Walt Disney, part LXI: Not even your average bear

BROTHER BEAR

2003

Directed by Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker

Written by Tab Murphy and the rest of WDFA, I guess, based on an "idea" by Michael Eisner

Spoilers: moderate

I have spoken before of a certain tradition, that is not a "tradition" in even the most vaguely formal sense, but seemed to me to form a pattern for nigh-on forty years, in which Disney animation, during its periods of decline and aimlessness, sought refuge and inspiration in the North American woods.  It started in 1942 with Bambi, one of Disney's great masterpieces—and I, personally, would claim that it repeated in 1947, with "Bongo" in Fun and Fancy Free, while claiming with significantly greater passion that it fully earned the name of "a tradition" in 1981, with The Fox and the Hound—and I believe it would have made Walt smile to have recognized this pattern, and to know that when the going got tough, by some instinct his inheritors still looked for grace in the natural beauty of this great continent.  It had worked, in my estimation, every time, even if it's fanciful to the point of ahistoricism, maybe, given that Bambi flopped and The Fox and the Hound, though financially successful, occasioned an actual schism in the studio.  But I'm rolling, and if I may, I think it says something about the deep pit of diffidence and despair that Walt Disney Feature Animation had found itself in by 2003, that when they returned to the North American woods with a new film, called Brother Bear, it stopped working, and stopped working so hard that Brother Bear would prove to be the next-to-last feature that it seemed like Disney was ever going to make by means of animation in the classical, two-dimensional sense.  This didn't quite come to pass (it was the fourth-to-last, ooh), but it was the intent, and it was the last feature, period, to be animated at either their Paris satellite or their Orlando studio—each of them established not even so many years before, in happier times when all seemed possible—with the former I've heard finishing their work while movers were literally clearing out the offices, while for the latter, at least it meant a release for its animators and staff from their Billy Pilgrim-like prison of being a Disney World tourist attraction.  That's as much of a silver lining as I can come up with.

By now, David Stainton had already replaced Thomas Schumacher (who had apparently once declared Brother Bear "the film of the century," which seems like extravagant overhype) as the president of feature animation.  Even higher up, within a month its release, Roy E. Disney had quit as chairman of animation to launch yet another shareholder revolt (almost a tradition itself, albeit one personal to Walt's nephew), this time aimed at deposing Michael Eisner for, amongst other sins in Roy's eyes, creating a "soulless" simulacrum of his uncle's company; given that theatrical release windows worked a little differently in 2003, and Brother Bear, for all its (absence of) reputation, actually did have a respectable box office run that autumn, I would expect that somewhere in the world that it was even still playing when Eisner rode off into the sunset the following year.  He was replaced by Bob Iger, and, two decades later, we can say that maybe this was not a total improvement, if your complaint about modern Disney was "soullessness."

Eisner, at least, must have loved cinema as an artistic medium, even if he increasingly did so neither wisely nor well, and even if running Disney had changed him, distancing him from creative expression and turning him weird.  Both sides of Eisner, nonetheless, the hotshot movie producer and the imperial CEO alike, loved The Lion King, for it had been WDFA's biggest hit and arguably their greatest cultural success all in the same package, and so, in the halcyon era of the mid-90s, he'd issued orders to WDFA to do something similar, but with bears.  Eisner also, evidently, loved bears.  (He did not, anyway, do anything to stop The Country Bears.)  The cynical explanation, probably a correct one, is that bears made for easy-to-sell toys.  If that was the beginning and end of Brother Bear's motivation, it's bizarre that it started (echoing "Hamlet with lions") as "King Lear with bears."  That didn't get very far, for obvious reasons, and after what seems like a less difficult development cycle than usual, it got its directors, Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker, who soon figured out what their movie was going to be about.  A supervising animator of tertiary characters and a layout supervisor, respectively, it's hard not to wonder if Schumacher picked them out of a hat.  (At the same time, it also doesn't seem especially fair that they've had virtually no projects of note since.  Blaise has at least had jobs afterwards, but when Walker passed in 2015, it was without a single credit of any description whatsoever since Brother Bear.  I mean, I have very little use for their movie, but I don't think it's so bad that Blaise forgot how to draw or Walker stopped being able to supervise a layout, and the way that these unloved Disney movies of the early 21st century, arriving with the full-on collapse of traditional animation, seemingly just annihilated people can be horrible to contemplate.  Even filmmakers with a legacy as firmly established as Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise could lose it all, as they did, more-or-less the very instant that Atlantis: The Lost Empire came out; it makes me shudder to think that, just as easily, so too could have gone Ron Clements and John Musker after Treasure Planet, when those directors still had the signal achievement of Disney's 21st century left in them.)

