Robert J. Maxwell Man Bites Bear It's easy to see why this film was rated so highly. It's awfully likable. The principles are Youk, a bear cub, and Bart, a 1500 pound fully grown male Kodiak bear. Poor Youk. His mother is digging out a honeycomb and dislodges a large chunk of granite which crushes her head. Youk, whimpering, must take off on his own, wobbling along through the grasslands and crags of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, an inhospitable place to everyone but skiers.We are then introduced to the mammoth Bart, who shoos off the rugrat, clearly a bear with dependency issues. Still the cub follows Bart around, though unwanted. Then, enter the enemy, two sinister hunters collecting bear skins to sell for the manufacture of robes, rugs, coats, hats, and whatever else they make out of bearskins. Pow! And Bart is wounded in the shoulder, wobbling off painfully until he manages to heal his wound by rolling around in a muddy pond. His convalescence over, Bart adopts Youk, and teaches him the rules of the game.But during his escape from the two hunters, Bart has killed one of their horses and wounded the other, so now revenge joins profit in motivating the two hunters, who bring in a pack of hunting hounds. Well, I'll tell you, it's one tribulation after another, both for the bears and for the hunters. Youk is hunted by the angriest mountain lion known to man or beast and is saved at the last minute by the intervention of Big Bart. Big Bart also traps the meanest of the hunters, scares the crap out of him, and then after roaring, bearing his teeth, and scraping some dust on the cowering human ("Please, don't kill me!") he wanders off, satisfied that he's made his message clear through his body language and prosody. And he HAS too. The mean hunter has an epiphany. Later when he has a clear opportunity to kill Bart, he spares him.What makes the film so appealing, chiefly, are two of its features.First, Youk is both ugly and cute at the same time. He's pretty funny too, rolling around, eating psychedelic mushrooms and tripping out, so that a floating mushroom turns into a real butterfly. The hunters manage to capture him and in their absence from the camp he rummages through their possessions and winds up covered with feathers. Cute. He witnesses a primal scene involving Bart and a sluttish female and falls asleep while they copulate.Second, although we are constantly on the side of the bears, the humans are not shown as resolutely evil in their actions or their emotions. Having captured Youk, they tie him to a tree, tease him, and laugh at his antics. He's not treated badly. When the men ride away, Youk is perfectly willing to follow them so they must scare him away. And the humans don't show any animus towards bears or other animals. They like their dogs and their horses. They're just depicted as making a living. The living involves killing animals, but the bears kill deer too. Everybody has to make a living.The framework for the relationship between humans and their natural environments was described by an anthropologist, Florence Kluckhohn, who observed that people had three ways of dealing with nature: they could live in submission to it, they could live in harmony with it, or they could try to conquer it. The hunters in this film are more or less living in harmony with nature. The iconography suggests this story takes place in the late 19th century. By that time -- up to and including now -- not everyone felt that way. We have no more passenger pigeons in North America, though they used to darken the skies. If you want to see an American buffalo, you must go to a zoo now. Wolves are disappearing and grizzlies are increasingly hard to come by. I won't go on about this point, though it would be easy to do.One annoying element of the film is that, well, I'm afraid some of Youk's whimpers, screams, and inquiries were dubbed by either a pre-adolescent human child or a fully blown human woman. We can clearly hear little Youk uttering, "Huh?" and "Wow" and "Oh" and "Wassup" and "So's your old man" and reciting Hamlet's famous soliloquy -- "To be or not to be". Under the influence of those psychedelic mushrooms he fantasizes himself at the Metropolitan opera singing "La Donna e Mobile" to a packed house.I kind of enjoyed it, despite the cuteness, not because of it.

Scott LeBrun Based on James-Oliver Curwoods' 1917 novel "The Grizzly King", "The Bear" is quite remarkable, a heart tugging and involving drama where animal actors are at the forefront. At the beginning, a grizzly cub is orphaned, and the poor little thing eventually hooks up with an adult Kodiak bear. The big and fearsome Kodiak becomes the cubs' companion and protector, but is itself a tempting prize for a pair of hunters, Bill (Jack Wallace), and Tom (Tcheky Karyo).Written by Gerard Brach ("Repulsion", "Frantic") and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud ("Quest for Fire"), what's nice about "The Bear" is how well it manages to promote love and respect for Mother Nature. It's a beautifully shot (by Philippe Rousselot), picturesque story, with no shortage of perils into which our four legged heroes are placed. It may be hard for some people to watch at times, although scenes of harm to animals were faked as best as possible using special effects. (Admittedly, the blood looks rather like paint.) It's sometimes manipulative, to be honest, but it still engages the viewer, thanks to a delightful pair of performances by Bart (the Kodiak) and Youk (the cub). Youk in particular is adorable. Wallace and Karyo are good, refraining from being purely one dimensional. Philippe Sarde composed the touching music score.The film is actually not without humour, and even creates some surreal "nightmare" sequences containing striking imagery.Must viewing for lovers of both cinema and animals.Eight out of 10.

dav4is I remember this first as a book I read back in the '50s. I loved it then, and I love the film now.First, I have to address some of the complaints made by other reviewers here.1. About the "fake bear sounds" made by the bear cub. I recall a display of bear cubs at a local game farm; that's pretty much the sound they make, much like a baby.2. The "unrealistic" aspects: The big male refraining from eating the cub; the bear confronting the defenseless hunter and allowing him to go free. Curwood claims in his preface, if I recall correctly, that these events not only really happened, they happened to him! He was the younger hunter, named Jim in the book.3. Bear sex as porn: Get a grip! I think that this was straight from the book, too.Now, to my observations.Much credit has to go to the casting directors and animal trainers. These critters seem perfectly cast! Could any bear cub possible be any cuter than this one? With expressive little eyes, even! I particularly liked the sequence where he chases the frog and ends up imitating it by jumping around after it.The big male is suitably big and ferocious.The sow (female bear) is amazingly attractive and fetching, lolling on her back and practically begging "Come and get it sailor!".The dogs in the book were Airedales, but in the movie were black Dobermans, looking like the spawn of Hell! Now cougars can be pretty appealing looking beasts, but this one has a distinctly dastardly appearance! I especially liked the cub's reaction of studied indifference during the Bear Sex scene, reminding me of the Ron Perlman character in Quest For Fire while his chum was making it with the native girl. Oh! Same director! But how did he get the bear to have that same expression as Perlman?

Drake1147 I liked and disliked many aspects of this movie. The human noises for the cub were quite annoying at times, but I understood the purpose for them. People need a connection so that they can feel the bear's pain. The humans were crucial to the plot... you need conflict. Dialouge was important too, 88 minutes of a person making slurping and whining noises would've been unbearable without people talking. The hunters however were not so scary. They were scary when I was a kid, however as an adult I found them pretty much harmless. The big bear did more damage in this movie then the hunters. I realize the younger hunter had a life threatening experience, but the way the other two hunters cut there rather steep loses and just left was kind of unbelievable. The bear's dreams were creepy even now and the resolution right at hibernation was perfect. The ultimate feel of this movie was warm and fuzzy and the intent was in the right place.