Brother Bear (2-Disc Special Edition) | Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Suarez

Brother Bear (2-Disc Special Edition) | Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Suarez | Brother Bear DVD's

DVDs:

Brother Bear (2-Di...

	Brother Bear (2-Disc Special Edition) Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Suarez Walt Disney Video, 2004 average customer review:based on 215 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Brother Bear DVD

My seven year old daughter loves it, watches it over & over again.

Brother Bear DVD's

I bought this as a gift for my grandson. He loved it and we have watched it together and enjoyed it very much.

I received the product in a very timely manner.

Good movie, but more older children...

Overall the DVD was excellent and somewhat appropriate for older-young children.
I would recommend this for older-young children. It does have a few scenes that very concervative parents may term violent but is violence in nature. very entertaining for adults too.

Excellent Movie -- A Wonderful Fantasy

The only reason that I did not give this movie 5 stars is because I saw Brother Bear 2 before writing this review, and I wanted to leave room to rate the sequel higher! This is a great movie with a wonderful story that is full of super songs and backed by a really nice musical score.

This movie and Brother Bear 2 are currently our two-year-old daughter's favorite movies. Both of our girls willingly watch this over and over.

I highly recommend this movie, if for no other reason than you need to see it before you can fully appreciate Brother Bear 2, which I think is a "must have" in your library of "kids movies" that can be enjoyed by all ages. (By the way, I have never found any material on the second disc of any of the "Two-Disc Special Edition series that contains anything of value. I do, however, always get the widescreen version.)

[Postscript to the reviewer who wrote about "neolithic life": almost every movie requires a certain amount of "suspension of disbelief"; fantasies like Brother Bear require it in super abundance! So what? I do not expect my two-year old and three-year old daughters to learn about the realities and inequities of life from a Disney movie; I will see that they know about that when the time comes.]

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A Hallmark version of neolithic life

This is a film about neolithic peoples with Tina Turner and Phil Collins providing the background music - which should give you an idea of how realistic it is likely (not) to be.

"Brother Bear" is a typical Disney animated film - long on visual beauty, short on reality.

The neolithic peoples depicted here are Hallmark card versions of the real thing - the most astonishing thing about them is that they apparently have time to do something besides struggle to get enough to eat and work to keep from freezing to death. These characters spend a lot of time talking, thinking and praying - all of which certainly happened, just not nearly in the quantities displayed here, if we can glean anything from archeological evidence.

The most harmful lesson in this film, is that when the characters say, "I'm sorry" to someone they've been a complete jerk to, that person (or bear) forgives them immediately and everyone is OK again. Also, when the characters defy the spirits, and then realize their error and ask for help, help (in the form of an eagle) arrives immediately.

This is a terrible lesson to teach children. The truth is that when you are a jerk to people, they very often stop loving you and go away forever. The truth is that the spirits help us in this world at their whim, and often not at all, at least in any way we can recognize. When the "Ice Man" fell down that crevasse, I'm sure he was hanging there, wishing the spirits would arrive to help him get out. They didn't, and he froze to death. End of story, except for our current study of his well-preserved body.

This is the truth about the world, and especially the truth about the neolithic period. I've got nothing against films that showcase the human spirit, and neolithic peoples certainly had plenty of it to survive their time and place. What I've got a problem with, is films that tell children that the world is much more forgiving than it actually is, and this film, for all its visual beauty, commits that crime.

And if we're going to show characters having spiritual hallucinations, let's be honest about where they came from: a combination of starvation, dehydration and probably some kind of natural drug such as peyote or cannabis.

Of course, then it wouldn't be a Disney film for kids - it would be too close to reality for that. This film will probably be loved most by that group of revisionists who want to picture American Indian life as an idyllic paradise of natural and spiritual beauty, where the horses and the women have the same hairstyles and everyone has perfectly white teeth. In short, this film is perfectly enjoyable as long as you don't mistake it for having anything to do with the reality of the human condition.

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