Like many others when asked the same question, when I think of the film that made me fall in love with films, I struggle to find an answer. At first, I thought of writing this article about one of the classics, how could I go wrong? After all, I still remember when my father proudly sat me down to watch The Godfather with him for the first time (which in complete honesty, at the ripe old age of 8, I found it was quite overrated), or one if the Spaghetti Westerns that my grandfather liked so much; but classics are classics for a reason. They’re films with transgenerational messages that cut deep even to this day, and even though some may be outdated, their core message is one that still resonates with people, and while they have a very special place in my heart, classics aren’t the reason I fell in love with films.
So, in my search to find that film, I consulted my ever trusty and infallible confidante, one that has been with me since an early age, and more importantly one that has witnessed my passion for cinema evolve throughout my life… my dear mother. Confronted with what seemed like the overwhelming task of walking down memory lane, sifting through hundreds of movies in the attempt of finding the one, my mother did what all mothers do best, she told me a story; and like all good stories, it starts in a bathtub:
When I was but a wee lad, no older then 3 or 4 years old, butt-naked in the bathtub, I was pitting my plastic dinosaurs to an epic battle to the death, and amidst all the chaos, my mother suffered collateral damage by getting soaked from head to toe. She promptly took my dinos, told me that it was time to get out of the bath, and after a little back and forth she left the bathroom to take the towels out of the dryer. To this day she swears that this is what happened… As she was heading back to the bathroom, she overheard me talking to myself, apparently “attempting to invoke spirits to guide my way”. As the traditional, catholic, Spanish lady my mother is, her first thought was that I had been possessed, and quickly ushered my father to listen in with her. After a moment or two of more spiritual chants and my mother gauging the efficacy of an exorcism on a child, my father starts laughing and quickly reassures her. It turns out that I wasn’t indeed possessed, rather I was reciting word for word a scene from the 2003 Disney animated musical Brother Bear.
To many, Brother Bear is regarded as a “B-tier Disney Movie”, to which I full heartedly disagree but that’s not what I’m here to argue. Brother Bear has been a film I’ve come back to in many stages of my life and have learned something different each time. In my opinion there are two things that a film needs to be considered amazing, great spectacle and nuanced subtext; Brother Bear excels at both. The overwhelming richness that the animators carved into each frame is astounding, the meticulously hand painted backgrounds, combined with the quirky anthropomorphic animal characters succeed in bringing the North American flora and fauna to life. However, as any cinephile knows, pretty images are nothing without a hard hitting story to back it up, and that’s where Brother Bear shines. The core of the story centers around empathy, looking through another’s eyes, and how that is the way to true understanding and unadulterated love. The vehicle of this story is Kenai, a young man who loses his brother to a freak accident involving a bear, he then takes matters into his own hands and searches for retribution by hunting down said bear. Finally, after successfully tracking and killing it, the spirits take this as an opportunity to teach Kenai a lesson by transforming him into what he most despises; a bear. Kenai is then forced to take the shape of his brother’s killer, and is told that if he wants to turn back into a human, he must travel to where the “lights touch the earth”. Along his journey, Kenai encounters a young bear cub, Koda, who he reluctantly allows to tag along, and who we later discover was the son of the bear that Kenai previously killed. Throughout the movie, Kenai undergoes both a physical and personal transformation as he is forced to empathy by the great spirits, and ultimately comes to realize that the bear was no more a monster than he was; much like Kenai and his own people, the bear just wanted to feed her cub and keep it safe. However, it all comes crashing down when Kenai heartbrokenly confesses what he did to Koda, who understandably, runs away. This scene in particular is a masterclass in storytelling, the animators purposefully break certain rules that a scene of this gravity would typically uphold (i.e, 180-degree rule, music intercut with dialogue to name a few) and allow the music and emotion on the characters’ faces to tell the story; it succeeds so much in fact that I still cry every time the scene comes on. The act of confession, while unbearably painful, leads only to forgiveness.
Kenai’s story shines a hopeful light to all of those who believe are beyond redemption, and shows us that the process of atonement begins with empathy and accountability. These are lifelong lessons that have stuck with me to this day, and that is why Brother Bear is the film that made me fall in love with films, because a great film has the power to be so much more than just the film.
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