I’ve gone off Disney pretty badly since my crazed Tarzan obsession and my college dissertation etc. But they remain an interesting company to me always. It’s sad, for example, that the entire movie of Brother Bear is better expressed, and infinitely more profoundly expressed, by a single lyric in the nearly-ten-year-old Pocahontas (“But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you’ll learn things you never knew you never knew…”) – but Brother Bear still has some fantastic moments of animation.

The explosion of colour on the mountain where the main character transforms into the bear is one: it’s been done many times in Disney movies – more recently, the opening of the map in Treasure Planet, and the ‘activation’ of Atlantis’ power crystals in Atlantis (that’s a seriously poor description of what goes on in that movie but I hope anyone who’s seen it knows what I’m talking about) – that combination of something suddenly magical, normally after a fair length of quiet, dialogue-heavy, flat animation, then BOOM, the screen explodes in a deluge of colour, sound, and music. It got me.

Phil Collins’ songs were the reason I’d avoided the movie so long. Like I said, I was (and am) obsessed with Tarzan. It really pi$$ed me off when I heard they were bringing Collins back. They were doing so well doing things differently everytime after the slew of full-on musical extravaganzas in the 90s. Suddenly we had the goofy, almost Looney Tunes / Wacky Races style of The Emperor’s New Groove, the pretty unique modern-day setting of Lilo and Stitch… Brother Bear really shows sign of an ideas drought. The fact they advertised the movie so much with “With 5 new songs by Phil Collins!” etc, after he’d won the Oscar, after the success of Tarzan… y’know, Disney? It’s not that easy. They should’ve got somebody else. However, one of Phil Collins’ songs here got me in a seriously big way, plus I liked how the songs were merged into, from the characters starting a cappella to either Tina Turner, Collins, or the chorus.

As with Home on the Range, I can’t seriously recommend this movie to people. I kind of like it, as a Disney fan, it’s interesting. Much as it upsets me they’re ceasing the hand-drawn animation, their latest stuff has left a lot to be desired. I couldn’t sit through many more Brother Bears till I lost my love for Disney.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 17th, 2004 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.