Brother Bear

Saw Brother Bear. It was alright. Everything about it was kind of middling. They were doing something strange with the background art. I think they were showing off some technique of partial matte-paintings made available by digital backgrounds. Neat. The artwork is pretty but unremarkable. It's the pinnacle of the kind of art you'd find on jigsaw puzzles. The characters are animated in the trademark Disney way, all shovel-shaped eyes and comfortingly cute characters with lyre-shaped mouths. The animators have clearly done their homework and when the headstrong protagonist transmogrifies into a bear he indeed sometimes moves like an actual bear and not like a man in a fur suit.

The plot is more interesting: a young man wants to prove himself as a man (thereby, of course, signifying his current immaturity) and decides to take revenge on a bear who indirectly killed his brother (full disclosure, his brother sacrifices himself as a means to save our hero. Not 15 minutes in and there's already a suicide for the greater good.) The "spirits" do not take kindly to this however and turn him into a bear to teach him a lesson. As a bear, he befriends a precocious cub who is in full-on annoyingly cute mode and travels to a mystic mountain to turn himself human again. The film's ending surprised me (though not terribly) and the message of general acceptance is a good one. Especially nice is the slight breaking of the gender roles what with the male bear acting as caregiver/big-bro to the young cub. Also interesting was the removal of any real villain from the film. This meshes nicely with the central thesis of what makes something a "monster."

The songs were tiring and the comic relief was (I think) pitched mostly at the younger crowd. It smacks slightly (the humor does) of Shrek-damaged snark, but it's not quite as cruel. So the whole thing is not exceptional but is competently made and perhaps I was just up too late when I saw it, but I thought several parts were quite moving. Like a sausage, it is undistinguished but good.