User Reviews

I liked and disliked many aspects of this movie. The human noises for the cub were quite annoying at times, but I understood the purpose for them. People need a connection so that they can feel the bear's pain. The humans were crucial to the plot... you need conflict. Dialouge was important too, 88 minutes of a person making slurping and whining noises would've been unbearable without people talking. The hunters however were not so scary. They were scary when I was a kid, however as an adult I found them pretty much harmless. The big bear did more damage in this movie then the hunters. I realize the younger hunter had a life threatening experience, but the way the other two hunters cut there rather steep loses and just left was kind of unbelievable. The bear's dreams were creepy even now and the resolution right at hibernation was perfect. The ultimate feel of this movie was warm and fuzzy and the intent was in the right place.

... is to leave your enemy alive knowing that without his dogs and his guns and his buddies and his notched bullets meant to cause his prey to explode not just die, that this enemy is just a great big sissy. No, the story is more complex than that, but at the climax of the film you can almost detect the trace of a smile on the face of the gigantic Kodiak bear as he roars in the face of the unsuspecting hunter who is left on his knees, hands on his ears begging "please don't kill me". And then the bear just turns around and ambles away.

So how did we get to this point? It is British Columbia 1885, and this story starts out with a momma bear and her cub, digging honeycomb out of the base of a hill. The momma is making such a ruckus digging that she causes a minor rock slide and is killed instantly in the process. This is the very saddest part of the film, as the baby first tries to help mom by removing the rocks, and then snuggles up next to her corpse until hunger makes him leave her behind.

Meanwhile there is the gigantic Kodiak bear I mentioned in the first paragraph, doing what Kodiak bears do - scratching his back on trees until they fall, mating with female bears he comes across, and killing elk for food because, for something this big, some fish and berries are just not going to do the job.

Also there are a pair of hunters, an older one and a younger one. They are obviously after bear pelts, because as we meet them the older hunter is flinging the bear meat into the fire and finishing up the job of skinning his latest kill. Now at the time I am writing this, trophy hunters are in the news, and the news is repellent, people killing wild animals just for the sport. But this is a wilderness and more than likely these hunters need the pelts to sell and to use in the harsh cold winters for themselves. Everything pulls its weight in such an ecosystem or it is deemed as unnecessary and won't last long anyways.

What sets up our story is that the pair of hunters detect our gigantic friend. The younger hunter is inexperienced, though, and shoots too soon. He wounds the bear but does not kill it. The hunters go out looking for the bear and when they don't find it, the older hunter says to let it go. That is, until they realize they are the hunted and see that the bear has doubled back on them and slaughtered their pack horses, including the older hunter's own horse, and probably as close to a pet as you get in this place. The older hunter swears revenge and leaves the younger hunter there while he goes back to town and gets their tracking dogs.

In the end we have the most unlikeliest of scenarios. The male bear takes up with the baby bear feeding it and protecting it in almost a big brother/little brother relationship that provides some precious moments, and we have the young hunter and the old hunter deciding to let the giant bear get away in spite of the fact that he killed the older hunter's horse and the younger hunter's favorite dog in the chase.

Watch this one to see the forgiveness that seems to go both ways in the animal kingdom - human to animal, animal to human, and to see the possibility that sometimes animals can strike up friendships even in the harshest of environments. And might I add that the beautiful Canadian scenery almost steals the show. Highly recommended. Let me also note that there is almost no dialogue in this one, but it is unnecessary to convey the relationship between the hunters and what they are thinking. The acting and direction are that good.

This outdoor wildlife drama, stars Jack Wallace and Tcheky Kayro as two nineteenth century trappers. The trappers share the spotlight with two bears that they encounter during one of their Pacific Northwest expeditions. The film examines the relationship between a young cub and a fully matured Grizzly. This is an excellent wildlife film which might be a little frightening at times for younger children, but includes many heartwarming scenes for parents and older children. Viewers who prefer limited dialog should love this film, which presents a substantial portion of the drama from the young Grizzly's prospective. The film which has several touching and humorous moments is highly recommended for family viewing, but keep in mind that it may not be suitable for younger children.

Man Bites Bear It's easy to see why this film was rated so highly. It's awfully likable. The principles are Youk, a bear cub, and Bart, a 1500 pound fully grown male Kodiak bear. Poor Youk. His mother is digging out a honeycomb and dislodges a large chunk of granite which crushes her head. Youk, whimpering, must take off on his own, wobbling along through the grasslands and crags of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, an inhospitable place to everyone but skiers.

We are then introduced to the mammoth Bart, who shoos off the rugrat, clearly a bear with dependency issues. Still the cub follows Bart around, though unwanted. Then, enter the enemy, two sinister hunters collecting bear skins to sell for the manufacture of robes, rugs, coats, hats, and whatever else they make out of bearskins. Pow! And Bart is wounded in the shoulder, wobbling off painfully until he manages to heal his wound by rolling around in a muddy pond. His convalescence over, Bart adopts Youk, and teaches him the rules of the game.

