Runtime: 1 hour, 17 minutes
Rating: G
Directors: Alastair Fothergill, Keith Scholey
Quick Impressions:
A few months after our wedding, my husband and I were on an exciting weekend trip with my then four-year-old stepson. While relaxing in the hotel room before dinner, we happened to catch a documentary about bears on TV.
“Ohh!” I gushed (because they were so cute). “Look at them! They’re so cute!” (They were! They were so cute!) “Bears are so cute! I want a bear!”
With a look of grave concern, my stepson turned, looked me right in the eye, and said gently but firmly, “No. We cannot get a bear. I’m sorry, but they are just too dangerous.”
His tone was so hilarious, like a parent who loves you but fears you’ve gone too far this time and must be protected from yourself.
Anyway, my five-year-old daughter has been dying to see “the bear movie,” as we all call it for weeks now (thanks to relentless Disney Channel marketing, no doubt), so bears have been all the gossip in our house, and I’m sure I’ve retold that anecdote about her brother at least thirty times in the past month.
“I think you were right,” my daughter decided about halfway through the movie today. “Bears are so cute. Maybe we should get one.”
“But where would we find a bear?” I whispered back.
“We could just steal him from the zoo,” she suggested. “Of course, they might notice.”
“We could dress him up in people clothes and sneak him out the exit,” I offered.
“Daddy’s clothes would work,” she decided.
Clearly my stepson is the sensible one in the family. His sister has a totally different personality. It’s like that in the bear family, too. Scout is independent, but Amber likes to ride around on the back of their mother, Sky. They all like to eat, of course—if they can ever find any salmon!
You’ll find out more for yourself when you watch Bears. (Okay, honestly, there’s not much more to find out. A mother bear and her two cubs spend a year looking for salmon in Alaska. That’s about it, refreshingly simple and pretty engaging onscreen.)
The Good:
I’ve always liked bears. There’s something so human about them—except they’re bears, kind of like me. (Well, I mean, okay, I’m not technically a bear, but at some moments I distinctly feel like I’m only just technically a human. Maybe humans are slowly evolving into bears, and I’m the missing link. Or maybe I’ll be a bear in some future life. I really like the idea of hibernating. Why go to sleep when there’s stuff to do? Better to crash somewhere cozy and dark once all the excitement dies down, I think. The bears have the right idea. Plus I love rolling around outside in the grandeur of nature, and I hate it when wolves try to eat my children. You see, I’m practically a bear already!)
I’ve also always liked nature specials about wildlife, and I’ve been watching Disney’s spin on the animal kingdom since as far back as I can remember. My mother was a particular fan of The Yellowstone Cubs, and I remember watching that over and over again when I was about six. (I assume it kept re-airing on the Disney Channel because we didn’t get a VCR until the following year.)
I should mention, though, that while I’ve always liked children’s wildlife documentaries (made by Disney or others), I don’t go into them with particularly high expectations. With any documentary, authenticity is far from a given. Unless you’re the one standing out in the field with your camera inches from a bear’s nose, you really can’t be sure how much the footage you’re seeing has been manipulated.
Around the same time we watched the bear show with my then four-year-old stepson, we also took him to see the movie Arctic Tale which very movingly depicts the lives of two sets of animals, a mother walrus and a mother polar bear and their babies. By the end of the movie, you’re sobbing (and ready to apologize to the polar bear for that time you took a really long shower and almost singlehandedly melted her entire habitat), and then suddenly you see this disclaimer up on the screen saying that all the footage is of many different animals, the characters are composite, and the entire storyline is fabricated.
Stuff like that happens a lot with “documentaries” for children, so at this point, I don’t even expect authenticity. I just hope to see a lot of well shot footage of cute animals playing (and hopefully none of cute animals dying horribly in agony). Honestly you never know what you’re going to get. Will the movie be completely faked with a contrived storyline and ridiculously happy ending or will it be very raw and real with a meandering plot and abundant gruesome carnage? That’s less of an either/or thing and more of a spectrum, really.
So I’m happy to report that Disney’s Bears exceeded my expectations. By all appearances, it truly is the story of a real group of particular, individual bears going through a given year in their actual lives. (Now of course, it could be as fake and contrived as Arctic Tale, but if it is, it has the good sense not to advertise the fact at the end of the movie. It could be fake, but since it’s in Disney’s hands, the public will never be given reason to suspect. Forty years from now, in fact, we can probably expect the release of another Disney movie, celebrating the gritty, “true” details of the making of Bears because the people running the Disney empire are not stupid.)
The bears are so cute, too. They’re everything you could possibly want from bears and more (more because there are more bears than just the three featured heavily in the previews). Although we mainly follow Sky and her two young cubs, we also meet a variety of other ursine characters, including the dominant male and his outcast rival, several growly females, and a few nondescript strangers. Animal lovers will be thrilled that the movie also heavily features a dangerous wolf and several arresting birds (in particular an apparently psychic raven).
