I am going a bit of a different route with this review. This is actually my first time ever watching Brother Bear, and I really had no idea what to expect going in. It's not a movie I've ever really seen talked about, all of these things apply to the next few films as well. I know I mentioned in my last Disney Review I've been feeling that Disney Magic start to die out with Emperor's New Groove, and it's a trend that was slowly built up to what we see here.
I don't feel like I'm watching a Disney movie, I feel like I'm watching a higher budget version of the many Disney knock-off animated films. It's like it understands the elements that made those classic Disney Film's great, but don't understand why those elements worked. I always thought it was strange I just stopped hearing about new Disney movies at a certain point in my life, and as I've been doing these reviews I am starting to realize why. This is the point where I think Disney had lost all the life it once had. I've been critical of many Disney movies in the past for feeling like they just needed to churn out a movie to say they were releasing movies, but this is different. Even those films, at their worst, usually felt like someone cared to make it good, but even that seems to have dissipated.
In some ways I'm struggling to really say much else about the movie past that. It's not that it was bad, there were definitely parts that made me chuckle, and at times it does a good job at capturing some of the shows brotherly relationships, and I actually quite liked the old woman. Animation is good as always. And the show certainly has a lot of terrible things about it I could bring up, like how poorly the montages showcase the growing relationships of characters (Something that was actually done really well in Tarzan). But none of that really feels like it matters, there is just no life in this movie.
Meet the Robinson's, Chicken Little, Home on the Range, Bolt, these are all movies that either I barely remember even existing or had no idea they were ever even a thing. After Brother Bear I am beginning to wonder, is this really what Disney became for these years? I hear good things about Tangled, and I know Princess and the Frog has it's fans, but this next stretch of movies just seem to exist in some kind of dead zone people don't talk about, and I'm worried about what's to come.