But during his escape from the two hunters, Bart has killed one of their horses and wounded the other, so now revenge joins profit in motivating the two hunters, who bring in a pack of hunting hounds. Well, I'll tell you, it's one tribulation after another, both for the bears and for the hunters. Youk is hunted by the angriest mountain lion known to man or beast and is saved at the last minute by the intervention of Big Bart. Big Bart also traps the meanest of the hunters, scares the crap out of him, and then after roaring, bearing his teeth, and scraping some dust on the cowering human ("Please, don't kill me!") he wanders off, satisfied that he's made his message clear through his body language and prosody. And he HAS too. The mean hunter has an epiphany. Later when he has a clear opportunity to kill Bart, he spares him.

What makes the film so appealing, chiefly, are two of its features.

First, Youk is both ugly and cute at the same time. He's pretty funny too, rolling around, eating psychedelic mushrooms and tripping out, so that a floating mushroom turns into a real butterfly. The hunters manage to capture him and in their absence from the camp he rummages through their possessions and winds up covered with feathers. Cute. He witnesses a primal scene involving Bart and a sluttish female and falls asleep while they copulate.

Second, although we are constantly on the side of the bears, the humans are not shown as resolutely evil in their actions or their emotions. Having captured Youk, they tie him to a tree, tease him, and laugh at his antics. He's not treated badly. When the men ride away, Youk is perfectly willing to follow them so they must scare him away. And the humans don't show any animus towards bears or other animals. They like their dogs and their horses. They're just depicted as making a living. The living involves killing animals, but the bears kill deer too. Everybody has to make a living.

The framework for the relationship between humans and their natural environments was described by an anthropologist, Florence Kluckhohn, who observed that people had three ways of dealing with nature: they could live in submission to it, they could live in harmony with it, or they could try to conquer it. The hunters in this film are more or less living in harmony with nature. The iconography suggests this story takes place in the late 19th century. By that time -- up to and including now -- not everyone felt that way. We have no more passenger pigeons in North America, though they used to darken the skies. If you want to see an American buffalo, you must go to a zoo now. Wolves are disappearing and grizzlies are increasingly hard to come by. I won't go on about this point, though it would be easy to do.

One annoying element of the film is that, well, I'm afraid some of Youk's whimpers, screams, and inquiries were dubbed by either a pre-adolescent human child or a fully blown human woman. We can clearly hear little Youk uttering, "Huh?" and "Wow" and "Oh" and "Wassup" and "So's your old man" and reciting Hamlet's famous soliloquy -- "To be or not to be". Under the influence of those psychedelic mushrooms he fantasizes himself at the Metropolitan opera singing "La Donna e Mobile" to a packed house.

I kind of enjoyed it, despite the cuteness, not because of it.

I remember this first as a book I read back in the '50s. I loved it then, and I love the film now.

First, I have to address some of the complaints made by other reviewers here.

1. About the "fake bear sounds" made by the bear cub. I recall a display of bear cubs at a local game farm; that's pretty much the sound they make, much like a baby.

2. The "unrealistic" aspects: The big male refraining from eating the cub; the bear confronting the defenseless hunter and allowing him to go free. Curwood claims in his preface, if I recall correctly, that these events not only really happened, they happened to him! He was the younger hunter, named Jim in the book.

3. Bear sex as porn: Get a grip! I think that this was straight from the book, too.

Now, to my observations.

Much credit has to go to the casting directors and animal trainers. These critters seem perfectly cast! Could any bear cub possible be any cuter than this one? With expressive little eyes, even! I particularly liked the sequence where he chases the frog and ends up imitating it by jumping around after it.

The big male is suitably big and ferocious.

The sow (female bear) is amazingly attractive and fetching, lolling on her back and practically begging "Come and get it sailor!".

The dogs in the book were Airedales, but in the movie were black Dobermans, looking like the spawn of Hell!

Now cougars can be pretty appealing looking beasts, but this one has a distinctly dastardly appearance!

I especially liked the cub's reaction of studied indifference during the Bear Sex scene, reminding me of the Ron Perlman character in Quest For Fire while his chum was making it with the native girl. Oh! Same director! But how did he get the bear to have that same expression as Perlman?

OK, to start with, let me say that I'm sure that this movie had some really "cute" parts in it. But there are things in it that are almost UN-Bear-able here they are 1.the dumb little bear sounds that the little bear makes (definitly fake) 2.the fact that the producers included the little bear's dreams... seriously 3.the fact that the old bear gets a girlfriend about halfway through the film and they go off and do it in the woods while the little bear watches. this part was unnecessary and for a moment i thought the producers would dub in porn music... it was close 4.after the little bear watches the old bear and his girlfriend do it in the woods, the little bear goes off and eats

mushrooms, and yes, the producers meant it this way, they specifically included a little bear "trip" where the mushroom he ate goes all Technicolor and floats around, eventually morphing into a Technicolor butterfly.

I first watched this as a little kid and did not pick up on all of these things, but recently watched it again and thought up a better title for it then just "the bear" how bout' "the noisy, drug-addicted, completely fake-acting porn star bear"