In any case, around the turn of the millennium, Brother Bear came together.  On paper it looks good, and it's really only a couple of tweaks—and a complete overhaul of its tone—away from being great.  In fact, it kind of actually is great, going on for 24 minutes of its 85 minute runtime, this being the number of minutes that elapse before it pulls a certain trick with its aspect ratio and color style, of sufficient fanciness that you really will have to hand it to Blaise and Walker for demonstrating formal intelligence and a willingness to experiment with what a Disney cartoon could do, even if that "complete overhaul of its tone" remark means I don't want you to get the impression they're altogether doing a good job, or a correct one.  So: Brother Bear's twist on "the North American woods" is that its woods are the primeval ones of (let's say) 13,000 years ago, in the far northwest of the continent, somewhere in Canada or Alaska—or Beringia—and here we find a clan of Paleoamericans and a trio of late-adolescent-to-young-adult brothers whom the movie implies, or simply fails to assert otherwise, are orphans with no friends.  (I'm sort of just snarking for snark's sake, but it's somewhat hard to understand how the movie happens if they have parents or people who enjoy their company, since the plot basically amounts to "three brothers venture out into the wilderness to get themselves killed, each in turn, by this fucking bear," and you'd think a society of forty people should care slightly about the loss of three men in their prime hunter-gatherer years if they liked them even a little bit at all.)  Well, these brothers three, from oldest to youngest, are Sitka (D.B. Sweeney), the caring and conciliating one; Denahi (Jason Raize), the one far less willing to put up with nonsense; and Kenai (Joaquin Phoenix), the immature and impatient one with the irrational sense of wounded dignity, also (obviously) our protagonist; and they roughhouse and poke at one another in a manner less dissimilar to 21st century Americans than you'd guess (unless you've watched a lot of family cartoons, in which case you'd guess that from the outset), which, who knows, maybe captures the emotional truth of things more than otherwise.

Though it is further worth mentioning, I suppose, that the closest to "Native American of any description" we've got here is that "Raize" potentially rhymes with "maize," which is not terribly germane here.  There's more fundamentally aggravating stuff, anyhow, like enough of an insistence on our heroes as Proto-Inuits—Thule culture, at least, judging by their kayaks—that for the narrator who opens the tale they tapped Prof. Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, an Alaskan, to recite that narration in Yupik (he is rapidly superceded by an English-speaking narrator, Harold Gould).  And this culture... did not exist until about 10,000 years after this movie starts, and to the extent it did it was still in Siberia (the groups comprising modern Arctic natives arrived a lot later than "Native Americans," more-narrowly-defined*), and it notably did not coexist with mammoths.  (On that count, Kawagley and Gould's narrators seem to suggest, by virtue of referring to them in the past tense, that the North American megafauna overkill hypothesis is both true in its strongest form, and it happened inside a single generation.)

