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Disney’s Togo: Not Just Another Dog Movie
Heroic deeds have long been the base alloy of cinematic storytelling. Add in a heroic dog, and you have a story that just screams for a Walt Disney Movie.
“Coffee or whiskey?” Constance Seppala asks the semi-hapless Mayor of Nome, whom she well and good knows has come to her home at an ungodly hour to ask her husband Leonhard to set out on the adventure that warranted this film’s story. “I’m having both,” she declares, her frustrated character already ahead of the men in the scene on where this is all going. Her husband is the only one to save the day; she knows it, he kinda-sorta-working-on-it knows, and she would rather get on with it, but knows it’s a process in the stubborn and proud man she loves. There are children to save, a storm coming, and no one could possibly make it but him, but the writers mercifully get on at the right pace for the film, if not for poor Constance.
Formulaic? Sure. But it works here, and is well done. Formulas for movies get that way for a reason, and heroic deeds have long been the base alloy of cinematic storytelling. Add in a heroic dog, and you have a story that just screams for a Walt Disney Movie.
Togo is very well done, in all respects. It would be hard to screw up the cinematography of Alaska and the production does not, highlighting the often brutal but always beautiful wilderness…
