#jack couffer

Nikki, Wild Dog of the North (1961)

From 1948-1960, the Walt Disney Studios released a series fourteen full-length and short-length nature documentaries, known as the True-Life Adventures series. The predecessor of Disneynature, True-Life Adventures increased awareness of the preciousness of global wildlife and ecosystems, and provided audiences glimpses of animals that they otherwise might never have seen. The series had a lasting impact on nature and wildlife documentaries today, as they invented several narratives to accompany the unscripted documentary footage. Jack Couffer and Don Haldane’s Nikki, Wild Dog of the North is not among the True-Life Adventures films, but the film – which tells one story told through visuals combining natural and staged scenes – exists as part of the series’ legacy. Today, Nikki, which is decidedly more of a fictitious piece than a documentary, is a forgotten entry in the Disney filmography. But it remains a lightweight, endearing film that might surprise the unhardened and those with depressed expectations.

Nikki (played by an Alaskan malamute of the same name) is one-eighth of a wolf owned by fur trader, Andre Dupas (Jean Coutu), as the two make their way into the Canadian Rockies (the entire human cast is French Canadian, with the exception of one whitewashed Native American). It is 1899 as fur trapping is soon to be an obsolete practice as the nineteenth century concludes. After braving a series of rapids and landing ashore, Nikki smells a bear and Andre follows. Nikki and Andre find a black bear cub that the film calls Neewa clinging to the top of a tree, following a scene where Neewa’s mother, Noozak, has been killed by a grizzly bear. Andre, sympathetic to the black bear cub, takes Neewa in with the condition that Nikki take care of his newest animal companion. Nikki and Neewa are tied together, but eventually the two are separated from Andre and must fend for themselves. A friendship results. They have encounters with carnivorous hostiles and are separated when their rope breaks and Neewa must hibernate for the winter. There is also a Disneyfied villain in fur trader La Beau (Émile Genest), who is accompanied by his Native American companion, Makoki (Uriel Luft in a whitewashed role).

The on-location cinematography by Charles P. Boyle in Kananaskis Country and Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada is stupendous photography, capturing the nearby Canadian Rockies in their snowcapped beauty. From the scenes high into the mountains, the harshness of wintertime blizzards, the canoeing scenes where Nikki and Andre are floating down a picturesque river, and the forested hills within these rugged valleys, the visuals are just as stunning as any scene during the True-Life Adventures series. Camera movement is fluid, but never nausea-inducing, as it must keep up with the pace of Nikki and Neewa (despite the fact that, by nature, dogs and bears are not typically friends, Nikki and the main bear cub playing Neewa in the film actually got along even off-camera). Whether at play, in flight, pursuit, or wandering, Boyle’s cameras capture the clumsiness in Nikki and Neewa’s movements – Nikki is a young dog; Neewa a cub – as the two grow alongside each other amid the magisterial landscape.

Like innumerable Disney live-action films, Couffer and Haldane – probably with pressure from their producers and executives – draw obvious lines between good (Andre and Makoki) and evil (La Beau). The moral distinctions are elementary enough for even the smallest children to understand; likewise, the human characters are all underdeveloped (though the character of Makoki is whitewashed, he is portrayed as an honorable character that disdains unnecessary violence – nothing revolutionary in our present decade, but certainly notable for the early 1960s). But due to the animal-on-animal and animal-on-human violence contained in Nikki, Wild Dog of the North, this is not a film for the youngest kids. The tone adapted by the narrator Jacques Fauteux gears this film towards older children that understand and accept that nature – as it is and always has been – can be brutish and bloody. Brutishness, however, only appears in the final fifteen minutes of the film (specifically, La Beau capturing Nikki and using him for dogfighting – this will be described shortly), as Nikki, Wild Dog of the North is nevertheless a lighthearted dramatization of a dog and a bear cub’s forced, but fruitful and fun-loving, friendship.

Exactly how much of Nikki, Wild Dog of the North is staged and how much is reality? Even with a recent screening on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), freely-available literature is almost nonexistent on the subject – also, who knows how long it has been since the film’s last screening on American television? One figures that any scenes containing humans and Nikki are staged, even if there are “wild” animals present during those moments. Other sequences depicting various animals – especially the pack of wolves, wolverines, and the fight scene between Neewa’s mother and the grizzly bear – are probably legitimate footage that suits the film’s nature documentary influences. There is no evidence that animal endangerment occurred during production, but there is also no evidence saying otherwise. Personally, I find it hard to imagine that Walt Disney would sanction any such abusive practices. Disney, whose love of nature and animals was so interwoven with his love of animation in his childhood, produced the likes of Bambi (1942) and the True-Life Adventures series as pieces extolling nature and decrying those who might who might tamper with its beauty.

Which brings us to one of the most frightening moments in Nikki, Wild Dog of the North – the dogfighting scene. Blood is spilled and unscrupulous fur traders (including the loathsome La Beau) place money on the bouts. These terrifying scenes, shot in close-up and appearing quite convincing at times (though there have always been ways to depict animal fighting in ways without harming the subjects), operating with a terrible bloodlust and inhumanity. To be clear, this film takes a stance that vigorously condemns any such practices of dogfighting and other forms of animal fighting. It just takes perhaps a few minutes too long to break away from an uncharacteristically violent moment in a Disney film in order to place the narrative on a track to the saccharine finale we know is inevitable.

Long before near-unanimous scientific warning of how environmental degradation damages humankind (and the pushback from those denying such changes), here was a film that understood the preciousness of nature and how humans (and a dog) should not meddle too much with it. Nikki, Wild Dog of the North, with a mercifully brief running time of seventy-four minutes, never overstays its welcome. The film’s curious tone makes it unsuitable for younger children, its uninspired structure and simplistic writing influenced by the True-Life Adventures series make it a cultural signpost of how nature films – whether a documentary or not – made sense of their images in a period where American documentary filmmaking was a fixture, a specialty of Walt Disney Studios. Even for 1961, this approach melding documentary and fictional narrative together was novel, having only been evoked for Perri (1957; a Disney True-Life Adventure about a female squirrel that was the only one designated as a “True-Life Fantasy”). Though no longer remembered by even the most knowledgeable Disney fans, Nikki, Wild Dog of the North’s influence can be seen in contemporary nature documentary films, including the Disneynature films of recent years. Quaint as it may seem now, the film remains as a beautiful ode to the places it features, and the animals that inhabit them.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating.

Polish poster for LIVING FREE (Jack Couffer, UK, 1972)

Designer: Wiktor Gorka (1922-2004) [see also]