I made a slapshod rewrite of the Balto movie (happy 100th b-day to the real dog, RIP) and I wanted to share some redesigns I did of the major characters alongside it.

I’ll never get why they didn’t make Balto look anything like his real life counterpart. Apparently the design team wanted him to look like Tramp from Another Dog Movie, but… why? I had to give him SOME resemblance to the real dog. Something else I gave him was a white mask following the design on his face in early production art and storyboards.

Lots of people complain that Balto looked nothing like a wolf. I disagree; he looks much more like the scraggly things on the hill then any of the stupidly fluffy pseudo-malamutes in Nome. That said, I would’ve liked if he consistently held his head lower in that weird parallel-to-the-ground gait wolves have, and he coulda used more scruff and some visible gauntness. Otherwise, his design’s pretty cute. Cute enough to spawn a shitload of fan characters, anyway.

Wrt writing, Balto doesn’t have much personality outside of Generically Heroic. Some people have stated the film would be better if Balto had been mute. Again, I disagree. They shoulda just bagged a VA who actually tried and written more meaningful dialogue. All the same, I appreciate his altruism. He did have a likeable humbleness to him.