For one of its last traditional, 2D-animated projects, Walt Disney studio chose a story fabricated from tried-and-true elements. Take a headstrong kid with abandonment issues. Have him/her discover the true meaning of love and appreciation of family/culture. Add quirky and amusing sidekicks, tie the package together with heart-tugging pop tunes and voila! The products of this formula range in quality from the excellent LION KING (1994) to the utterly forgettable POCAHONTAS (1995), and BROTHER BEAR falls somewhere in the middle. Proud Inuit Kenai (voiced by Joaquin Phoenix) is anxious for the day he'll be declared a man, but must first learn to follow the path of his personal totem, a symbol of love in the form of a carved bear. He would have preferred something a little bolder and more manly, like his older brother Sitka's (D.B. Sweeney) eagle of guidance or his brother Denahi's (Jason Raize, who committed suicide shortly after the film's release) wolf of wisdom, and his siblings' taunts about his lover-boy status cut to the bone. He's further annoyed to discover that the fish they caught for a celebratory feast have been eaten by a bear. He recklessly follows the bear and accidentally taunts it into attacking him, forcing Sitka to sacrifice his own life for Kenai. Kenai retaliates by hunting down the beast and killing it, but the Great Spirits are disappointed by his actions and decide to teach the young man a lesson by transforming him into the creature he hates the most, a grizzly bear. While Kenai is adjusting to his new, furrier life, a shaman tells him his only chance to regain human form is to journey to the Northern Lights and appeal to the Great Spirits. Along the way, Kenai reluctantly befriends a spunky young cub, Koda (Jeremy Suarez), who's been separated from his mother on the way to a salmon run, meets some bickering moose (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas), and attempts to avoid Denahi, who's abandoned his peaceful ways in order to avenge what he presumes to be Kenai's death. While the hand-drawn animation is visually appealing, the story is completely predictable and Phil Collins' music lacks the impact of his Oscar-winning TARZAN tunes. But the spunky Koda is adorable, and while the Canadian-accented moose (antlered ringers for Thomas and Moranis's dim-witted Bob and Doug McKenzie) aren't as strikingly original as THE LION KING's Timon and Pumbaa, it's still pretty amusing to see them hitching a ride on a woolly mammoth's back or contorted into yoga positions. --Angel Cohn
