The 2020 movie ‘The Call of the Wild’ is now also available on OTT. This is a story about dogs that are escorted to the Alaskan islands of Northwestern United States to hunt for gold. The Call of the Wild also talks about the friendship between a man and a Scotch Shepherd dog.
This story about the gold rush in America was already translated into Tamil in the 50s and was already introduced to the readers under the name ‘Voice of Kanakam’. The forty-year-old American novelist Jack London wrote this story in 1903 with Buck as the main character.
It is true that miners working in Canada’s Yukon Basin in the 1890s got their hands on some gold. The news of the discovery of gold spread like wildfire in America and millions of people traveled there. Some of them achieved more than expected. But many lost their lives because they were not able to find gold in the life of the bari region. Many others returned home empty-handed. But the real beneficiaries are novelists and film makers. Gold Rush (1925), a $923,000 adaptation of the story, grossed $2.5 million. Megan’s Gold (1969), made for just $7 million, grossed $41 million. Written by Jack London, this novel has sold over 1 crore copies till date.
Many have tried to film The Call of the Wild in Hollywood, which takes place entirely in the Arctic. Some have made only a few episodes of it full-length. But this is the first time that the entire novel has been made into a full movie. The film released in 2020 is directed by Grease Saunders. Motion capture should be used for something that we can no longer create natively for whatever reason. But many Indian screenwriters make puppets based on it.
In Hollywood, this technique is used for non-animated verisimilitude that cannot be judged as real or fake. In fact, you’d bet that The Call of the Wild’s only character besides the rest of the cast was motion-captured in the frozen Alaskan mountains (and half of it was a studio set). Teri Notary, who has played himself sincere in motion capture as Pug Dog.
The pug dog is smuggled from California to Yukon, Canada where it is sold in the market and then goes to the Arctic. A pug’s life is derailed when he is suddenly stolen from a judge’s house as a pet dog. Luxury living until recently is becoming the opposite. It tumbles down and falls all over the place. Dogs are sold to pull sledges across snowy mountains p. There the buyer is bound to the Alaskan island by one of the sludge cart dogs. We sit up straight as the first pouncing buck… takes a giant leap into the forest to save his owners from avalanche danger… and becomes the leader of the dogs after a series of grueling trials.
There are many different expressions of sadness, distress, gratitude, bravery, adventure, risking one’s life to help in danger, and so on. Apart from many of Hollywood’s leading actors who acted in the film, we can’t believe that Bug Nai is the only one capturing it. But it was only when I saw Behind the Scenes that Ada Buck appeared as a dog that Terry Notaria has to raise some eyebrows.
Tents are not allowed in the open-air pastures of the mountains and are sheltered in the warm snow outside. After a night’s sleep, the snow falls in the morning between the snow and the snow. There, Buck, who is first hurt in a fight with a wolf over a rabbit, later understands.
That we have to fight here. This novel movie emphatically tells us that the strength to fight can only be gained from the field, and only by adapting to the circumstances can one not only devise a strategy for victory but survive. Enemy fights, encounters with other types of wolves, in a twist where the Alaskan journey has been tiring, yield gold chips from the Yokan River. The dog also searches for some gold chips. Puck’s master did not want to keep the dog that had saved him from the enemy any longer as a slave.
It sends its wolf and wild dog friends, seen in the distance. Buck happily joins his racemates to greet them eagerly. The frozen regions of the Alaskan islands and frozen rivers in many places are captured with soul-stealing beauty. You can definitely watch it at least once.