The Journey of Natty Gann sounds like a sci-fi movie, but it is a sweet tale of a girl and her wolf and an Odyssey across the northwest during the Depression; it has gorgeous scenery, is completely and totally sentimental in a Disney sense, and has an adorable and chaste romance between a very young John Cusack and the fifteen-year-old heroine.
For me, though, the standout (aside from the fucking awesome wolf) was Ray Wise, who is rather wonderful in this film. I've always thought of him as a character actor, and he is, but here he has a giant part and does superb work carrying the movie. I've never seen the lead actress, Meredith Salenger, in anything else, but she's very good in this.
On Disney+, where I watched this, there is a warning before the movie about "tobacco use" – three kids sneak a puff on a cigarette in the men's room before they get in a fight and start punching one another. There is, however, no warning about the punching, or the attempted sexual assault Natty Gann experiences from a guy who picks her up while she's hitching north, or (and this is what I actually found disturbing) the several scenes where real violence is done to animals. The poor wolf is in a dogfight which we actually see, and it's rather shocking for a kids movie.
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