Disney’s Brother Bear has always felt a little overlooked among the company’s roster of animated features. It lacks the name recognition of a centuries-old fable like “Sleeping Beauty” or “Snow White,” and parts of its story seem divided between impulses, veering back and forth between a melancholy drama inspired by Native American shapeshifter tales, and a more modern comedy. But it features spectacular animation sequences, and it’s built around heartfelt messaging about the connection between humanity and the natural world.
Both those latter elements come into play in “Snow Bear,” an 11-minute short hand-animated by Brother Bear co-director Aaron Blaise, now featured on YouTube. Blaise, a supervising animator on The Lion King and Mulan, once said in an EW interview that he took on Brother Bear as his directorial debut “so that I could animate bears.” He returned to that obsession with “Snow Bear” — a representative for Blaise says he personally produced 11,000 drawings for the film, over the course of three years making the film on his own.
The wordless short follows a lonely polar bear wandering the Arctic in search of a friend. As it tries to connect with other animals, it’s rejected — until it builds a friend out of snow. “Snow Bear” is sweet and kid-friendly, but underlying it is a message about the threat climate change poses to polar bears, as the polar ice caps disappear, and their habitat alters. A statement about the short says Blaise teamed up with the advocacy group Polar Bears International to make “Snow Bear.”
A five-minute making-of featurette about the short, also featured on YouTube, explains how Blaise reached out to Oscar-winner and Brother Bear composer Mark Mancina to create the music for the short, and how he brought his own background as a painter into the animation, design, and color selection for the project.
Blaise also created art for a companion card game inspired by the short, currently on Kickstarter, described as “a mash-up of Rummy and Uno with a sprinkle of puzzle building thrown in.” The campaign, already fully funded, runs through Dec. 28.
