My original plans this year were to try to knock out an animated feature once a week, something I haven’t done or even come close to. If I hit that pace for the rest of the year, I’ll just watch everything on the Oscars list by around Christmas. To that end, Brother Bear popped up on the queue, so I figured I’d give it a go. It wasn’t long into the film that I wished I had gone with a different one. I’ll apologize now if this turns out to be a beloved film of your youth. Sorry, but this one missed me on pretty much all counts.
Sherman, set the Way-Back Machine for the time following the last ice age when mammoths still roamed the planet and humans used stone tools. We meet up with a band of human hunter/gatherers and focus most of our initial concentration on three brothers. These are Kenai (Joaquin Phoenix), the hotheaded youngest; Denahi (Jason Raize), the middle one; and Sitka (D.B. Sweeney), the eldest and wisest. The day we meet the trio is the day that Kenai will be given his animal totem, the guide he must follow into manhood. The totem he gets is the bear of love (his brothers got the wolf of wisdom and the eagle of guidance). He’s not happy with the selection.