The only human actor is narrator John C. Reilly who does a fabulous job. Not only does he provide sonorous, clear narration, but he also sometimes slips into a kind of free indirect discourse (sometimes even discourse outright), describing a given situation from the imagined point of view of one of the characters onscreen. He’s really very good. He’s easy to listen to, and he does a great job of making the characters vivid and sympathetic through his presentation of their “thoughts.”
The movie’s goal seems to be encouraging children to consider life from the point of view of a bear. We see what a mother bear and her cubs go through in a year, what drives them, what scares them, what disappoints them, what worries them, what saves them. It’s pretty hard to see all that and fail to sympathize (even, to a degree, empathize) with the bears.
My strong impression is that the movie is asking us to have respect and compassion for bears as fellow creatures sharing our planet. Unlike Arctic Tale, Bears does not end with a heavy-handed round of shaming or a rousing call to action. Instead, it merely intends to engender a respect for bears and (by extension) for all creatures and for the world in which we all live.
I’m pretty sure this is the aim of the movie, and I think it succeeds beautifully. About ten minutes before the film ended, the narrator made a comment about Sky longing for salmon, and my daughter whispered thoughtfully, “She has been looking for that salmon since the beginning of the movie.”
“Yes,” I replied. “That’s what it’s like to be a mother bear. You wake up hungry and have to think about, ‘What can I do today to feed myself and feed my children?’”
She whispered back, “Yes, and it’s so hard because you have to watch those cubs, and everything in all of nature is trying to hurt them and kill them.” So the movie definitely does successfully encourage children to think about the world from a point of view other than their own.
Best Scene:
It’s a good thing my stepson was sure that nothing bad was going to happen to the little bear cubs because I definitely wasn’t sure, and somebody had to reassure my daughter.
Though for a film about wild animals, there’s very little blood and violence, Bears relies heavily on moments of peril and suspense to capture the audience’s attention. Those little cubs just can’t stay out of trouble. They are always in danger. Sometimes, it appears that one is just sitting there and nothing is happening, but don’t be fooled. He’s in mortal peril at that very moment, and he’s so aware of his fate that he’s having an existential crisis, and that little growly sound his mother is making is the bear equivalent of taking an entire bottle of Prozac. Good grief, they’re in such hysterics that they can barely control their racing thoughts before the crisis is resolved. We know all this because the narrator pointedly tells us, again and again.
Every time those cubs were in danger, my daughter nearly descended into madness. She was beside herself with anxious horror. Fortunately, her brother kept telling her, “It will be okay. Nothing bad will happen. The cubs obviously live or they wouldn’t have made this movie.”
I wanted to believe him, but I was less sure. After all, in many of the (more honest) nature specials, animals do (frequently) die on screen (especially smaller, weaker animals). Death comes up a lot in realistic movies about nature because…well, I mean, that’s is how life ends…for everyone. I wasn’t completely sure what would happen to those bear cubs. I wanted to reassure her, “Of course, nothing bad will happen. Bears are magical creatures that live forever,” but I didn’t know for sure if my lie would be sustainable, or if I’d say that and ten seconds later, Scout would fall off a cliff into a waiting Venus flytrap or something! (Wait until you see the movie! It’s always Scout getting into these situations, never Amber!)
This is a Disney movie, though, made for little kids, so I think my stepson had its number long before I did.
Anyway, my point is, all of the “little bear in peril” moments really captured my daughter’s attention. The best of these is the scene when the tide rises unexpectedly, creating immense suspense that my daughter barely survived herself.
Funniest Scene:
When Scout is trying to figure out how to open a shell and get a snack, everyone in the theater was giggling (especially the young children). The little bear is extremely adorable on his own, and John C. Reilly’s narration enhances the hilarity of the situation.
Best Action Sequence:
Without a doubt, the biggest treat in the movie is watching the salmon swim upstream, fly out of the water, and whack the befuddled bears in the nose. Gun battles, car chases, helicopter crashes, alien invasions—that kind of stuff happens in basically every other movie out there. I mean, we all know by now that the only reason Roland Emmerich even makes movies is for the visceral thrill of blowing up the White House!
Buying a ticket to a mainstream movie today pretty much guarantees you at least one eyeful of excessive violence and CGI explosions.
But how many movies show you salmon in slow-mo flying up out of the water and smashing smooshily against the side of a bear’s responsive face? The best part is, Mother Nature is doing all the hard work (unless Disney has some animatronic crew member hiding under the water throwing up fish at regular intervals, which now that I think about it, is almost certainly the case).
(I’m just kidding. This has more integrity than some children’s nature “documentaries” I’ve seen. As the end credits play, we get to see production photos of diligent camera men invading the bears’ space in eerie silence.)
Best Scene Visually:
I’m a huge fan of the scene featuring the “free buffet” on the rocks at low tide. There’s some pretty showy time-lapse photography going on, but even apart from that, the natural textures of the scene are so layered and eye-catching. There’s also a gorgeous shot just before this scene (I think) of mists misting around (or clouds clouding around. Just trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.)
The Negatives:
Honestly, this movie is totally inoffensive, perfectly sweet, beautifully shot, and entirely kid friendly. If you like bears—or even if you just want to see some beautiful shots of Alaska—then Bears is sure to please you.