That's maybe not too annoying: genre-wise, it really just wants to be a caveman movie with a fantasy conceit, and we could be charitable and just allow that Brother Bear simply wants to deploy the folks who've been in its setting for longer than the Europeans have to stand in for the unreconstructable Lithic stage society it's imagining, while giving that society some patina of cultural specificity.  (On the other hand, somehow this movie with no white characters, and barely any people characters, still manages more specificity in its white cultural references; but we'll get to that momentarily.)  To all this I might sort of inwardly scowl, yet only in the same way I grouse about Alpha not using Western Hunter-Gatherers, so, in the end, that's all well and good.  But, like, I'm pretty sure two of those brothers are just named after cities, man, themselves blunt topographical descriptors like "that's a pretty flat meadow" and "the coast of the island we live on," and the middle one is, I'm almost as sure, just a gloss on the endonym of the Dena'ina people.  (The name of the shaman, Tanana (Joan Coapland), is itself a variant of that word used by a related Athabaskan group, and on hers, the spelling isn't even changed.  Brother Bear was one of those productions where they got to take a field trip, and apparently they didn't bother asking any Alaskan for a list of four real names, or at least four words that weren't the first four nouns they saw in some park museum.)  That's some serious "not trying," and while, sure, that's just on one (relatively) trivial axis, it possibly speaks to the whole thing.

And then there's the line, "why wasn't I turned into a homing pigeon?"  Possibly because homing pigeons won't arrive in North America till the Columbian Exchange, asshole.

So our boy Kenai (pop. 7,424) is about to become a man, by way of his totem ceremony, where he'll find out what animal spirit and vague concept shall define his life path.  He gets "love," represented by a bear, which seems inapropos, as Kenai would be the first to tell you, though right now he's more concerned with the further embarrassment of that pick-a-nick basket full of fish he didn't secure, now purloined by a real bear.  He resolves to hunt the bear down, at least to get back the basket, but he's probably apt to kill the creature, and despite Sitka's cautions and Denahi's eye-rolling, he ventures into the wilderness.  He promptly almost gets killed by that bear; instead, the one who dies is Sitka, belatedly following his brother, saving Kenai and Denahi alike in the process, but not even hurting the bear.  So Kenai doubles down and this time he does win, but Sitka, with the spirits in the afterlife, adjudges his brother a murderer, and metes out his poetic punishment, transforming Kenai into a bear.  Sitka, however, did not reckon on Denahi, who, after all, had thought that Kenai's attempt to exact vengeance on a bear was just another manifestation of his idiocy.  But now instead he takes up Kenai's spear, because after losing one brother to this damned bear, and misidentifying his other brother as that selfsame bear, and to all appearances witnessing the aftermath of this bear eating Kenai bones and all, he's decided that Kenai was right, and the bear does need to die.  (I will permit it to pass that the film's eco-message is probably more resonant with people who live in a wide range cleared of all dangerous animals centuries ago than it might be with people who actually have to compete with, and potentially contend with, a man-eating bear.  I will also permit it to pass that maybe Sitka's the real idiot.)  Thus Kenai, reduced to barbaric yawps and unable to plead his case, flees his own brother into the further wilderness.

This is where that aspect ratio trick happens, the screen expanding to fill a 'Scope widescreen frame, and the colors surge from muted grays, olives, and golds (even during the mystical transformation, they're just extra-shiny golds), becoming vibrant and bright in a way that's hugely effective in generating the same wooziness of an expanding worldview such as Kenai's about to start experiencing.  It is unfortunate, however, that Brother Bear's home video presentation necessarily suffers on its account, with the entire first 24 minutes of the film being stuck in this awful little windowbox, especially when the first 24 minutes are by an enormous margin the best part of the movie, and it's only good afterwards on the infrequent occasion that Denahi shows up to menace his brother, and it can be like its first 24 minutes again.

