It’s a hard life for the adorable boy and girl cubs who co-star with their mom in Disney’s “Bears.” One falls asleep on a sandbar only to wake up surrounded by water at high tide and is later nearly eaten by a rampaging cannibal bear; both nearly starve to death when their mother can’t find enough salmon. That’s a lot of suffering, but I still think I’d rather be a cub than a Cubs fan.
This is one of those nature documentaries that’s pretty much solely interested in being entertaining, and so is cleverly edited to look like the linear story of a mother (dubbed Sky) and her newborns (Scout and Amber). They emerge from a den in a mountain after the winter, trek across the peaks to the sea and hunt for salmon, though they’re willing to settle for grazing on grass.
Think of it “like a dirty salad,” reasons the ever-amused narrator, John C. Reilly.
I didn’t know bears ate grass, nor did I suspect that they ate each other, but Sky has repeated run-ins with two local males, each of them much larger than she, who intend to feast on her babies.
She and the cubs are dashing away from one of these savage cannibals when she runs straight into the path of another. As Scout hides among a pile of logs, Sky adopts the unwise trick of rambling in the other direction in hopes that the predator will follow, but instead he ignores her and noses around her boy: Bears have seven times the sniffing power of bloodhounds, we’re told.
Yet the cubs survive without explanation as the old male bear apparently loses interest and wanders off. Wasn’t he supposed to be starving? What happened? And why is Sky presented as full to bursting with salmon in one scene and then shown as alarmingly thin a couple of minutes later?
There’s only so much editing can do to make a bear story seem like a human one, and the filmmakers (Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey directed) also go to unfortunate lengths to give human characteristics like laziness to the bears. A more interesting movie might have toned down the anthropomorphism and stuck to more surprising facts about all the ways bears aren’t at all similar to humans.
Then again, at a stream where salmon actually leap out of the water (and into ursine jaws), the struggle for the best positions at the feast reminded me of nothing so much as the desperation of the roaring and ravenous mammals waiting to get into Nobu.