An average movie

This movie was one of the last flops delivered by Disney before they would drop their trademark hand-drawn animation style. In fact, I even saw this feature in the movie theater with my wife and the kids (in fact, I think it was the very first movie we saw in the movie theater all together). Anyway, it had been ages since I saw the damned thing so I was quite eager to check it out again. Well,  eventually, even though it didn’t get much love when it was released and even though it was indeed rather flawed, there was some elements that I really enjoyed about this flick. Obviously, the animation was quite gorgeous but, a part from that, it was in fact an interesting tale and it was in fact much darker and much more dramatic than we have been used to get from those guys. Basically, the main character was a rather selfish and ignorant young boy who, after losing his older brother, blames a bear, kills the poor beast and ends up taking care of this bear's little cub. I mean, that was some rather heavy material and there was some great potential but, unfortunately, they didn’t really know how to handle such a dark tale, I'm afraid. In fact, I don't even think that to change the main character into a bear was the problem. No, the problem was that, from the moment he turned into a bear, from that point, everything became suddenly so childish. Basically, they did their best to tone down all the fascinating dark elements of this tale resulting in another generic road trip with some talking animals and some typically uplifting songs by Phil Collins. In my opinion, they had a pretty good story but they completely drowned  it into the usual boring Disney formula which was too bad. Still, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, I thought it was a decent watch and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre. 

6/10