Brave did it better by focusing on an individual family as opposed to a nation of people and a species of animals. The premise is far too broad and unwieldy. By the end, Kenai and his brother Denahi (voiced by Jason Raize) fail to discuss their issues as a family, or anything regarding Kenai being a bear, so what did the story accomplish? The bears will still be hunted, so Kenai isn’t changing the hearts and minds of the Inuit.

The problem is that movies before and after have done the premise better, and if you saw PIXAR‘s Brave – which I did before seeing this – then the entire movie is a derivative take on PIXAR when this came first! I hate the body swapping premise with regards to animals – and I had problems with it in Brave – because true communication between these ruptured groups never happens. If you read my synopsis the twist is blatantly explicated from the lines above so the screenplay isn’t anything new. Along the way he teams up with a little cub named Koda (voiced by Jeremy Suarez) looking for his mom. With the aid of a magical spell, Kenai is placed into the body of a bear to see how misunderstood the animals are. When his brother is accidentally killed, Kenai believes a bear is responsible and goes off seeking revenge. Kenai (voiced by Joaquin Phoenix) is a young Inuit man searching for his place in life. There’s several choices in the movie that left me asking “Why?,” and it turns Brother Bear into a movie with a mediocre story desperately shouting how cool it is.

The studio’s exhaustion is on the screen in this tired retread of movies like Pocahontas (that film’s fingerprints are particularly pervasive on top of Brother Bear’s ham-fisted message of tolerance).

Brother Bear isn’t the movie that put Disney‘s hand-drawn animation in the coffin, but it marked the death knell for the medium, being the last hand-drawn endeavor to be completed at the Walt Disney Animation Studio in Orlando, Florida.

Brother bear and brave