Being Bear

Even hunter gatherers in the Ice Age have to keep in mind it's wrong to kill bears in Disney's 2003 animated film Brother Bear. The premise is trite but I'd say this film is generally underrated. Joaquin Phoenix as the hotshot young protagonist, an Inuit named Kenai, gives a great performance matched by terrific animation from John E. Hurst and Byron Howard. Even more than Treasure Planet, Brother Bear follows in the footsteps of the original Star Wars trilogy. There are also echoes of Bambi, The Fox and the Hound, The Lion King, Pocahontas, and Dinosaur.

It's worth remembering Bambi was written by a game hunter. Despite the horror and trauma certainly intended by the killing of Bambi's mother, it's a story that acknowledges the inevitable pain of existence rather than an argument for abolishing meat consumption. The Fox and the Hound takes it a step further, being fundamentally about two friends learning to accept that one's nature as a killer can't be changed.

Arguably beginning with The Little Mermaid, though, Disney started to walk away from this, presenting a shallower ethic that essentially endorsed embracing an alternate, impossible reality in which meat and animal byproducts are presented as good clean fun while the actions necessary to acquire them are depicted as evil.

It's true, Kenai marches off in pursuit of the bear not for its meat or its hide but as revenge for it stealing a basket of fish Kenai neglected to tie up in a tree. But one suspects the meat and hide from a large bear would be a pretty handy fringe benefit.

But if one takes Kenai's recklessness just for its value as part of his character, one is reminded of the impetuous young Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, or the young man who rushed away from his training on Dagobah to help his friends only to end up requiring a rescue himself.

The bear does give Kenai a slightly better reason for revenge than stolen fish when it kills his brother, Sitka (D.B. Sweeney)--not unlike Luke having plenty of motive to kill Vader after the deaths of Obi-Wan and his aunt and uncle. Once in the spirit world, Sitka, continues his Obi-Wan role and decides Kenai would learn his lesson better in the form of bear. At this point film switches from a 1.75:1 aspect ratio to 2.35:1.

I found this technique more distracting than interesting. It may have been subtler in the movie theatre where one would be less aware of the black spaces on the sides of the screen in the first part of the film. The colours also become more saturated as Kenai joins the world of talking animals and he meets a bear cub named Koda (Jeremy Suarez).

Despite having a less grounded conception of killing and survival than Fox and the Hound, Brother Bear is less squeamish about killing off main characters. Disney producers balked at killing any main character onscreen in Fox and the Hound while such a death is the cornerstone of Brother Bear's story.

The relationship between Kenai and Koda is fantastically developed through performance, design, and top notch animation. You can see how the process of learning to care for Koda causes Kenai to mature. Though the rest of the Inuits depicted aren't much more complex than Pocahontas and her people, Disney once again deciding that indigenous people are of course magical and supernaturally in harmony with the all wise and benevolent forces of nature.

Among the animals, though, the supporting characters are superb, especially a pair of moose voiced by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, essentially reprising their SCTV characters Bob and Doug.

Phil Collins returned once again to write songs for the film but one of them, the opening song, is performed by Tina Turner. It sounds distractingly similar to "Circle of Life" and most of the film's songs lack real life of their own. Except "On My Way" because the first few lines are actually sung by Koda and the viewer is momentarily reminded of the films where Disney had the sense to let the characters do the singing.

Brother Bear is available on Disney+.

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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet