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Now I hate it... forever. No seriously, I went into this thing thinking "whatever's said here, it won't change how much I liked this movie as a kid". Well, turns out I never once considered how the movie was actually put together. The surprising fact that it was made in Japan (why do I keep finding out everything I liked in the 80's was made there?) is kinda blurred out by the incredible animal cruelty this movie had to have.
Great... Most things I liked in my childhood I can still muster up some love for, but then again most of those things don't involve throwing 30 cats off a cliff. This doesn't make that ripoff Homeward Bound a good movie! Just a MUCH more moral one. Hell, even if they put together a CG remake "Now without the sting of cruelty", it'd still carry that history with it. This is just going to be one of those times when I have to sever all ties with all positive emotions I felt towards this thing. That sucks Japan, but what should I expect from the country that brought us The Cove?
The thing about Milo & Otis is that no animal cruelty [or, at least, animals being terribly injured or killed] has never been PROVEN. Allegations and such have gone back all the way to the original 1986 release in Japan, but again, no proof has ever been uncovered.
What, aside from the VIDEO FOOTAGE? Yeah, aside from that there's no proof. Even if they didn't go through several kittens and managed to snag each of those shots first time, they THREW A CAT OFF A CLIFF and filmed it struggling to climb back up. They had a dog fight a BEAR.
I'm all for establishing evidence and everything, but when you have damning footage like the entire movie, the onus is on them to provide evidence they DIDN'T do what they appear to have done.
Let's put it another way. A tape surfaces of a ritual murder. The person on the tape can't be found, and by all appearances the murder in the video appears to be real rather than staged. The one who made the tape comes forward saying that it was all staged, but won't demonstrate how the claimed "special effects" were accomplished and won't reveal the name of the person being "murdered" on the tape. What would you conclude?
That it was a hoax meant to spur hype and discussion? Especially after several governing bodies investigated and were unable to uncover anything actionable.
My point still stands: no evidence has ever come to light that animal were seriously injured or killed and several Japanese Humane Societies actually allowed their names to be used in association with the film.
Unlike with Cannibal Holocaust.
That WHAT was a hoax exactly? The footage IN THE MOVIE? So someone broke in with footage that looks exactly like it belongs in the movie, slipped it into the film, and snuck out, and no one noticed? That's a pretty bold defense argument right there.
Heck the Japanese version has even worse stuff than in the US version. The evidence is for clear animal cruelty. Not the deaths, no, but to say we shouldn't be suspicious is to ignore the movie itself as evidence. I don't care about what some foreign agency said was going on. Japan doesn't have the best track record when it comes to animal abuse. Did 30 kittens get killed in the cliff scene? That's a specific claim we'd need a little more evidence for, but considering that we KNOW for a fact that a cat was clearly thrown off that cliff into some dangerous waters, it's suspicious enough for me to say they're the ones that need to explain themselves. The fact that the kitten is clearly different throughout the movie also raises some eyebrows.
At the very least, we have some clear evidence of animal cruelty in the form of the movie itself. At most, there's the unsettling but justified suspicion that some of those shots were deadly enough they very likely didn't get it in one take. Denying this is just an attempt to rescue a childhood memory.
I have very little in the way of childhood memories of Milo & Otis, other than a vague recollection that it existed, I'm merely raising the fact that 25 years of rumors and innuendo and investigation have led to nothing.
I don't remember if I've seen this movie or not. It's quite possible I did as a kid, yeah, but i don't know. As for those charges though, they do seem pretty plausible with what's shown, and yeah, that's pretty disturbing. It is odd that they can't prove one way or the other though.
Not really. The whole thing was filmed on an island somewhere. A few cats going missing wouldn't be noticed or even traceable. Of course the opposite is also true.
Let me state it a lot more clearly. It's possible no animals were actually killed, but that doesn't change the fact that those animals in the film were clearly being put through cruel situations to get those shots. Allegations don't matter. I'm watching it with my eye balls. Do I give them the benefit of the doubt? Not really. The movie itself clearly shows they don't care about the animals' well being, so I've got no reason to extend them any such courtesy. I'm marking the idea that animals died in the making of this thing under "likely".