Since it runs only about an hour and fifteen minutes, though, adults without children may want to wait and watch it at home. That’s the only real reason not to see this movie in the theater. It delivers exactly what it promises—a little more than an hour of narrated footage of the first year of life of two young bear cubs and their mother. The target audience is clearly children. Adults without children simply may not be interested in spending movie theater prices to watch three bears walking around for an hour.
I think you would have to try to be offended by this movie, but if you were really in a bad mood when somebody dragged you to the theater, I can think of one aspect of the film that might legitimately get under your skin.
Early on, John C. Reilly made some comment (about one bear’s interior life), and my daughter whispered suspiciously, “Does he know how to speak bear?”
I think she’s onto something. Whether he knows how or not, the narrator behaves as if he is fluent in bear for the entire movie. It’s like he’s The Bear Whisperer or something. How in the world is he privy to their innermost thoughts and secrets? As I watched, I thought, It’s good to see this and be encouraged to look through a bear’s eyes. We’re all so often guilty of dehumanizing bears.
And then I thought, Hey wait a minute! Bears are not human.
That gave me pause (because I was turning into a werebear! (just kidding)). Unbearable puns aside, I really did stop and think about the narration. John C. Reilly was so compelling when speaking for the bear. But do the makers of the movie really know what the bear is feeling inside? I do believe bears have feelings and thoughts and regard for their young, but do they experience stressful situations in the same ways that a human would? Is this movie giving us an intimate look at bears, or is it anthropomorphizing bears?
I mean, in some scenes, we see the bear turn to the camera with a tormented look, and then we hear narration like, “Her mind is racing with panic right now,” but I mean is it really? In the credits, they show us the camera crew filming the bears. To get some shots, they appear to be standing within twenty feet of the bear (at least). Isn’t it possible that sometimes when the bears get those weird looks on their faces, what they’re really thinking is, Who is this guy and why does he keep following me around and staring at me?
Clearly some of the stress of the threatening situations was at the very least built up by the narrator in order to maintain dramatic tension in the movie. The only question is, how much of the stress how much of the time? Was the anxiety entirely manufactured, or did the bears genuinely worry at some situations?
Then I just started thinking about narration in general because 1) the plot is very minimal and 2) I’m always thinking about stuff like that, anyway. I’m obsessed with the use of narrative as a way of finding/creating meaning/limiting chaos.
So I started thinking about how children (and maybe also adults) probably believe what the narrator is saying. Why would they question it? Children usually believe narration because they’re used to it. The narration shapes their understanding of the events they’re seeing. I mean, half the time now, I catch myself repeating what was told to me as a child to my own child. Our early caregivers (often our parents) typically explain the world to us much more than we (or likely they) even realize at the time. And then we see reality through that lens, at least until we become aware that it is a lens and likely even after that discovery.
Children don’t really have the skillset or inclination to recognize the narrator’s speech as motivated interpretation rather than uncomplicated discovery of fact. Of course, now that I’ve said that, I remember that my own child seemed skeptical that the narrator could speak for the bears with such conviction. So maybe I’m the one who goes around obliviously believing everything that’s said to me, and everybody else in the world just thinks I’m dumb (including the bears. Why else would they look at me like that? What must they think of me! I’ll ask John C. Reilly. He’ll know for sure.)
My point is, if you’re looking for things not to like about the movie, you could easily heckle it by saying, “You don’t know what’s in that bear’s heart, you liar! And do you honestly expect us to believe that they’re desperately following this one magical raven who knows all the secrets of the world?” If that’s how you feel, though, I would really like to know why you thought it was a good idea to give Disney their cut of your $7-$12 so you could watch a bear movie made for little kids. If you know so much about how the world really works, then you should know yourself a little bit better than that by now, I think.
Overall:
Bears shows us a year in the life of Sky and her two young cubs as they avoid predators and search the wilds of Alaska for the salmon they need to stay alive. The bears are adorable. The Alaskan wildlife is beautiful. Some of the photography is amazing. And John C. Reilly’s narration is expertly done. If you have young children and want to take them to a first movie, this is a good choice because it’s very short and highly engaging.
Our eleven-year-old boy and our five-year-old girl both really liked the movie, and so did all the other kids in the theater (because they kept saying so). This is really not the kind of movie that anyone hates. It’s well done and highly palatable. The only question is, do you want to spend the money to see it in the theater? Will buying the tickets mean a) no real sacrifice to your lifestyle, b) passing on another movie, or c) letting your baby roam bear-style in the yard for a few days because you can no longer afford diapers. As long as you didn’t answer (c), going to Bears is a safe bet, but waiting until it comes on TV seems like a fine alternative, too.
Also, just so you know, if you’re the type who cringes at animal suffering, we don’t see much of that in this movie. I did unexpectedly start crying at the end, though, at the thought of the emotionally turbulent challenges of being a mother nurturing children through the first years of life. Of course, I should admit that once when I was still pumping breastmilk for my daughter, I let down for some cute bear cubs I saw on TV, so my responses are, perhaps, not typical. This really isn’t a tear jerker (but you should probably call your mother, anyway. She’s given you so much!).