Film Review: Brother Bear
Posted on | June 1, 2010 | No Comments
Brother Bear
http://www.disney.com
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In an undefined past in an undefined part of North America, young Kenai, a member of an undefined tribe, receives his totem and loses his older brother on the same day. Rejecting his totem, “the bear of love”, he hunts down and kills the bear he blames for his brother’s death. His brother’s spirit then turns him into a bear, so he can learn the lesson of his totem. The rest of the film concerns Kenai’s quest to turn himself back into a human, while being chased by a hunter and bonding with a lost bear cub.
I have mixed feelings about this one. I’m bothered both by the fact that Kenai’s tribe is undefined, and by the oddness of having a “bear of love” and an “eagle of guidance” as totems, rather than just a bear and an eagle. Who came up with these associations? Setting the story in the past and being unspecific about the nation Kenai’s tribe may have evolved into over time does give the writers a certain amount of freedom, but if they thought that would stop the movie from still being somewhat incorrect and/or offensive, they weren’t right. (See more discussion on this here.) On the other hand, I’m thrilled to see a Disney movie starring an (however vaguely) American Indian tribe that isn’t Pocahontas.
The film is absolutely gorgeous, with beautiful wilderness vistas and attractive character designs for both human and the animal characters. Aside from the pop songs slapped here and there on top of the film, there are surprisingly few cringe-worthy elements, the others worth mentioning being somewhat offensive Canadian stereotypes in the form of the two comic relief moose, the lovefest of bears feasting on Nemo’s relatives (all other animals talk and are sentient, but a slaughter of salmon? Cute!) and bears having human-like eyes only when we’re meant to identify with them. The pop songs are pretty dreadful, though.
The good stuff includes some laugh-out-loud moments, the aforementioned beautiful animation, a better than usual attempt at portraying a non-Anglo culture in a non-stereotypical way (perhaps because it was made up, simply borrowing material from several cultures), the basic lesson of love and responsibility being quite manly actually, and the warning against the mistake of prejudice (unless it’s fish).
The weight of Kenai’s transgression and the loss of Koda’s family struck me as unusually harsh for a children’s film, but I find that to be a good thing – allowing fake deaths to become an animation cliché in the recent past has been, I think, a mistake. Children’s stories are not meant to be brainless and light. The best stories for children are about growing up, about identity, ethics, responsibility, and quite often a parent’s death that leaves their child vulnerable, forced to come into their own. These stories are hugely important, and making that death a ploy to provoke a fleeting emotional response is downright deplorable.
Brother Bear is a story about finding your own identity and about the worth of compassion, and that, I believe, along with the comparative lack of cringes, makes it one of the better Disney feature animations of the noughties.
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Bechdel Test:
1. It has at least two female characters
2. who talk to each other
3. about something other than a man.
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