Director Bob Walker, actors Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas (voices of moose brothers Rutt and Tuke), producer Chuck Williams and director Aaron Blaise.

Most of the recording sessions were solo affairs, with Suarez and Phoenix working together only once or twice. Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis as moose brothers Rutt and Tuke, however, performed simultaneously throughout. “They were the easiest guys to cast,” says Blaise. “We thought, if Kenai’s going into the animal world, why not give the animals different dialects just like in the human world? And then we thought, well, this is North America, you gotta have some Canadian characters in there. And then right away it was moose, and then right after that we thought, okay, it’s got to be Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas. It all happened within minutes.”

Getting the two actors to commit to the idea wasn’t as simple, but once Moranis and Thomas had agreed on all the ways the moose could be funny and still not resemble Bob and Doug McKenzie, the two were off and running and the directors were cradling their aching faces. “Aaron and I had front-row seats at every recording session,” says Walker. “They’d do the pages, then they’d develop their own little thing, and by the end it was nuts. We’d come out of there with sore jaws from laughing.”

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas only agreed to voice moose Rutt and Tuke if they weren’t just going to recycle the Mackenzie Brothers.

Not a Musical
The film has six songs, sung by the likes of Tina Turner, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Bulgarian Women’s Choir and the film’s co-composer Phil Collins. This is Collins’ first foray into film scoring, a job he shares with Mark Mancina, and Williams calls the results surprising: particularly the action sequences, which play out not to stop-on-a-dime tempo shifts but steady driving rhythms. “Typical scores go for the in-the-moment shifting,” Williams says; “Phil writes as a drummer. He drives right through it.” As in Tarzan, Brother Bear is musical but not a musical. “Frankly, I don’t feel like people really want to see characters singing anymore,” says Blaise. (Little Koda does in fact attempt to break into song at one point, and Kenai stuffs him in a hollow log for his efforts.)

Chuck Williams demonstrated responsible filmmaking on Brother Bear, his first outing as producer. There were no missed deadlines or overruns on the budget.

Brother Bear is in Cinemascope, but it doesn’t start that way. Other animation has been in Scope, but never before has an animated feature changed aspect ratio mid-stream. Like the 1982 sci-fi flick Brainstorm, Brother Bear is part Academy ratio (1.85:1) and part Scope (2.35:1); and, as in Brainstorm, the format shifts with changing points of view. “We figured, why not have the audience go through a different point of view,” says Walker, “like Kenai does when he gets turned into a bear?”

Throughout act one, with Kenai still a human, the frame is in Academy ratio and stationary, with the colors growing progressively muted. When Kenai is transformed into a bear in act two, the screen widens to Scope, the color palette changes from gray to highly saturated, and the camera is freed to move around. Walker says that although the saturated colors do pop out, he hopes the aspect ratio change will be felt rather than seen: “A lot of people don’t notice it until they’re told, actually.”

Apart from the issue of securing the title — which had to be licensed from the owners of the Berenstain Bears — the production went off with no major setbacks, under budget and ahead of schedule (no mean feat since it was originally scheduled to come out next April, before its play date was switched with Home on the Range’s). This brings particular satisfaction to producer Williams, who is only too aware of recent animated box-office failures.

“It’s not just our studio,” Williams says, “it’s about being responsible filmmakers. If we want to keep making films, we have to be able to meet the business side of things.” And today’s CGI-versus-traditional debate isn’t helping; it’s twaddle, surely, but how many executives are secretly (and not-so-secretly) buying into the traditional-is-dead trope?

“It’s not the technique, it’s the project that matters,” Williams says simply. “Do you care if your cabinet’s put together with nails or screws? No. It’s what it does for you, and how it functions in your life. [Our] next film A Few Good Ghosts is a hybrid film. It’s 2D and 3D. There may be a different tool for the project after that. It may be clay animation. Who knows. The people here can embrace it, and still tell good stories.”

Taylor Jessen is a writer and archivist living in Burbank. His piece on the production history of the animated feature Twice Upon a Time will appear in Animation Blast #9 in early 2004.