W.C. Fields said you should never work with children or animals. Thanks to CGI technology, you don’t have to anymore – at least not with animals. Buck, the main dog in The Call of the Wild, appears to be a cross between Beethoven and Roger Rabbit. Like the former, Buck destroys or eats everything in his path, and like the latter, it’s painfully clear that the human actors are interacting with an animated character – the difference being that Roger Rabbit is actually supposed to be a cartoon.

Buck’s not alone, though. In the Yukon, he and a husky have a fight that plays like the doggy version of 300. The advantage of using computer generated animals – not only the dogs but also wolves, rabbits, etc. – is that you don't have to worry about ASPCA or PETA. The downside, however, is that the audience doesn't worry either about what happens to these creatures, because it’s blatantly obvious that they're not real; moreover, not only are they not there, but there isn’t even a ‘there’ for them to be, since the entire world around them – snow, trees, rivers, even the horizon – is equally fake-looking. This should have been a fully animated movie; it still would have looked awful, being computer-animated, but at least it would have been consistent.

Buck’s problem, of course, goes beyond appearances; on top of not looking like an actual dog, he doesn’t act like one either. For example, he takes Harrison Ford’s whiskey bottle away from him and refuses to give it back – pray tell, how exactly does Buck know that drinking’s bad for ya? In general, Buck is as good a judge of character as dogs usually are in the movies – and only in the movies; if that were also the case in real life, Hitler and Blondi would not have been as happy together as they indeed were.

If a dog looks like a dog, behaves like a dog, and is in fact a dog to whom things happen that would realistically happen to a dog, we can’t help but care about him the same way we care about Bresson’s donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar. You don’t have to actually put the animal in harm’s way – that’s why they invented animatronics, after all –; just make sure we can believe that there’s something tangible at stake, and suspension of disbelief will do the rest.