![brother bear and lilo and stitch brother bear and lilo and stitch](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/a58i4GP--gs/maxresdefault.jpg)
I mean, by God, if "the CEO wants to sell teddy bears" isn't going to inspire writers to do their best work, what on Earth possibly could?Įventually the story got whipped into a form that could be shipped off to Florida, to become the third and final movie primarily animated at that studio before it was boxed up, put in mothballs, and replaced by a really crappy walkthrough exhibit that I saw once in 2005 and vowed never to bother with again. Various ideas were kicked around - "bear King Lear", "bear Antigone", none of which came to fruition, surprisingly.
![brother bear and lilo and stitch brother bear and lilo and stitch](http://images4.fanpop.com/image/polls/516000/516508_1281849925169_full.jpg)
What about bears? The fact that they are readily marketable, in Stepakoff's estimation. Most of what is known about the earliest genesis of the story comes to us from Jeffrey Stepakoff, a television writer who briefly worked with Disney in the mid-'90s his only credit with the company was "additional story material" for Tarzan, though he has also laid claim to being present at the very beginning, when Michael Eisner informed the animation department that he wanted a movie about bears. Which at the very least means that it's not tremendously bad - it's not tremendously anything. The other moral is that, even though I saw it in theaters, I remembered less about it than any other film in this retrospective - some of which I hadn't seen for fully five or seven years prior to November, 2003, when Brother Bear debuted. Anyway, the moral of the story is that Brother Bear was so hugely unmemorable that by the time Home on the Range came out, I had mostly gotten over my nostalgia, and didn't bother. Also, I'd heard that the film did an aspect ratio change from 1.75:1 to 2.35:1, and if there's one way to make sure that I'll be there opening night, it's to advertise the presence of an aspect ratio change. I find this ironic, because this was the only traditionally-animated Disney feature I saw in theaters after Fantasia 2000 the announcement that they were killing the style pushed me into a funk where I would have seen just about anything that came out, just to show my support. It is quite possibly the most easily-ignorable film of Disney's 49-feature canon - a perfect object with absolutely no personality.
![brother bear and lilo and stitch brother bear and lilo and stitch](https://lumiere-a.akamaihd.net/v1/images/image_9d0a181b.jpeg)
Brother Bear is at best the one left over, the one that made a decent amount of money and sold well on DVD, despite the fact that nobody you personally know seems to have seen it. Did I mis-count? Oh, wait, no, Brother Bear." Among the late-period Disney films, it lacks the infamy of Atlantis: The Lost Empire, the cult of The Emperor's New Groove, the marketing presence of Lilo & Stitch, the hallucinatory, "did they really make that?" quality of Treasure Planet - even Home on the Range has privilege of place, as theoretically the last traditionally animated feature produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation, until John Lasseter took over and announced the 2-D revival. Even I keep forgetting that it exists: when working on scheduling issues in the past couple of weeks, half the time I mentally tallied up all the movies still to come, this was the one I kept skipping - " Treasure Planet, Home on the Range, The Princess and the Frog. Brother Bear is the platonic ideal of a completely vanilla animated children's movie: the one Disney film that, whenever I mention that I've been working my way through the whole animated canon, I can guarantee that whomever I'm talking to forgot that it exists.