See, these are some very strong bones for an adventure story, even one with thematic heft as a fable ("now you know what it's like to be the hunted") and, forget thematic heft as fable, it's a great excuse for wilderness action, with a "villain" implacably driven to hunt down a hero whom we would not like to see die, but would surely not want to see murder his brother to live—I don't even know that we need to spend even half our time with Kenai-the-bear in this story, when Denahi's tragic quest is just as compelling—and from time to time, that's even the movie we get, so that when, for instance, Denahi pursues Kenai into a freakish fantasia of the Valley of the Ten Thousand Smokes, in the first showcase for movement through a Deep Canvas background that the movie has bothered with even though it's almost an hour into it, it's actually quite cool.  Those first 24 minutes are very, very cool: my biggest complaint is that it indulges in a little too much "shakycam," and, hell, even by the second confrontation with the bear Blaise and Walker have already largely abandoned it, as an unsuccessful aesthetic.  The stark color style in service to an iconic-more-than-realistic treatment of Northwest America is gorgeous (and when I called Brother Bear's Deep Canvas "subtle" last time, I hadn't recalled it was so subtle it really might as well have been not used except for a few key sequences—I legitimately can't determine if it actually is being used, most of the time—but just because they didn't exploit a tool shouldn't be an automatic demerit, and the absence of any serious overreach throughout the whole film, and the stateliness of the first act, is a point of recommendation in itself).

The animation is either solidly good, or outright terrific: I genuinely enjoy the dynamic established between the brothers, probably on the basis of Kenai, Denahi, and Sitka's animators (James Young Jackson, Ruben Aquino, and Anthony Wayne Michaels, respectively, though Jackson only on Kenai-the-human) distilling their personalities into movement, as much or more than through any operation of their (still perfectly well-calibrated) VA performances; as for Rune Brandt Bennicke's adversary bear, she's just Goddamn outstanding, somehow swinging as far away from the borderline-abstract mythicism of Glen Keane's celebrated Fox and the Hound bear as possible, but getting to the same terrifying place by way of well-observed, only modestly-hyperbolic realism.  (She's actually still incredibly gross and horror-inflected; the detail of her bottom lip, so slack it just hangs off her face, is in its low-key way just about as unnerving as anything in, say, The Prophecy, or Annihilation.)

I belabor this—again, just the first act, only 24 minutes!—to emphasize the Brother Bear that we didn't get.  Because after that, the actual movie starts, beginning with that aspect ratio and color style shift, and the actual movie is as insipid and paint-by-numbers as a talking animal cartoon could possibly get while still theoretically treating with death and guilt.  Almost the first thing we get following Kenai's awakening at the bottom of a cliff is Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas reviving some obscure-ass Second City routine in the form of a couple of low-I.Q., somehow-drunk talking moose, which is at least off-kilter enough, conceptually, that maybe I'd like it (probably more, "appreciate it," since it's still kind of bad) in some other circumstances; but it does set our new baseline.

It bothers me more than it should that the animals talk at all, let alone this "all animals, or at least non-primate mammals, speak the language of nature" shit it's shoveling, sometimes turning them into technology-users or, minimally, technology-understanders, so you kind of start wondering why brown bears have not established themselves as Alaska's primordial master race, while always wondering why the movie needs to be this frivolous.  (Later, we get a bear who speaks a language they don't understand (Darko Cesar), and since, in its minor way, Brother Bear wants to offer up an encomium for all the peoples of northernmost America—its indigenes, its Anglo-Canadian comedians—it even made some minimal amount of sense when I still thought he was speaking Russian.  Well, I got the family resemblance right, but it's Serbo-Croatian, so what the fuck is this even, except addling a bad concept even further?)  What had been a fairly hard-nosed and kick-ass, if never inhumane, action-adventure is pretty much all limp comedy now, Kenai meandering through the woods pointed vaguely at the mountains where the aurora borealis spirits will restore him, and amongst its episodes we find, e.g., a part where to evade Denahi's refined hunting skills, his cohort hides their tracks by... riding mammoths.  The bear rides mammothback.  He does so thanks entirely to the eliding powers of editing, not that I actually want to see the process, and these really are the jokes.  Except when the baby bear shows off his karate chops.  Those are, also, "the jokes."

