Disney’s advertising campaign for its new animated feature, Brother Bear, made me wary about how good this film really was. Why did the commercials and so many of the posters focus on the comic relief characters, the two squabbling moose (as in the promotion’s catchphrase “The Moose Are Loose”)? (Some of the posters were clever, like the one characterizing the moose as “Grazed and Confused.”) But why weren’t they spotlighting the title character, the bear? Does this mean that the moose will steal the show, but that the actual story about the central characters is a flop?
Far from it, as it turned out. Brother Bear, which has many fathers (directors Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker, and writers Tab Murphy, Lorne Cameron, David Hoselton, Steve Benich and Ron J. Friedman) is one of the best traditionally animated Disney films since The Lion King. In large part that is because of the psychological depth of the story of its title character. Brother Bear is an effort to go beyond devising merely an adventure story to creating a contemporary fairy tale, albeit one set in the distant past, with the emotional resonance of myth. And it succeeds.
One initial point of interest is that Brother Bear continues Disney’s efforts over the last few decades to make the cast of characters of its canon of animated features multiracial. The early Disney animated features drew on European fairy tales (Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty) and classic European children’s stories (Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and the partly animated Mary Poppins). More recent Disney animated features have made their main characters Arabs (Aladdin), Chinese (Mulan), Hawaiian (Lilo & Stitch), and, in Pocahontas and now in Brother Bear, Native American. (Disney hasn’t done an animated feature with black lead characters as yet, unless we count the 1940s live action/animated Song of the South, which has been accused of racial stereotyping. But the voices of black actors are prominent in The Lion King, and the stage version makes the central characters’ African ethnicity explicit.)
Brother Bear is set in primeval North America at a time following the Ice Ages, when woolly mammoths have not yet succumbed to extinction. Since the Northern Lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis, are visible (and judging from the moose’s accents), presumably the story takes place in Canada. The human characters are all Native Americans, and the story begins with three brothers, Sitka, the eldest; Denahi, the middle brother; and the much younger Kenai, who initially comes off as something of a prankster and a slacker, quite unlike his dutiful older siblings.
The tribe’s female shaman offers each of the three brothers with a separate figurine of an animal, which is to be his totem, a representation of his true personality and path in life. She presents Kenai with the totem of a bear, which, one might think would represent strength or perhaps ferocity. Indeed, most of the people in this film seem to think of bears as ferocious enemies to be killed. But the shaman instead calls the bear the totem of love. Kenai vehemently rejects the totem and the idea that this represents his destiny and himself.
Now, in his description of the archetypal format of the hero’s adventure, Joseph Campbell referred to the call to adventure. The shaman in Brother Bear is both a herald, announcing the “adventure,” and a mentor, offering guidance. But the adventure she is heralding is a journey of self-discovery, and Kenai denies that he is the “self” that she sees him as being. Campbell contends that to deny the call to adventure is to bring on serious, harmful repercussions, and so it is here.
The path that Kenai seems, by his initial actions in the film, to prefer to take is a more stereotypically masculine one: that of a hunter and warrior. So it seems significant that the shaman is a woman. She presents his eldest brother with the totem of the eagle, signifying wisdom. So wisdom is not restricted to only one sex. Nonetheless, the film does seem to be establishing a dichotomy between traditional male values (violence, vengeance) and traditional female values (love, nurturing).
Irresponsible as usual, Kenai fails to guard a basket of fish, which are eaten by a bear. Demonstrating his lack of self-control, Kenai foolishly sets out after the bear, intent on killing the creature for what is, after all, a paltry offense, for which the hungry bear is hardly to blame, and one that was really Kenai’s own fault. So one might say that Kenai is actually in denial over his own guilt and displacing the blame onto the Other, the bear.
Kenai quickly gets in over his head, the bear attacks him, and his eldest brother, Sitka, has to intervene to rescue him. In the course of Sitka’s struggle with the bear atop a glacier, both fall from a great height: Sitka is killed, but the bear gets away.
