FILM, ADVENTURE, FAMILY
A Man, a Dog, and a Big Spoon of Hollywood Heroism
Disney’s “Togo” tries to resurrect the long-dead family genre with moderate success.
“Once upon a time, Disney released movies like this in theatres”, writes Jason Bailey in The New York Times. Once upon a time, Hollywood made meaningful (My Dog Skip) and heart-warming (Eight Below) family films about dogs that were made out of more than a paper-thin plot and a popular actor in the lead. Those times came to end, and Hollywood had decided to replace the family genre by superheroes from comic books.
Today, if you want to visit the cinema and bring the whole family, you’d likely choose one of the sequels of Marvel or DC. Not that you have too many options, anyway.
“In 1925, a diphtheria epidemic in a small Alaskan town forces dog sledder Leonhard Seppala (Willem Dafoe) to head out on a 600-mile trip to track down the vital anti-toxins, a mission dubbed the Great Race Of Mercy and only made possible by the guts and heart of his lead dog Togo.” — Ian Freer, Empire
Togo at least tries to resurrect the genre that seems dead for more than a decade now, even if it’s not particularly great. Hollywood has a long history of producing features about heroic sled dogs in the wild surrounded by the mesmerizing landscape of Alaska. They just love making sentimental films about underdogs (pun intended), and to their credit, the audience usually eats them up joyfully.
That’s the case with Ericson Core’s latest feature as well, but I can’t say that it doesn’t feel artificial and generic more than it should throughout its nearly 2-hour runtime.
However, as a one-time Alaskan Malamute owner and Siberian Husky lover, I got to tell that Togo is a cutie. (That couldn’t be ignored, after all, this is a dog-film.) He’s resilient, fearless, loyal, and has a fighter’s heart. Those are all necessary ingredients unless you want to make out your “protagonist” a born evil like Stephen King did it with Cujo.
“Togo is indeed a very good boy, and like any movie animal worth the project named after them, Togo the character feels to be made of more than just select editing and spirited human scene partners.” — Nick Allen, Roger Ebert.com
The movie is divided by present and past, showing flashbacks of how Togo turned out to be a helluva leader when he wasn’t meant to be one. In the flashbacks, Sepp (Willem Dafoe) says malicious things he doesn’t mean like, “Saint Francis of Assisi would shoot this dog”, but it makes no difference as we already know he has a soft spot for Togo in the present.
Therefore, there are no real stakes in the story as we’re fully aware from the get-go that Togo will stay 12 wonderful years with Sepp and his wife (Julianne Nicholson), at least, leading his fellow sled buddies through the grim but spectacular wilderness of Alaska. Togo, as a movie, is adventurous but riskless, heart-warming but shallow, and works and it doesn’t.
However, it never gives up hope to thrive no matter what. In a year, when we’re drowning in hopelessness, we desire stories (based on real events) like this more than ever, which can offer us a tiny piece of promise to beat adversity and come out alive from the battle.
And for that, dog and movie lovers, Togo is worth a watch.
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