Brother Bear

From the start this flick feels like a video that would be shown at a diversity training session. And it turns out that’s the good part, if you forgive the wild swings in tone. Once the movie changes--in story and character--everything plays more like a standard cartoon flick, where things gets really stupid and the tale is largely played for (nonexistent) laughs. The moose characters are a stereotypical insult to Canadians. The bear cub character who gloms onto the protagonist is one of the more odious kid personas in the whole canon. Even songs by Phil Collin--he of the hooks that can drag you down the street--can’t rescue this piece of what the bear leaves in the woods. And, oddly, the characters themselves--certainly the protagonist Kenai--openly express their own contempt for the proceedings; it’s almost like listening to a meta commentary track. The viewer hardly can hardly be expected to like a movie that its own characters don’t seem to like at all. Most of the main personae are downright unlikeable. On the bright side, the Disney obsession with dead parents remains a going thing. There’s really no way to sugarcoat it: this flick is a flop. One wonders how anyone thought this one had any chance to succeed. Today, a couple of decades on, this movie is thoroughly and deservedly forgotten. Leave it that way.