Linda Willams (1998) defines melodrama as “a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action” (p. 42). This emphasis on moral and emotional truth, as opposed to cinematic realism or adherence to historical fact positions the figure of the “suffering innocent” (p. 43) as a dividing line between the oppositions of (cinematic) “good” and “evil.” Balto (1995) takes several liberties with history. The nature of these liberties is of great interest, especially as the film is promoted as a “true” story (on its movie poster), and more particularly if we are to understand the film is operating specifically as melodrama. This paper examines Balto in terms of its melodramatic structure, and how the liberties taken with actual history serve to enhance the visceral impact of the film.

Melodrama is most often (pejoratively) deemed a genre of excess. Nearly all the writings on melodrama focus on its excessive qualities as properties of the “woman’s film” (Williams, 1998; Gledhill 2000), and are framed in terms of issues of violations of good taste, in that they are overly, often uncomfortably, sentimental. Children’s cinema is also often framed in terms of violations of good taste – too loud, too bright, too nonsensical. The similarity in negative views of these “marginalized” genres has yet to be noted in writings on melodrama or children’s cinema. It seems only logical, then, to examine lto in terms of its excessive pathos, sentimentality and action-packed third act, especially in that the film undermines historical fact in order to drive home a larger point on suffering and the rewards of virtue, and because it implicitly maintains a tie to history, inherent in the live-action opening and closing “brackets”. Though most, if not all, children’s animation is melodramatic, Balto in particular is deserving of special attention by virtue of the tensions of pathos/action in the animated narrative, and the implicit “real-life” history in the live-action, which requires an anchor to an actual lived experience, as provided by the live-action bookends. While other animated films may have this explicit division between live-action and animation, in the case of Balto, the shift in medium is more than simply indicative of a flashback. As the human grandmother is revealed as Rosie, the little girl in the animated “core text,” this lends greater historical credence to the emotional journey of Balto in the animated portion of the film.

This troubled relationship to history is heightened by the division of the film into two parts – a brief live-action opening sequence, the animated “core text,” and a return to the live-action space at the end. Christine Gledhill (2000) further observes that “melodrama’s heightened contrasts and polar oppositions aim to make the world morally legible” (2000, p. 234) – pure/impure, rural/urban, wild/domestic, and nostalgia/history. The division of the narrative into two separate parts highlights the grey areas between historical fact and emotional truth. The interdependence of these two modes of representation as separate, yet inseparable parts of the same narrative is crucial to understanding the film as melodrama.

Read more… »