Kenai and Koda arrive at the annual salmon run to join up with their extended bear family and swap exciting stories. All images © Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. All rights reserved.

“I think animals are always so cute,” said Hobbes, worrying a sick raccoon, in one of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes strips from 1988. The image of a stuffed tiger talking wistfully of the cuteness of an ailing raccoon speaks considerably to the unwritten motto of Disney feature animation, the original home of cute talking animals that move. From the Three Little Pigs to Bambi to Baloo to Stitch, giving human qualities to the non-human has been the through line and the meal ticket for Disney; but in Brother Bear, the studio’s latest offering, anthropomorphism graduates from subtext to text.

Kenai, the middle brother of three Native Americans living in the Pacific Northwest some time after the retreat of the glaciers, witnesses the death of his older brother Sitka at the hands of a grizzly bear. High in the mountains, Kenai exacts his revenge on the bear, but the auroral Great Spirits have other plans and Kenai shortly awakens in a different terrain and a different body. Transformed into a bear and separated from everyone he knew, bear-hating Kenai must ally himself with a bear cub named Koda and find his way back to the mountaintop, where the Great Spirits can undo the change.

Troubles vex him, not least his own brother Denahi, who was moments too late to witness the transformation, and now considers Kenai, the bear, as the bear who killed Kenai. Kenai must fend off not only his own brother’s attacks, but attacks of conscience when he realizes his companion Koda, a motherless cub, is motherless for a specific and terrible reason that Kenai alone knows.

Michael Eisner wanted another animal project to follow in The Lion King’s footsteps. The animators on Brother Bear seemed to be visually inspired by the megahit.

The story kernel formed, so legend has it, when The Lion King blew up the box office in 1994, and Disney ceo Michael Eisner saw no new animal projects in the pipeline. Eisner wanted something specifically North American, taking particular inspiration from an original landscape he’d bought by Albert Bierstadt: epic in girth, its colors hyper-real, the product of a 19th century school of painting trying to contain in its canvases the sheer vastness of the still-unexplored American West. To track the “king” idea, the hero would naturally be a bear, king of the forest.

“I came on about six years ago and started doing research on different bear myths and legends from around the world,” says co-director Aaron Blaise, “and I came upon these transformation myths that the Native Americans had. They really lent themselves to animation, and the magic we like to portray in our stories.” He became a bug in the ear of then-division head Tom Schumacher. “Blaise was a well-respected animator, had done Rajah in Aladdin, and Nala in Lion King, and really ran his supervising crew well,” says producer Chuck Williams. “And Schumacher said, ‘Well, Aaron, you might make a good director.’”

Idea of the Century
By 1997 the Bear idea had kicked around development in the form of something called Timber, as well as another idea that appropriated King Lear where an old blind bear traveled the forest with his three daughters. “I heard they were knocking on doors and sleeping in beds,” says Williams. “Aaron didn’t want to tell a story like that. He wanted something much more naturalistic.” In 1998 Blaise and Williams came up with a two-page description of a father-son story where the son is transformed into a bear, and in the end remains a bear. “Tom Schumacher held it up and said ‘This is the idea of the century,’” says Williams. “‘Let’s get you guys a writer’.” Tab Murphy (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan) was hired, and the project began to blossom.