Because Kenai's absolutely not meandering alone: for reasons beyond explanation, though I've seen it happen to better men than I, it seems genuinely hard to cohesively or efficiently summarize Brother Bear's plot, despite its sheer simplicity; but what Brother Bear is about is Kenai running across another bear, a cub named Koda (Jeremy Suarez), who has been "separated" from his mother, and you can connect the dots there—I'm even certain the movie knows you shall immediately do so.  So it at least isn't condescending about it, but it also seems to think allowing you to connect those dots is all that this new, film-consuming interaction requires to be interesting.  It doesn't bother with anything else than "sneering, independent young person reluctantly accedes to the possibility of a found family," and Koda doesn't act in any way psychologically consistent with a juvenile separated from his mother—it's obviously not consistent with bear behavior, since my understanding is that Kenai, were he a brown bear, would be likelier to eat him than comfort him—nor is he animated with the anxious burden you'd think he'd feel by Alex Kupershmidt, not even for purposes of cloying for your pity (Kupershmidt was just off of Stitch, where he managed to have the mutant living weapon feel all sorts of emotions beyond "generic sass," but "lost, frightened teddy bear" somehow evaded him and his directors completely).

Meanwhile, Kenai is too stupid to figure out what the movie assumes that the smallest children in the audience already know, and he looks pretty risible now, too.  The other shift, that I didn't mention, is the jarring (and extremely, extremely unproductive) switch to a vastly cartoonier style in the character design and animation, which is as big a reason as anything else the film feels so utterly weightless whenever Aquino's Denahi isn't forcing it back to something even marginally consequential, and it's further rather irritating how in the process of anthropomorphizing this bear, Kenai fails to even look like the ursine caricature version of himself—in Byron Howard's rendering, this is a noticeably Caucasian bear—on top of a sequence where flashbacks repeat the first act climax, where that in-theory-useful dichotomy, between mama bear's horribilis subjective monstrosity and the less-frightening "reality" of bears as Kenai has come to understand it, just gets ground up into a paste.

So it becomes this plodding blob of scenes, mostly comic/"comic," occasionally "poignant"—sometimes, thankfully, interrupted by Denahi's manic intensity—that typically retain some very superb soaring, glaciated Northwestern America art direction.  But that blob is rarely going to be anything else besides an annoying bear cub "endearing" himself to Kenai, and Kenai's heart growing three sizes, even though we are given very little reason to understand why it should.  Such is indicated, nevertheless, by way of a frolicking travelogue montage, beneath one of the film's several bad Phil Collins songs, which are all individually less bludgeoning than the barbaric lyrical literalism of his Tarzan contributions, albeit still somehow worse (there is literally one musical feature in the entire Collins-led soundtrack I truly liked, when it shifts into bleakness for roughly two seconds in preparation for the big, guilty reveal, whereupon the song immediately stalls out), while, as a matter of Disney's precipitously-declining barometer for hipness, we find them letting Collins boldly strike out into full-on muzak territory.  Likewise indicated, under another Collins song montage, is pretty much the entirety of that big, guilty reveal, and in a movie where the drama should come almost automatically—hence how I imagine Blaise and Walker tricked themselves into thinking dialogue was largely unnecessary, and this was the more artful way—it only manages to come off as the most shockingly lazy and perfunctory thing, not even rising to the level of properly manipulative.

And that's basically the mood Brother Bear leaves you with, a certain emptiness and disappointment; I've seen this movie before, and I still spent its first act wondering why I hadn't liked it and how it could possibly have such a meager legacy, until it slapped me upside the head with the asphyxiating salmon of its main phase, and I remembered, "oh, right, it peters out into absolutely nothing, and wastes 85 minutes of its viewer's time."  It's a movie that hits all its little plot and character beats, and doesn't even have the energy to tell its own story in a way that suggests it believes in it.  Disappointment becomes an even more depressing sensation, because it starts so well, and you can't help imagining that it would've taken very little extra effort for the whole thing to be that good, or at least fine.

Score: 5/10

*Somehow I don't think "Second Nations" will catch on.