John C. Reilly’s “
Bears”, for Disney Nature, is about the
real thing. Mama Bear wakes up with her
two cubs on a mountaintop in the Aleutians, and has to travel down to the coast
for the summer, and then back up a river to fish for salmon. It’s a desperate race against time in a short
summer. If she doesn’t eat enough and fatten up, she won’t be able to provide
milk for her cubs, and they won’t survive. The film says they are brown bears, although
these are pretty big, almost like grizzlies.
Along the way, she watches an avalanche, and has to protect
her cubs from a roving wolf. She finds a feast of clams at low tide, and
finally some “free fish”. But one good
meal isn’t enough. When she goes
upstream, the salmon don’t show up until a heavy thunderstorm raises the water
level. But still he can’t find many of
them. Finally, she finds herself “On
Golden Pond” (as in the 1981 film) after
a raven leads her and the cubs to it.
Corvids (crows and ravens) really will “help” large mammals find food or
warn them about storms and fires.
What is so striking in this film is how the animals have
personalities. It takes brains to eat a
varied diet from different sources in different places, and the bears,
sometimes walking like bipeds, do seem a bit like people. Where is the father? Why do the women in bear society do all the
work? Well, bears don’t seem to have a familial
social structure. The right wing will
love to moralize about this.
The film also has a little subplot about two big males, with
the larger one acting like a bully, stealing fish from the his runner-up.
The film could be compared to Werner Herzog’s 2005
documentary “Grizzly Man”, about nature photographer Timothy Treadwell, who was
killed with his girl friend by a grizzly on the same Katmai area in 2003.
The new Disney film shows the photographers, working close to the bears, in the closing credits. The bears seem to accept them.
I saw this in the afternoon at a Regal in Arlington, with limited showings remaining. DisneyNature offers this featurette:
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