Trailer
Plot summary
In post-ice age Alaska, three brothers return to their tribe so that Kenai, the youngest, can receive his totem from the shaman Tanana. Where Sitka carries the eagle of guidance and Denahi the wolf of wisdom, Kenai is given the bear of love, a totem he rejects. A grizzly steals their basket of salmon, and Kenai chases it onto a glacier, where the fight costs Sitka his life. Kenai hunts the bear down and kills it, and the Great Spirits answer by turning him into a bear. Tanana finds him and sends him toward the mountain beneath the northern lights, where the Spirits can undo the change. A cub named Koda, whose mother is missing, offers to guide him there if Kenai escorts him to the salmon run, while Denahi, believing a bear killed Kenai, hunts him.
Cast
- Paul Christieas Ram #1 (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Brother Bear (2003)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Around 2000 the story had the transformed Kenai taken in by an older bear, Grizz, who was to be voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan; struggling to get charm into the film, the team turned Grizz into a cub named Koda, voiced by Jeremy Suarez.
- Brother Bear was the first feature since The Horse Whisperer to do a widescreen shift, and the only animated film to use the technique until The Simpsons Movie and Enchanted in 2007.
- Phil Collins was offered the chance to write songs for Brother Bear and co-write the score after the success of the Tarzan soundtrack, but the bad news trickled down that he would not be singing it all, which he called a disappointment.
- Will Friedle would have replaced Joaquin Phoenix as Kenai in a television version; the pilot tested well, but Disney Channel executives felt that adapting the film as a series was counterproductive to their goal of reaching a tween audience.
- According to Ruben Aquino, the supervising animator for the character, Denahi was originally meant to be Kenai's father, and the relationship was only later changed to brother.
- The film gave Jason Raize his first and only film role, and he died in 2004 without ever appearing in another picture.