Sitka’s death, too, is ultimately the result of Kenai’s mistakes, but, now with even greater cause to be in denial, Kenai turns furious, projecting the guilt for his brother’s death onto the Other, someone he sees as distinct and different from himself, the bear. Kenai casts the bear as what the psychologist Carl Jung would call a Shadow figure, the embodiment of all that he believes he is not and rejects.
Now, note that Kenai’s older brothers tried in vain to dissuade him from chasing the bear in the first place, and, even after Sitka’s death, the middle brother, Denahi, tries to persuade Kenai not to seek vengeance on the bear. This is an interesting stance on violence for the film to take. Previous Disney animated features actually commend the seeking of vengeance and even violence under the “right” circumstances. Hence, after the Wicked Witch puts Snow White into her deathlike sleep, the Seven Dwarfs pursue the Witch to her death. (They do not actually kill her, and her death comes by other means, but they sure do seem like a lynch mob.) The Prince in Sleeping Beauty actually kills Maleficent in her dragon form. Brother Bear, in sharp contrast, never countenances violence or vengeance in any instance whatsoever.
Obsessed with blood vengeance, Kenai finds the bear and kills it with his spear. At that point, the bear and Kenai are both enveloped by the Northern Lights, which in the world of this film have spiritual significance. The Lights transform Kenai into the form of the very creature he killed.
In Neverwhere, too, the hero becomes one of the Shadow figures: Richard Mayhew enters the world of the homeless, and, effectively has become one of them. Kenai had regarded the bear as the Other, the Shadow, a creature different from himself, the evil to be destroyed. He regarded the bear as a killer and became a killer himself in destroying it. By employing the same lethal violence he believed the bear embodied, Kenai has become “the Other,” the Shadow, himself: now he is the bear. Appropriately then, Kenai is horrified when he discovers what has happened to him.
In Campbell’s monomyth, the hero crosses a threshold from his original, everyday world, into the literally or figuratively enchanted world in which adventure takes place. Brother Bear utilizes unusual means to dramatize this transition. Once Kenai has become a bear, the colors on the screen become brighter and richer. Moreover, the image of the film projected on the screen actually widens; I suspect I would not have consciously noticed this happening if I had not read about it beforehand.
All of this reinforces the idea that Kenai has entered a higher realm than the world of his previous human existence.
Kenai has also undergone a symbolic death and resurrection of an unusual sort: having meted out death to the bear, his human self “dies,” and he is “resurrected” in the bear’s body.
As befits a magical realm, now the transformed Kenai can understand the language of the animals. The stated reason for this is that Kenai is now in animal form himself. But I wonder if the tale of how the warrior Siegfried killed a dragon, tasted its blood, and then was able to understand the language of birds, is also relevant here. Siegfried slays the Shadow figure, the embodiment of dark forces, and then, by tasting the blood, takes on part of the Shadow himself.
The natural world of the animals, in which, as demonstrated, magic works, is the “enchanted realm” of Brother Bear. But the “enchanted realm” of Brother Bear is ultimately not so much a geographical location as it is a state of mind, a perspective on life, and a form of identity. After all, humans can and do journey through the wilderness in which Kenai’s adventures take place. His “enchanted realm” is really his existence in the form of a bear. The crossing of the threshold was not physical travel but his physical transformation, his change of identity. (Likewise, I think, in superhero stories, the crossing of the threshold into the world of adventure takes the form of the hero’s change from his everyday self into his costumed, heroic identity.)
As in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which I reviewed last week, once the threshold is crossed into the enchanted world, the journeyer cannot return until his mission is accomplished. Neverwhere‘s Richard Mayhew tries to go back only to learn that people do not recognize him or, in most cases, even notice him. Security guards treat him as a criminal. Similarly, Kenai, transformed into a bear, discovers that he can no longer communicate with human beings. And the humans, including his middle brother Denahi, now regard him with fear and hatred: this is exactly how Kenai regarded bears before he became one. Kenai cannot return to the human world or even communicate with its people as long as he remains a bear.
Oddly, Denahi has himself undergone a transformation. Thinking that the bear he sees (which is really the transformed Kenai) killed Kenai, Denahi becomes as obsessed with vengeance and violence as Kenai had been. Having formerly condemned vengeance, Denahi has now become what he rejected: the Shadow has overwhelmed his former personality.
