney sometimes does and tries to remove every speck of dust they can find, removing some of the texture and quality of the painted cells in the process. The film isn't that old, so the grain isn't as apparent as what happened when Land Before Time came out on blu-ray. This is also the first time in the United States we have the opportunity to see Balto in widescreen 1.85! When I watched it, I saw things I didn't remember largely because they were not chopped off the sides on all the previous DVD releases we had to put up with. Video bitrate hovers around a healthy 30mbps.Audio is amazing on this blu-ray as its presented in HD-5.1 Master Audio. I've never heard Balto sound better, if you have a decent system to show it off. Watching the white wolf scene, I noticed James Horner's score being more crystalline and with more sparkle than it ever had, even more than on the CD soundtrack, which was already mastered well!Unfortunately, no extras are there. That's a shame because there is a Making Of featurette out there. For those that want to browse google, the 30 minute Making Of documentary that was released over in Europe on one of their DVD releases. There are also other documentaries to be found about the real Balto online if you're so inclined to learn more about the four-legged hero of Nome (and Togo too!).Overall, I was shocked Universal released this on blu-ray at all, given it was already making its rounds on streaming services. I won't complain about the lack of extras, just happy to finally have the film in its proper aspect ratio and in HD!

Fun movie

For some reason I can't explain to myself, I had a childhood bias against dog-themed movies that stretched to the animation realm (I suppose I suspected they'd end up making me cry), and therefore I steered clear from "Balto" until only a few years ago. Shame on me, boy. What we have here is a quality animated tale, able to go head-to-head with most Disney output, and very easily the best of the three features produced by Steven Spielberg's way-too-short-lived Amblimation company. It has some shortcomings that most likely played against it during its theatrical run, but the movie perseveres through style and production strength, thoroughly earning its spot as a cult classic and home video favorite.The story: loosely based on a true event, Balto (voiced by Kevin Bacon, Mystic River) is a dog-wolf crossbreed who must prove his worth and place in a small Alaskan community by rescuing a sled team relaying a crate of valuable medicine to the stricken town across the dangerous sub-Arctic wilderness.Aficionados of strong mainstream animation will be getting an eyeful. In comparison to Amblimation's previous two films, "Balto" ranks number one: it's infinitely finer and more detailed than We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story, and while An American Tail - Fievel Goes West was arguably more expressive with a jump-out-at-you illustration quality, it was less coordinated and a bit too over-the-place by contrast. I've always appreciated the art style that director Simon Wells brings to the table, and this one ought to be considered his magnum opus for how well he pulls everything off here: the animal animation manages to be both graceful and funny depending on the character, the rotoscoping used for human characters is as smooth as Don Bluth could ever have managed, and the limited computer-generated objects and environment pieces are tastefully rendered and harmonious to the film's predominant 2D art style...95% of the time. It's a pretty gorgeous picture.The voice acting's good and solid. Bob Hoskins (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) as Boris the goose, Bridget Fonda (Jackie Brown) as Jenna the lady husky, and voice-acting stalwart Jim Cummings (The Lion King) as the narcissistic antagonist are great as immediate co-stars, and Phil Collins is pretty funny in one of only two voice acting roles he's taken, this time as a pair of hydrophobic polar bear cubs. Kevin Bacon does a pretty good job as Balto, but since the movie makes such a huge deal out of his being a half-breed - a possible allusion to mixed race Native Americanism - he might have been more authentically played by a young Indian actor like Jay Tavare or Paul Litefoot. Moving beyond the casting, the only fault I can find with the movie is in its writing: most notably, the inclusion of Muk and Luk - Phil Collins' characters - is redundant, since Bob Hoskins was already supplying comic relief within his mentor role. I also was kind of a annoyed with a dumb E.T. reference late in the movie and a really forced sequence wherein Jim Cummings' character keeps Balto from joining the sled team by stepping on his paw and making him bare his teeth at the team leader - what, were the humans so unobservant that they didn't see this was a provoked response?Gunnar Kaasen, the real-life musher who drove Balto and his team during the historical relay, is also a voiced and animated character but he's not explored at all or even named in the movie - perhaps the one thing the film was missing, to give it a greater sense of legitimacy. However, as it currently stands, "Balto" is very good, with a strong story that needed telling and probably otherwise would've been snatched up by Disney in the future, but it's not perfect. Luckily, its imperfections are overlookable and don't keep the film from retaining its well-deserved status as a cult classic and credible alternative to other big studio output of the time.