Trailer
Plot summary
Balto, a wolfdog, lives outside Nome, Alaska, in 1925 with Boris, the goose who took him in, and two polar bears, Muk and Luk. Because of his mixed heritage, the town's dogs and humans ridicule him, and Steele, the Alaskan Malamute the town favors most, challenges him. He finds friendship with Rosy, a young girl, and with her husky Jenna. Diphtheria then sickens Rosy and every other child in Nome, and the winter weather blocks medicine from arriving by air or sea. The governor permits the antitoxin to come by rail as far as Nenana, and a race is run to pick the dogs for the sled team that will collect it. Balto enters and wins, but Steele reveals his wolf blood and he loses his place. The chosen team leaves that night.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Balto (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Kevin Anderson was first cast as Balto and had finished all of his voice-over work, with the animation done around his performance, but late into production Universal Pictures insisted on a bigger name and replaced him with Kevin Bacon, who had been filming Apollo 13 at Universal around the same time.
- Brendan Fraser, who was filming Airheads at the time, was originally cast as Steele because Wells had envisioned the character as a school quarterback jock carried away by his sense of importance; Spielberg wanted to feel a clearer sense of Steele's "inherent evil", so Fraser was replaced by Jim Cummings.
- Budget constraints meant that in most shots the effects animators had to choose either footprints or shadows, and to achieve the snow colors and textures the production design mandated, the background artists used oil paint instead of gouache or watercolor, so extra days were scheduled for each background to dry.
- Principal animation lasted from 1993 to 1994, with each animator completing five seconds of animation a week on average; Ken Keys, one of the animators on Steele, said he was "throwing away nine drawings to keep one".
- Jenna, the copper-and-white Siberian Husky voiced by Bridget Fonda as Balto's love interest, was given a facial design based on the actress Audrey Hepburn.
- All of the ink-and-paint work is the first use in film of the 2D animation software program Toonz, which was still in development and needed intense interactivity with its developers.
- Released theatrically in the United States on December 22, 1995, the film was a financial failure after being overshadowed by Toy Story, but its subsequent home video sales led to two direct-to-video sequels, Balto II: Wolf Quest and Balto III: Wings of Change.