On first realizing he has transformed into a bear, Kenai is understandably horrified. But in large part that is due to the fact that Kenai regards the bear as an evil monster and does not recognize the capacity for monstrousness within himself. Kenai receives another shock when he realizes that Denahi now sees him, in his bear form, only as a killer to be destroyed. Denahi now regards Kenai as Kenai regarded the bear.
One of the principal themes of Brother Bear is the need to try to perceive things from a different perspective than one’s own, to understand how other people might look at something. As a human, Kenai saw the bear as the embodiment of fear, evil and death; the transformed Kenai is now forced to see his brother as the embodiment of fear, evil and death instead. The key moment in stating this theme comes when Kenai, in bear form, and a bear cub, Koda, come across a Native American painting of a man with a spear confronting an enormous, ferocious-looking bear. The bear looks like a monster to human eyes, but Koda calls the spear-carrying human the “monster.”
But Kenai has not simply shifted 180 degrees from one perspective to the opposite one. True, he now must fear his brother, but Kenai knows that his brother is not truly evil, but merely mistaken: he doesn’t know who this bear really is.
Furthermore, Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow entails qualities that a person rejects and tries to repress, but these qualities can be positive as well as negative. Remember that the shaman told Kenai that the bear was his totem and represented his destiny, which took the form of love. Kenai rejected the totem and this path through life. In being physically transformed into a bear, Kenai was actually set back on his correct path by supernatural forces. Though Kenai thought the bear represented violence, the bear as Shadow actually incarnates a side of Kenai that is positive yet buried, his capacity for love, just as the shaman told him.
Hence, Kenai soon encounters a newly orphaned bear cub, Koda, whom he initially finds annoying. However, the perceptive viewer may see the connection between the rambunctious Koda and the human Kenai of the film’s early scenes, whose pranks made trouble for his older brothers. Kenai grumpily assumes a sense of duty to accompany the cub, and eventually their relationship evolves into an affectionate friendship and even fraternal love. Kenai evolves into Koda’s “brother,” hence the title of the film. Kenai’s literal journey across the wilderness with Koda becomes his figurative progress into maturity. Once the irresponsible, emotionally immature little brother whom his older brothers had to look after, Kenai grows into the role of Koda’s older “brother,” mentor and guide. One could also see Koda as representing the childish side of Kenai, which his newly mature personality now supervises.
By the way, about the aforementioned moose, Rutt and Tuke. The main story of the movie is strong enough that they do not tip the film’s balance and actually steal the show. But they are really funny, nonetheless, and certainly Disney’s best team of comedy characters since Timon and Pumbaa in The Lion King. Rutt and Tuke are voiced by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, respectively, and are basically recreations of two other Canadian siblings that Moranis and Thomas played, Bob and Doug McKenzie from SCTV’s “Great White North” sketches, which later spawned the feature film Strange Brew. (So, the moose are like Bob and Doug, but without the beer, eh?) It’s a pleasure to have these characters back again, even transformed into moose (much like Kenai is turned into a bear!), in such an effective vehicle. In fact, the characters work surprisingly well in animal form, perhaps demonstrating that the McKenzie brothers were always cartoonish, in a good sense. Disney must think so, too: the screening I saw was even preceded by a bit of animation in which the moose tell us to turn off our cell phones. The “Great White North” sketches were always improvised, and I presume that much of the moose’s dialogue in Brother Bear was, as well. In fact, if the Disney Home Video folks are smart, I think they should commission Moranis and Thomas to do a commentary track, in character, for the eventual Brother Bear DVD.
Now, here is the Spoiler Warning point at which those of you who have not yet seen this movie may wish to get off and head to the next topic in this week’s column.
During Campbell’s hero’s journey, the hero gains something of value in the enchanted realm that proves to be of use in the journey’s later stages. In Brother Bear, that is Kenai’s realization of his capacity for love. I believe there is also a point in the hero’s journey that Campbell does not recognize, and which I call the Second Fall. At the outset of the hero’s journey the hero is in a low condition, or falls into one. This also seems to happen again at the beginning of the journey’s final phases. In Brother Bear, this Second Fall comes when Kenai makes a discovery that even those who insist on Spoiler Warnings should have seen coming: he learns that he himself was the killer of Koda’s mother.
