The Call of the Wild Parent Guide

“Is there any house big enough to hold him?”

Buck is massive St. Bernard/Scotch Collie with a loyal heart, expressive eyes, and prodigious amounts of energy that can’t be contained in his sedate California home. His mischief-making career comes to an abrupt end one night when he is dog-napped, sealed in a wooden crate, and shipped thousands of miles without food or water. Upon arrival in the far North, Buck is brutalized, subdued, and sold as a sled dog to deliver the mail to prospectors in Yukon Territory. Buck’s heart is as resilient as he is strong, and he soon embarks with gusto on this second phase of his life. And, then, on the third…

The Call of the Wild carries a number of themes that will interest parents, and resilience is doubtless one of them. Buck is a poster boy for emotional resilience, bouncing back from everything life throws at him. But John Thornton (a scraggly, bearded Harrison Ford), running from the demons of his past and trying to drown them in alcohol, demonstrates that for some of us, resilience is more of a journey than a hardwired personality trait.

The primary messages of this film, not surprisingly, relate to man’s relationship to nature. The most obvious is our responsibility to animals. There are scenes where Buck (and sometimes other dogs) are beaten, whipped, starved, or have guns pointed at them. The bigger theme is never articulated but is embedded in the location of the film. Set in Canada’s Yukon Territory, this movie is shot in the Yukon and British Columbia. Soaring, snow-capped mountains, meadows filled with wildflowers, sparkling rivers…this movie is a dream come true for anyone promoting tourism in the far North. It’s also a reminder of how beautiful and fragile our world is. Harrison Ford has publicly stated that The Call of the Wild is a warning about environmental stewardship. In his words: “We’re in danger of losing the support of nature for our lives, for our economies, for our societies. Because nature doesn’t need people, people need nature.”

Despite its powerful messages, The Call of the Wild comes with some negatives, none more glaring than the CGI dogs. I’m not sure why director Chris Sanders chose to use a computer generated canine; perhaps he didn’t want the trouble of using live animals on set, maybe he thought it was kinder to animals. Whatever the reason, the result is uncomfortable to watch. Real dogs look and act like dogs, even when they’ve been trained to do tricks. Animated dogs are obviously not real and can believably talk, emote, or act like humans. But the CGI dogs in this movie try to mix and match, combining realistic looking canine bodies with eerily human facial expressions. It’s a full-on uncanny valley experience and makes it difficult to get fully immersed in the story.

For parents who aren’t troubled by the movie’s CGI, the only real areas of concern are alcohol use and violence. John Thornton is a problem drinker, using liquor to numb the pain of his past.. The bigger content problem is related to violence – human on animal, animal on animal, and human on human. None of the violence is gratuitous or gory and all of it advances the plot, but there are scenes of animal abuse or fistfights and moments of extreme peril that might be distressing to some. The death of a character could upset sensitive viewers, like the little girl a few seats away from me who was audibly sobbing in the theater. But for most family viewers, Buck’s adventures will help deepen our appreciation of the beautiful planet we call home and might even help us hear the call of the wild places that still remain.