Have the dog actors had their last bark on the screen? | Movie

AAn old man and a dog are sitting on the moss-covered roof of a log cabin in the Canadian desert. It's a hot summer night, a gargoyle river nearby. The man, named Thornton, and the dog, named Buck, have made a long journey to reach this bucolic splendor, a journey that is coming to an end. Buck met a pack of wolves in the forest and is overwhelmed by a primordial desire to join his ancestors. Thornton is discouraged at the thought of losing his friend. Thus, in a last act of submission, Buck snuggled on Thornton's lap, before turning his back on domestication and returning to his species.

This is a scene from the recent cinematic remake of Jack Londons' 1903 novel, The Call of the Wild, which traces the journey of Buck, a cross of Collie St Bernard. There have been several attempts to reimagine this tale in the film: in 1935, an imposing St Bernard starred alongside Clark Gable in the first cinematic version of the novel. In 1972 Charlton Heston shared the screen with Buck the leonberger.

In the last iteration of The Call of the Wild, directed by Chris Sanders, Harrison Ford takes on the role of Thornton but no dog appears in the credits of the film. In fact, if you were on set while filming the scene in the log cabin, you would see Ford, desperate and sturdy, and there, tucked in his lap, an adult man named Terry wearing a mo-cap suit.

Indeed, the role of Buck was entrusted to CGI. Of course, this animation technique has been used for a long time in Hollywood to animate, with a striking realism, creatures which do not belong other than to fiction. The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. The super intelligent primates of the planet of the apes.

In this film, however, computer graphics is used to replace a figure who played an outsized, though often unrecognized, role in the history of cinema, the dog actor. At what price?

The history of dogs in the cinema is as old as the cinema itself. In the Lumire brothers, pioneers of the 1895 film Workers leaving the Lumire factory in Lyon, a cheerful mastiff leaps into the 20 second frame through the 46 second reel, completely oblivious to having been part of the history of cinema. This unexpected performance signals the uncontrolled and chaotic conditions in which the directors first produced films, which is again demonstrated in the Lumire Brothers 1897 The False Cul-de-jatte, in which a stray dog 39; questions on the set, lifts his leg and urinates at the climax of the films.

As the film industry consolidated in Hollywood studios in the first decades of the 20th century, the dogs continued to appear in the film, no longer as unexpected distractions, but as actors with lead roles. Throughout the 1920s, in fact, one of America's most famous actors was a German shepherd by the name of Rin Tin Tin. He starred in 23 films so profitable that they saved Warner Bros from bankruptcy more than once.

Part of what made Rin Tin Tin successful is that it worked during the silent movie era and the critics were taken by its physical prowess. In a review for the Chicago Daily News, poet Carl Sandberg wrote: He has the power of expression in each of his movements that makes him one of the main pantomimists on the screen.

As with other celebrities, the audience was also fascinated by the privacy of Rin Tin Tins. During the First World War, he was saved from a bombed trench by Lee Duncan, an American soldier who later dedicated his life to training the dog. In Los Angeles, Duncan sometimes brought Rinty, as he was called, on stage after the credits for the film to demonstrate the breadth of his skills.

While no other canine actor has since climbed the heights of Rintys, they have continued to play major roles in film. It was Toto, after all, who unveiled the Wizard of Oz. And Doc Taylors sheepdog Einstein was the very first creature to be screened in DeLorean on time.

But if the presence of dogs on the screen delights, it also introduces an element of unpredictability in production. Dog training is a complex and time-consuming art. Not only does the dog actor have to learn tailor-made behaviors for the scenes, he has to bond with fellow human actors and feel comfortable on set. And even then, the best trained dog of the most professional set will occasionally yield to a primordial desire. Rin Tin Tin, for example, once attacked a porcupine by shooting in the high sierras, delaying production until the pock marks on his face are healed.

Since the 1940s, there have also been strict guidelines defining appropriate behavior for animals on the shelf, which is now codified by the American Humane Associations 127 pages Guidelines for the safe use of animals in film holders. Animal rights groups like Peta are closely monitoring the industry to make sure producers are complying, amplifying any suspicion of public mistreatment. When a video surfaced from a distressed German Shepherd struggling to keep your head above water on the set of A Dogs Purpose in 2017, the outcry was so intense that the directors of Universal canceled the premiere of the film.

Perhaps to get around these uncertainties, director Chris Sanders opted for a computer-generated dog to star in The Call of the Wild, which was presented on February 21 of this year. Sanders, who co-directed Lilo and Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, designed Buck from scanned images of a St Bernard collie cross that he and his wife adopted from a Kansas shelter. The on-screen movements of the dogs were then performed by a renowned creature actor named Terry Notary, who was the invisible agent behind a number of CGI animals, including a murderous primate in Planet of the Apes.

On the set of The Call of the Wild, the notary donned a mo-cap costume and played the role of Bucks, imitating dog movements. The graphics team then replaced their form with a computer version of the dog during editing. The exit is a beautifully rendered, if somewhat disoriented, figure on the screen.

In the scenes where Buck is shot from a distance, chasing rabbits across the fields or pulling a sled across the Alaskan tundra, he looks like a convincing dog, but intensely oversized. But then, in more intimate moments when Buck interacts with Thornton, his expressions and behaviors are bizarrely anthropomorphized. For example, the dog somehow understands that Thornton has an alcohol problem and looks at him with disapproval while sipping his evening whiskey.

One of the joys of the original London novel is that it offers a bird's eye view of the world, a story where action was motivated by animal desire. Undoubtedly, Bucks has an overly human expression as an attempt to translate this into film. But for me, it had the opposite effect. CGI Buck is in a strange valley between a dog and a dog. He's visually compelling, but I didn't feel any emotional appeal to him as a character, like I have done in the past with dogs on the screen. (The adventures of Milo and Otis is the very first film in which I cried.)

While watching the film, I remembered Martin Scorseses' recent criticism of the CGI-laden Marvel franchise. These are theme parks, he said, not movies. They offer audiovisual entertainment without friction, without mystery, without emotional resonance. This, he continued, signifies a wider trend in the film industry, where films are optimized to distract, entertain and generate maximum income, leaving little room for films confronted with the film. unexpected on the screen, which, for Scorsese, is the cinema function.

Since his first appearance on the screen in the 19th century, the canine actor has been the support of this unexpected aesthetic experience. They occur unconsciously, with a keen sense of immediacy. CGI Buck, a strange cyborg composite whose animal instincts are artificial by humans, fails to preserve this legacy. Indeed, it seems to represent precisely what Scorsese deplores: the technological domestication of cinema.