Brother Bear (2003)

Having (I think) seen all the Disney animated features, I would have to say that 'Brother Bear' is the finest Disney feature since 'The Fox and the Hound' - which is to say the best around 25 years. It's a shame, and a bit ironic, that this sudden return to form should happen now, after a string of 90's movies which were nearly all good, but rarely brilliant; and on the cusp of the death of the classical 'hand drawn' style of animation from the people who invented the animated feature.

At first I had misgivings. Particularly when I heard Inuit using valley girl phrases - but these reservations disappear quickly enough (as indeed, do the Inuit characters).

Briefly, 'Brother Bear' is about a young Inuit man who rejects his totem ('the Bear of Love'), and goes so far as to kill a bear which he somewhat erroneously blames for the death of his friend. He is then magically transformed into a bear, and the rest of the film... doesn't really matter at this stage: I don't want to spoil it.

There are only a few minor faults which prevent this from scoring a 10: the moose and ram characters are really pretty dispensable, but they don't take up much screen time. Koda, the bear cub, elicited a bit of an 'oh, no' response from at first, but he grows on you fast.

The animation, as you would expect, is well ahead of the field (at least in the 'classical' style). While it isn't perhaps quite as eye-popping and panoramic as 'The Lion King', I think this only goes to show that good storytelling will win out over superficial eye-candy covering a third-hand script.

The final scenes of the movie are genuinely surprising (there is a sort of stock surprise ending, followed by something I really didn't see coming), and at the same time, it's genuine lump in the throat stuff - something Disney seemed to have been a bit shy about lately with films like 'Atlantis'. They shouldn't be. They do it well.

I've enjoyed nearly all of Disney's prolific output of the past ten years, but this is the pick of the bunch, IMO. It's not perfect, but if this had been the film which Disney's animation dept had bowed out with, it would have been a fine swansong.