Call Of The Wild’s CGI dog works well enough to get by (most of the time).
While all previous versions of The Call of the Wild have had to use real dogs to tell their story, we’re now living in a post-Lion King world, and and Hollywood can create quite realistic animals digitally. Having said that, Call of the Wild‘s CGI is not on par with the recent Lion King remake on a technical level. There’s never a moment in which you might mistake Buck for a real dog, as he always looks slightly off – although, for the most part the CGI is good enough to function. There are a handful of moments where the movie dips a bit into the uncanny valley, such as when Buck is given a moment of unnecessary physical comedy that causes him to move in an unusual way. In those moments, he resembles Scooby Doo. When action is forced to move a little too fast things look more like a video game. It works well enough for the rest of the film, but everybody will react to it a little bit differently.
