Phil Collins returned once again to write songs for the film but one of them, the opening song, is performed by Tina Turner. 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.Īmong 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. You can see how the process of learning to care for Koda causes Kenai to mature. The relationship between Kenai and Koda is fantastically developed through performance, design, and top notch animation. 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 colours also become more saturated as Kenai joins the world of talking animals and he meets a bear cub named Koda (Jeremy Suarez).ĭespite having a less grounded conception of killing and survival than Fox and the Hound, Brother Bear is less squeamish about killing off main characters.
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. I found this technique more distracting than interesting. At this point film switches from a 1.75:1 aspect ratio to 2.35:1. Once in the spirit world, Sitka, continues his Obi-Wan role and decides Kenai would learn his lesson better in the form of bear. Sweeney)-not unlike Luke having plenty of motive to kill Vader after the deaths of Obi-Wan and his aunt and uncle. The bear does give Kenai a slightly better reason for revenge than stolen fish when it kills his brother, Sitka (D.B. But one suspects the meat and hide from a large bear would be a pretty handy fringe benefit.īut 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. 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.
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.Īrguably 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. 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. It's worth remembering Bambi was written by a game hunter. There are also echoes of Bambi, The Fox and the Hound, The Lion King, Pocahontas, and Dinosaur. Even more than Treasure Planet, Brother Bear follows in the footsteps of the original Star Wars trilogy.
Joaquin Phoenix as the hotshot young protagonist, an Inuit named Kenai, gives a great performance matched by terrific animation from John E. The premise is trite but I'd say this film is generally underrated. 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.