Review of The Little Polar Bear

"Der kleine Eisbär" or "The Little Polar Bear" is a German animated movie from 2001, so this one already had its 15th anniversary last year. If you check the crew list, you will see that quite a few people worked on this one. I won't list them in detail, but lets just say that the original books this is based on are by Hans de Beer. The movie is really short, runs for under 70 minutes not counting credits and the protagonist is of course the title character, which means that the film plays in the arctic ice for most of the time. It is a bit on the generic side when it comes to the characters, friends, foes and the story in general, which is mostly about a bear making friends with a seal and as a consequence there is a bit of a ceasefire between these two groups of animals. Which is on the other hand very unlucky for fish, but that's just a side-note. There are some okay moments about the story too and I somehow liked the retro look as this one looks a lot older than 21st century. The prestige of this project can easily be seen in the cast list here as the likes of Busse, Lück, Stelter, Krüger, Bach, Biedermann, Petruo, Völz, Engelke... are very known here in Germany and the No Angels song during the credits is kinda nice too, even if I am not so sure how well its fits the subject of the film. So overall, this was a good film I guess, nothing great and "ausbaufähig" when it comes to story telling, but the cuteness, harmlessness and innocence of it all makes up for that. I will watch the sequel at some point too and I hope that one is on the same level. We will see.