Bears

The release of this film coincides with the creation of Fat Bear Week. I don’t know if that was deliberate or not, but it is true that one of the easy ways to get people into conservation is by the presentation of what’s called “charismatic megafauna.” In other words, quite large animals that look good on camera. People are more interested in saving bears than woolly geraniums. The website for the National Park Service listing all the species in Katmai National Park doesn’t even include insects. The only site I found with much information on invertebrates was made by an eighth-grader, I’m guessing for science class. People like bears better than black slugs, too.

John C. Reilly’s mellow voice introduces us to a mother bear, whom he calls Sky, and her cubs, Scout and Amber. She has given birth in a den in the snow, high in the mountains, and now, she is on her way to lower elevations, where she will spend the warmer months. She will care for her cubs. She will start to teach them how to survive on their own in the Alaskan wilderness. As she does, Reilly will teach us about the place where she lives. We primarily see through what she and her cubs experience.

There is danger here. When people think about Disney and animal documentaries, they think about White Wilderness and its fake danger, but even in White Wilderness Disney filmmakers showed us real danger. Because there is real danger for pretty much every animal in the world. You mightn’t think it about bears, but of course Scout and Amber are still cubs, and unlike their mother are small enough and vulnerable enough to be prey for a fox—or another hungry bear.

The bears are, after all, subject to needs. Reilly makes it very clear that the cubs will only survive the next winter if Sky herself puts on enough weight to let them nurse. The cubs eat solids, too, but I suspect they are unable to put on enough fat to survive a winter the way their mother does. Sky’s search is for salmon, though she eats grass and mussels and clams as well. But the male bears are not concerned about whether or not Scout and Amber survive. If the cubs are anything to them, it is simply this—another source of food that will see Magnus and Chinook through the winter for themselves.

There is an avalanche quite early on, which itself is doubtless the cause of death for any number of bears. Then toward the end, you don’t have to be a biologist to know that Sky looks much thinner than we’re used to seeing bears. It’s a worrying thing, really, and you start to wonder if perhaps Disney will be showing you a nature documentary where you get to know and care about the animals only to see them die. After all, that, too, is nature.