Looking elsewhere in the world of cartoon art, this reminds me of Spider-Man’s discovery in his origin story that he could have stopped the Burglar before he killed his Uncle Ben. It is the shock of the realization of one’s own responsibility for the central crime of the story.
This revelation also furthers several of the themes of the film.
One is the theme of the necessity of looking at things from different points of view. Now Kenai – and the movie – revisits earlier scenes of the film from the mother bear’s point of view. By taking on the form of the mother bear, Kenai has now gained her perspective on events. Rather than viciously attacking Kenai and his brothers, she was merely defending her cub, whom they did not see. From this perspective, the human Kenai becomes the monster of the piece, killing Koda’s mother.
Second is the need for self-recognition. The human Kenai characteristically projected his own hatred and violent urges onto the figure of the bear, and by killing the bear, tried to expunge them from his world. But now Kenai is confronted with the fact that he is, in effect, the murderer of Koda’s mother, and cannot shift the responsibility onto anyone else and thereby rid himself of it. In fact, Kenai confesses his guilt to Koda, whereupon Koda understandably rejects him, completing Kenai’s Second Fall.
Third is the redefinition of the bear as Shadow figure. The mother bear did not truly embody violence and death, but other qualities that Kenai denied in himself even more strongly: moral maturity, a sense of responsibility, and, as the shaman told him at the outset, love.
Fourth, by becoming a bear, the Shadow figure, Kenai has been put in touch with the positive qualities in himself that the bear truly represented. The bear was Koda’s mother, and Kenai, in his growing love for Koda, has really become more than his figurative “brother.” Kenai has effectively become Koda’s foster parent.
Unexpectedly, Koda’s reconciliation with Kenai comes about because of the two moose, Rutt and Tuke. Up until this point of the movie, I had thought that Rutt and Tuke’s only purpose was that of highly effective comic relief. But this movie is about brothers: Kenai has human brothers as well as an adopted brother, Koda, and argues with all of them. Rutt and Tuke are likewise brothers, constantly squabbling, even at one point literally locking horns, or, more precisely, antlers. This is a parallel that hadn’t really registered to me until their final scene with Koda. Here the two moose hesitatingly acknowledge their fraternal love for each other, with Rutt, the smarter (or, more precisely, less stupid) of the two, speaking of his sense of responsibility for his brother. They then go off, happily bonded, having taught Koda a lesson by their example. Rutt and Tuke have not only served as comedic mirror images for the other brothers in the movie, but ended up proving to be mentor figures as well. Now that was a real surprise. But, now that I think about it, the idea of a seemingly foolish comedic character proving to be a mentor is not unprecedented: think of Yoda’s first scenes in The Empire Strikes Back.
Ultimately, by risking his own life to protect Koda from the vengeful Denahi, thereby demonstrating the degree to which love now rules his personality, Kenai wins his redemption for his past sins. The Northern Lights reappear, as does the spirit of Kenai’s brother, Simka, who can now take the form of his own totem, an eagle signifying wisdom and guidance. The Lights transform Kenai back into human form before the eyes of Denahi and Koda.
But Kenai, surprisingly, does not stay in human form. As I commented last week about the ending of Neverwhere, this may indicate that Campbell was not always right in outlining the final phase of the hero’s journey. According to Campbell, the hero ultimately returns to the normal, everyday world, often giving up things of value that he had gained in his adventure. (Hence, for example, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy must leave the Holy Grail behind and ride off into the sunset with his reunited community of father and friends.) The hero does not remain in the enchanted realm of his adventures.
Brother Bear has it both ways. The hero, Kenai, is transformed back into a human being, thereby leaving behind the enchanted world, in which he can understand the speech of animals, and returning to the human world. But it is made clear that in human form Kenai can no longer communicate with Koda. Feeling responsibility towards his orphaned “little brother,” Kenai chooses to become a bear once more. (To leave Koda behind would be to orphan him once more, thereby repeating his crime.)
