Aaron Blaise (left) and Bob Walker make their directing debut on Brother Bear.

Disney’s Florida studio produced Brother Bear, which represents its first fully homegrown product. The Orlando studio opened April 17, 1989, the day Blaise, Williams and co-director Robert Walker originally met. At first numbering 70 (they have since grown to 400), the staff was assembled to produce featurettes for Mickey, Donald, and Goofy. “We actually never did that,” says Blaise. “We ended up doing the Roger Rabbit shorts, and then we became a B unit for California.” After animating sequences for the likes of Beauty and the Beast, the Florida studio finally got its own feature to animate, 1998’s Mulan. Last year’s hit Lilo & Stitch was also animated entirely in Orlando; yet they never worked on a story entirely their own. “This one was formed in Florida from its inception,” says Williams, “from the blank sheet of paper all the way through to the end.”

After the project was green-lit, Blaise immediately went into the field to research. “I’ve been going to Alaska for years doing my own paintings,” he says, “so I thought, man, setting this thing in Alaska would be great.” He and his story department visited Alaska’s Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and Kodiak Island, detouring as well through Yellowstone National Park, The Grand Tetons and California’s Sequoia National Park. “Environmentally, within the movie,” Blaise says, “We’ve created this idealistic North America, grabbing the best of everything.”

The panoramic vistas were inspired by Alaska’s Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and Kodiak Island among other North American natural landscapes.

Creative Leads
The style of the film’s backgrounds came from a source closer to home. There’s a hallway on the studio’s third floor where Disney artists show their own work in a gallery setting, and one day the wandering directors were exposed to the work of Xiangyuan (“Jay”) Jie. “Bob and I knew we wanted a real rugged, artful-looking film,” says Blaise. “We didn’t want it to be really detailed and highly rendered.” When they saw Jie’s bold, impressionistic landscapes, they were hooked. “You could see every brushstroke,” says Bob Walker, “and the way he handles color is incredible.” The rest of the unit was immediately trained to paint like Jie.

Kenai, a young man who has been transformed into a bear, and his cub friend, Koda (right), encounter the Great Spirits on the mountain where the light touches the earth.

As the story developed, the creative heads burned daylight endlessly looking for a voice to play the lead. Kenai would be a demanding part, because in Brother Bear there is no good guy/bad guy dichotomy. “There is no villain in the movie,” says Blaise. “The villain is our hero… We concentrated so much on trying to find the right voice qualities, we were kind of shooting ourselves in the foot.” They were still regrouping when Gladiator came out in 2000; and there was Joaquin Phoenix, earning the audience’s sympathy even as his character killed his own father. “[With Joaquin], we thought: Here’s a guy that has great vulnerability,” says Williams.

Jeremy Suarez started playing Koda in Brother Bear at age 11, voicing a character who, in human terms, would have been seven or eight. “He was actually on an audition tape with a whole bunch of actors for Finding Nemo,” says Walker, “and we fell in love with him.” A current co-star on The Bernie Mac Show, Suarez has all the qualities of Koda, says Williams: “the talkativeness, being excited about something even to the point where you slur your words from talking so fast.”