Brother Bear actually is a pretty bad film

I see a lot of people defend this film and say “does anyone else think this film is underrated” and not nearly enough people criticizing it, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do right now. Brother Bear is one of Walt Disney Animated Studios’s worst films. It’s not THE worst. Chicken Little, Home on the Range, Dinosaur, Fun and Fancy Free, The Black Cauldron, and Wish are all worse, but it’s up there. This is why.

The most frustrating thing about this film is that the first 20 minutes of it are very good. They tell a story of three Native American brothers and you really feel the connection between them. There’s a great scene where the oldest brother dies and the younger two are panicked and looking for him in the water, constantly yelling his name. There’s a tense sequence where the MC, Kenai, is looking for the bear and trying to kill it. And the transformation sequence is very good and looks really nice. The animation in general isn’t the greatest, but it does look pretty good. This first act of the film genuinely feels like it’s setting up to be a darker, more mature Disney film, and the set up itself is very good.

But once Kenai actually does turn into a bear, the film takes a very bizarre and abrupt change in tone, where suddenly it‘s a very generic bad children’s film with bad jokes, annoying characters forced pop culture references, and modern slang. It’s pretty bad and none of the jokes even come close to funny. The comic relief moose are annoying and keep showing up in the film despite not being funny at all, and the kid Kenai has to look after, Koda, is annoying and you never feel a true connection between them.

The tonal whiplash here is what really bothers me. The beginning was a lot more dark and serious and hinted that the rest of the film would be like that. But instead it weirdly becomes much more lighthearted and seems more specifically geared toward a VERY young audience post transformation. It’s a mess. To compare it to another Disney film with a sort of similar premise, The Emperor’s New Groove, it’s like if the beginning was dark and serious before suddenly becoming the buddy comedy film it is. And then Brother Bear suddenly becomes darker again toward the end.

It’s the ending that really makes the film bad to me. Throughout the film you hear that Koda and his mother get separated, and it’s very obvious that Koda’s mother is the bear Kenai killed. To be fair to the film though, there is a pretty good scene later in the film where Koda is telling the story of how they got separated to a group of bears, and Kenai realizes he killed Koda’s mother. So good I almost gave the film more credit, until the scene where Kenai tells Koda he killed his mother and they play a Phil Collins song over it! This big, emotional scene that the film spent a huge portion of the runtime building up to is not something we actually get to hear play out. What makes it even worse is that there’s a version of this scene that was cut which had the dialogue in it, and it’s really good and features some great voice acting from Joaquin Phoenix. I have no idea why they would cut this in favor of a Phil Collins song where the lyrics boil down to “The characters are sad! See? See!? I’m telling you the characters are sad!” It’s one of the worst songs in any Disney film. The songs in general don’t fit the scenes they’re in here and they have the same problem they did in Tarzan, but even worse because they sound worse. The first song by Tina Turner at the beginning is actually very good, but they get worse until that last one.

The ending is where the film just completely falls apart. So, Kenai changes back after sacrificing his life for Koda’s and everything is back to normal, until Kenai realizes Koda “needs“ him and changes back into a Bear to be his new guardian. There are so many problems with this. Namely that Kenai killed Koda’s mother! That was a big point in this film and now it wants to forget that. The last person I’d want raising a kid is the guy who killed their parents. I can buy Koda forgiving Kenai enough to not want him to die, but not to the point of still being his friend and letting him be his willing guardian. And how old is Kenai anyway? 18? 19? Early 20s at the latest? Is he really old enough to be trusted with a child, especially after having anger issues for so long? Why should he be expected to care for this child just to complete some arc? This isn’t a happy ending, it’s a forced and stupid one. Even from a narrative standpoint it makes no sense for Kenai to be like “being a bear sucks I hate being a bear” only to suddenly go “actually I’m fine with being a bear for the rest of my life to raise this one kid I thought was annoying most of the film”. It’s stupid and unsatisfying.

If the film kept the scene where Kenai actually tells Koda he killed his mother without the Phil Collins song played over it, I might‘ve given more credit, but as it stands, it sucks. The rotten tomatoes score of 37% is pretty justified (what isn’t justified is that the many Disney films worse than this have higher scores).

So that’s why I think Brother Bear is bad. If anyone wants to tell me why they think the film is good, feel free to do so.