Film Bear Week 2024

It’s almost October, and that means we are on the cusp of one of the most spectacular events of the natural world: Fat Bear Week.

With winter approaching, brown bears across the northern hemisphere are eating up a storm, as they look to pile on the pounds needed to see them through another seven-month hibernation! Hoovering up as many fish as they can during the salmon run, this sees the bears at Katmai National Park, Alaska, undergo some truly remarkable transformations. With its cameras at the Brooks River in particular hosting some of the largest brown bears on Earth, nature web-cam network Explore.org hosts a hugely popular annual contest, celebrating the biggest, fattest bears of all.

Voting for your favourites (and you will have a lot of favourites) runs from October 2nd to October 8th on the official Fat Bear Week website. But before that, and to get into the spirit of things, I thought I’d host a bracket of my own: the first ever Film Bear Week.

Quarter finals

There are two differences to Fat Bear Week here. The first, obvious one, is that I will be picking the winners. This is not a democracy. The second, is that I am picking the winners according to the quality of the film – and the bear action contained within it – rather than the size of the bear.

Looking at the draw for the quarter finals, it’s already clear some of these have not had a good summer, and still cut gaunt, sombre figures heading into the colder months. One of those stragglers is 1976 Grizzly. The film tries to rip-off Jaws – although to suggest it tries anything seem too generous. There are many moments where it’s clear producers said certain things needed to be worked in (a bit where a child gets attacked, someone catching the wrong bear, a topless bathing scene), but the time and budget was not available to it – and every time a scene like that ends with a stuffed puppet-paw swatting someone in the head. Meanwhile, opportunities to do anything schlocky and fun are routinely passed up (most infuriatingly, in the final confrontation scene, the killer bear stands taller than a helicopter’s rotor blades, but that is not how it is defeated). Up against Werner Herzog’s harrowing documentary Grizzly Man, it’s pretty clear this is as far as Grizzly is going.

The second bracket sees two films about surviving in the wilderness, while being tormented by a bear. The Edge from 1997 is very much part of Anthony Hopkins’ “fuck it, it’s paid work” era, which conspicuously set in after he won his first Oscar. The film rarely lives up to its billing as a ‘thriller’, with the primarily plot driven by whether or not Hopkin’s billionaire character can trust the equally dislikeable Alec Baldwin (I would suggest not – especially around guns) – and while it does come alive every time the bear appears to menace them, it sadly does not result in their demise. I don’t know anyone on the planet who wants to see a wilderness survival film in which these two people fight a bear, and the bear does not prevail. The Revenant arguably suffers from the same problem, because Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is someone arguably due much more than the light mauling he receives here. But it skates on by, because at least (as bad as the CGI looks) they didn’t make a real bear suffer through this production.

On the other side of the draw, two other oddly similar films await. The third quarter sees internet-famous stinker Gooby go up against meme-based hate-crime Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Honestly, there are not many films that Gooby could legitimately fend off. Robbie Coltrane’s deranged delivery as an imaginary man-bear, who may or may not be trying to abduct and murder a child, is amusing – listening to Cracker flip from fart-jokes to threatening to devour a playground bully is unnervingly funny – but to say it has some ‘problematic‘ implications is an understatement. Fortunately, that is Winnie the Problematic Pooh‘s middle-name. As the character lapsed into public domain, a group of filmmakers rushed to produce something, anything, so that they could theoretically cash in on a historic IP. But approaching the project with seemingly no ideas at all, they managed to produce a derivative ‘slasher’ so hateful – but also so lazy and dull-witted in the objectification of its all-female cast of victims – that sitting through it feels like an act of self-harm.

Finally, two Disney (-Pixar) productions face off, with Brother Bear taking on Brave. Both films use the narrative device of turning someone into a bear to address some short-coming in their personality – and to teach an audience it is wrong to assume every bear is a violent, aggressive beast to be brought to banished from sight, or killed. Brother Bear does this more overtly, because it sees a young man put into a bear’s body for callously killing another. It’s nicely put together, and I admittedly pine for when drawing was still a part of mainstream Hollywood animation. But it is also a bit weird in that the lead character ends up adopting the cub he orphaned – and if you are going to anthropomorphise an animal, that comes with human standards – especially when turning into a bear has seemingly not changed the character’s mental capacity one bit. The idea of someone murdering a human mother, then apologetically raising her baby as their own, would rightly be seen as grotesque. Brave takes its human-bear-change in a different, more interesting direction, though, so on it goes.