At the film’s end Kenai does return to his tribe, receives the archetypal recognition of the hero, and is welcomed back with honor. But he remains a bear. He has transformed his community, which now welcomes bears rather than attacking them, and is in a sense still part of it. But Kenai can no longer speak with them, and, presumably, once the film is over, he and Koda will spend most of their time with Kenai’s new “tribe,” a blissfully happy community of bears depicted earlier, not with the tribe.
Perhaps by letting Kenai remain in the enchanted realm, and his enchanted identity, Brother Bear is acknowledging an odd aspect of past Disney animated features. Characters such as Pinocchio, the Beast, and the Little Mermaid are all transformed into humans at the end of their films, yet Disney nevertheless continues to picture them in the theme parks and merchandising and elsewhere in their untransformed state. It seems that this is how audiences prefer to remember them. And, indeed, at the opening weekend screening of Brother Bear that I attended in New York, at the film’s end, people dressed as Kenai – in bear form, not human – and Koda came out into the theater to greet and hug the children who were present.
I was surprised that Brother Bear proves to be more openly religious than previous Disney films, in that it depicts the hereafter as a reality within the movie’s world. There is a precedent: Simba’s father appears as a ghost in The Lion King. However, Brother Bear dies much more with the concept. We are told at the outset of the film that the dead live on among the stars. Kenai’s eldest brother and the mother bear both return as spirits. The fact that the dead brother becomes an animal, too – an eagle – and that the mother bear too lives on as a spirit, links the hereafter to the “enchanted realm” of the animals in the film. The implication is that everyone, man and animal, will continue to exist in the hereafter, and thus life in an eternal enchanted realm awaits everyone. This also gives the story of Brother Bear a cosmic scale, setting the story of one boy, Kenai, against not simply a primeval wilderness, but the world of spirits, who exist among the stars.
I was pleased by Brother Bear‘s framing device: an old man, who at the film’s end is revealed to be Denahi, tells Kenai’s story to a younger generation. Fairy tales are usually set in a distant past, a convention adopted by Star Wars, which sets its futuristic stories “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” In this case, the distant past is Denahi’s youth, and, in a nice touch, this is a time following the Ice Age, when woolly mammoths still existed; apparently, by Denahi’s old age, they became extinct. The framing device gives Kenai’s story even greater significance: now it is the tale of the hero’s journey from irresponsible kid to a figure who inspires myth and legend for subsequent generations – and, by extension, for the movie’s audience. As I only realized later, this was also a clever reworking of a standard framing device for Disney animated films: the opening of a storybook at the beginning, and its closing at the film’s end.
Speaking of enduring stories reminds me of ominous news. It is said that Brother Bear is the next to last hand-drawn animated film from Disney; there are supposed to be no more in the planning stages after Home on the Range opens next April. DreamWorks has no more hand-drawn animated films in the works at all. In recent years computer-animated films such as the Disney-Pixar films like Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, and DreamWorks’ Shrek have been immensely profitable blockbusters, while most traditional hand-drawn animated features have been financial disappointments or failures. So, less than a decade after the triumphant commercial success of The Lion King, the powers that be have apparently decided that audiences now prefer the three-dimensional, more realistic look of computer animation, and the hand-drawn animated feature, with its more stylized look, is obsolete.
I still think and hope that the difference between the successful and unsuccessful animated features actually lies in the stories and in the inherent appeal of the characters to the prime audience, families with small children. The various attempts to do animated adventures to appeal to teenage audiences – Sinbad, Treasure Planet, Atlantis, The Road to El Dorado – flop, while the hand-drawn Lilo & Stitch, centering on a little girl and her rambunctious alien pet – is a big success. It also appears that Brother Bear, which centers on a surrogate parent-child relationship, is doing surprisingly well. Whether its success will change corporate attitudes towards hand-drawn animation, I have no idea.
It would be very strange if Brother Bear ends up being the next to last Disney hand-drawn animated film. To think that several generations who have grown up watching Disney animated features will witness the death of an artform. Did any of us, only a handful of years ago, ever think that would happen? Indeed, this is even happening within the long lifetimes of the last animators to work with Walt Disney himself.
This is strange, indeed.
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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