The Weekly Scene is known for many things: featuring films from all genres and all generations, unequivocally giving most films a 3/4 rating, and, perhaps most famously, mostly reviewing food-based films during the 2014/2015 school year. As if to combat the abundance of documentaries and food films reviewed in the previous year, this year’s The Weekly Scene has featured a noted absence of documentaries of any sort. Looking to break that streak—and looking to embark on a quest to review something never before reviewed in this column—this week’s film is a nature documentary produced by the Disneynature production house: Bears, a documentary directed and written by Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey.
Fothergill is a frequent Disneynature collaborator, and his partnership with filmmakers like Scholey, David Attenborough, and Mark Linfield is well known in the industry. That is to say, until I checked the credits pages of the handful of films that I proudly include in my “favourite nature documentary” category, I hadn’t realized that I’d viewed quite a bit of Fothergill’s work already. Likewise, Scholey’s name too appeared frequently enough for me to be embarrassed at having never stayed for the credits of a nature documentary.
Regardless, Bears is a masterfully made film that succeeds as education and entertainment because it adheres to the basic conventions of both media: keep the audience interested. From the first moment that we’re introduced to the brown bears who will serve as the film’s central characters, Fothergill and Scholey—aided by narration from comic actor John C. Reilly—hook the audience. We’re shown stunning panoramas of the Alaskan Peninsula, and each gorgeous snowcapped mountain vista is captured with stunning depth and clarity.
Especially impressive is the manner in which Fothergill and Scholey utilize each of the screen’s quadrants to display as much information and splendour as possible. In two particularly moving scenes, a helicopter mounted camera tilts up and pans from side-to-side, capturing a bear against a snowy mountain edge with a separate landmass in the background. The effect is something one would find in a Michael Bay action flick; in Bears, however, the effect is moving and awe-inspiring.
More scientifically-minded audiences will find fault with the film’s anthropomorphization of its animals. Wolves, bears, raven, and gulls are all given names, while Reilly’s narration adds dialogue that is utterly absent in a true natural setting. In the film’s defence, Bears is produced by a film studio under the Disney umbrella, and it is unfair to suggest that Disney has ever truly attempted to tell a story without characters aiming to move and affect their audience. Due to this fact, coupled with the fact that Reilly’s narration is sometimes endearing and often funny, Bears is excused for not maintaining an air of separation from its animals.
On the topic of anthropomorphization: Bears is a film with a coherent beginning, middle, and end. Hollywood and modern cinema is obsessed with the “Based on a true story” label, often distorting facts and real events in favour of producing a film that follows proper story beats. Bears is entirely based on the very real pilgrimage that Alaskan brown bears undergo each year. Come hell or ravenous wolves, the bears travel from the Alaskan mountaintops to the Alaskan coast and back each year in a quest for food and—in the case of the mature animals—mates.
One assumes that the crew attempting to create Bears underwent several quests to find the most photogenic—and successful—bears to capture on film, but other than Reilly’s constant interjections on behalf of the animals, the story is not based on truth, it simply is truth.
I first viewed Bears with a zoologist, and I would be remiss to not conclude this review with a moment of clarification. Bears do not, in fact, hibernate—as the film repeatedly suggests. Quite the contrary, bears undergo a process that is similar to hibernation, called dormancy, which is a prolonged sleep during winter months. Unlike hibernation, where an animal is effectively in a state of cryosleep, bears can very much wake up during dormancy. Furthermore, though bears during a dormant sleep reduce their heartbeats like animals undergoing hibernation, a bear’s body temperature during dormancy is much higher than one would find in a hibernating animal.
That Bears fails to explain this scientific fact does not take away from the story of the brown bears of Alaska. Bears are adorable, fearsome creatures, and what Fothergill and Scholey capture on film is nothing short of a miracle.