Semi finals

Grizzly Man vs The Revenant is theoretically an interesting match-up. Both films focus on human beings pushing themselves to the very limits of survival, and learning a painful lesson about their position on the food-chain. But The Revenant often feels like a vanity project, presented to Leonardo DiCaprio as a way to finally get himself over the line at the Academy Awards. The bear is circumstantial – the production just needed a reason for his character to get the living snot kicked out of him, before spending more than two hours crawling through mud, blood and snow. Every frame screams “if this doesn’t do it, Leo, nothing will!” and so a film supposedly about what happens when someone loses all of the comforts and benefits of society, ultimately just feels like a bunch of grasping Oscar bait. In contrast, Grizzly Man skewers a character who artificially presents himself as the ultimate survivalist – a delusional narcissist who ultimately exploits and endangers the humans and bears around him for his own pet ‘conservation’ project, and ends up paying a price for it.

On the other side, no prizes for guessing which way this one goes. Gooby is a film about a farting bear, who worms his way into the life of a lonely child whose parents are neglecting him – and leads the boy to an abandoned house where he nearly falls to his death. Brave is a beautifully animated film in which a mother and daughter learn how to respect each other through magic and adventure.

Final

Well, here we are. Our first Film Bear Week final. Grizzly Man vs Brave. Two high-pedigree features, who have spent the summer gorging on salmon, to become genuine contenders. But there can be only one winner.

Both have their pros and cons.

Brave is not the finest Pixar production. Pared back to basic family drama, it is probably one of the least imaginative of the early Pixar run – not only because its core dynamic is kind of similar to Brother Bear, but also because learning to get along with your parents is just the kind of thing you expect to find in any bog-standard kids movie. But even a slightly off-colour Pixar is still better than the vast majority of family cinema. Add to that, the way the bear-human conundrum is handled. Queen Elinor is not just a human inside a bear’s body – at various moments, her human consciousness visibly fades from her eyes, and the bear left behind in the forest begins to ominously advance on her daughter. The film’s broader element of threat hinges on a bear which was once an evil sorcerer – but the idea that it’s not an ‘evil’ bear that is liable to attack, just one which feels threatened or vulnerable in its own home, is such a mature and interesting inclusion, that will give you genuine chills.

Largely editing together unseen footage from the Alaskan wilderness filmed by Timothy Treadwell, in the lead-up to his death, Grizzly Man is a film which depends on authenticity to hold your attention. But at various points, Werner Herzog initiates conspicuously artificial interactions with his subjects. When he forces his talking heads to meet, to exchange items belonging to the late Treadwell, and records the supposedly organic meeting, it comes across as a grotesquely Hollywood manoeuvre – at best, riddled with artifice; at worst, exploiting a genuinely uncomfortable meeting under tragic circumstances. Fortunately, the original footage and testimony beyond these moments are still totally absorbing. The natural beauty which Timothy Treadwell captured on film, and the footage of the bears are remarkable, even before Herzog’s weathered, whisper of a voice chimes in to try and find sense in the madness. In the end, the only sense is that there is no sense – and that the best thing for us and the planet, would be to get past the idea that either as a species or as individuals, we are the stars of our own show. Treadwell was a sad and strange product of a human society that has long presented itself as an indispensable central feature of the natural world – largely as a way to justify a set of individually beneficial behaviours which are detrimental to that same world. When Treadwell failed to obtain the level of fame he saw as his right in the human world, so inflicted himself on bears instead. He presented himself as a ‘saviour’ to an animal actually armed very well for immediate self-defence – while acting as though in a broader sense, nobody else (not even the indigenous people of Alaska, whose warnings and expertise he completely ignored) cared. That cost him, his girlfriend – and the bear who ate them – their lives.

As an infamous obsessive, Herzog’s film is at times gentle and even sympathetic to this – but in the end, it is a condemnation. You come away from it, not only sickened by the whole affair, but also with a new self-awareness; that seeing yourself as the main character in everything is a self-destructive cycle that also visits harm and exploitation on those around you.

Champion: Grizzly Man

For those reasons, Grizzly Man is the first (and last) winner of Film Bear Week.