This would seem to be an awful lot of contrivance on the Great Spirits' part, but if they made it simple, then Kenai and Nita won't have several days together in which to fall back in love.
#Brother bear and brother bear 2 free#
The only way to free herself from this betrothal is if both she and Kenai - whom she knows to be a bear, which strikes me as just odd, but probably not for a legitimate reason - journey to the exact spot where he gave her the pendant in the first place, and burn it. Immediately consulting with the local wise woman Innoko (Wanda Sykes), Nita finds that this is because she's been promised to Kenai ever since receiving his pendant as a child, after rescuing her from a frozen river. Fans of the original will recall that the Great Spirits don't go in for half-measures, or subtlety. It's the day of her wedding to a strapping hunk of Inuit man meat named Atka (Jeff Bennett), and she's excited and scared, as a bride will be she has reason to be extra-scared, though, as it turns out that the Great Spirits themselves don't want this marriage to take place, through a thunderstorm and an earthquake at the ceremony. Naturally enough, Nita is about to re-enter Kenai's life. All is not totally un-fraught, though Kenai has of late been recalling his childhood sweetheart, a certain Nita (Mandy Moore), and Koda is moderately concerned that his big brother's resolute "no girls!" stance might be less stable than he'd like. It's mating season, and the rest of the bears are insisting upon Kenai going off to find some sweet hairy thing, but he wants to keep things strictly a boy's club, and Koda is absolutely fine with that.
#Brother bear and brother bear 2 movie#
It's bothersome in a way that I let become far too much of a problem for me.īut anyway, spotting the movie that a girl from the next tribe over doesn't really fit in with the implied world of the first Brother Bear, mostly we're in the realm of plausibly organic developments from the situation at the end of the last movie, in which human-turned-bear Kenai (Patrick Dempsey, an alarmingly fucking weird replacement for Joaquin Phoenix) and his adopted cub brother Koda (Jeremy Suarez) are just waking up from their first hibernation as a new little family. That being the case, it's still noteworthy that the film proceeds more or less logically from the first movie, outside of the arguable point that the depiction of Inuit society presented there doesn't entirely gel with the depiction here the whole entire narrative of Brother Bear 2 hinges upon its protagonist's years-ago friendship with a girl from another tribe, or merchant camp, or something that's not actually clarified very well. By which I mean, my response to this film was very nearly identical to my response to the first: having an incredibly hard time remembering its content even a couple of hours after I watched it, and seeing no reason for the story to have been told outside of a defiant "Um, because". I'll say this much for Brother Bear 2: it's a good sequel. I dunno, maybe they were hoping that they could retroactively legitimise the first movie by giving it a sequel: "See, it's an animated classic! It has those characters so beloved that we brought them back!" Not exactly the kind of legacy that you'd think would have convinced anybody that a sequel would be met by an eager fanbase. It is a film about which the single most salient fact is that it underwhelmed at the box office, thus smoothing the path for Disney to shut down its traditional animation program. But 2003's Brother Bear isn't Lilo & Stitch, or Mulan, or Lady and the Tramp it's not even The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Say whatever horrible things one wants to about the earlier Disney sequels, but they all, more or less, were marketable. What explains the justification for this project, if anything, beyond the power-drunk realisation that the DisneyToon Studios DTV films cost very little to make and brought in at least some amount of profit no matter what, is totally unknown to me, and impossible to guess. We've officially hit the point where it's just silly: we have arrived at the existence of Brother Bear 2.