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Polar Bear barely glides by: Movie Review

Buena Vista Pictures
Buena Vista Pictures

With nothing new in cinemas this week, it’s time for our annual highlight on nature documentaries to commemorate the end of Earth month. For that, Disney+ is continuing the company’s (mostly) annual tradition of releasing a family-friendly animal adventure. This year, it’s Polar Bear.

The film is spectacularly shot, with some heart-stopping vistas and dozens of truly beautiful scenes, with polar bears exploring mountains, seas, cliffs, ice flows, and gazing at the northern lights.

Polar Bear is best when left to its breathtaking visuals and luscious score by Harry Gregson-Williams. This tells a better story than the thin and slow-paced narration loosely telling the life story of a young, female polar bear from youth to motherhood.

The celebrity voice-over is supplied by Catherine Keener, whose clarity and tenderness lend themselves well to the story. What’s less effective is having her play the character of the nameless polar bear instead of narrating from a third-person perspective.

This framing device cheapens the (otherwise direct) message about how climate change is threatening the Arctic environments we see on screen. But Keener is still a great choice to lead the film.

This isn’t Disney’s first nature documentary about bears - their predictably titled Bears (2012) centered on grizzly bears in Alaska and 2017’s Born in China featured panda bears as one of their main characters. Heck, polar bears were one of the their main plot lines in 2009’s Earth, the movie that launched the new Disneynature brand in the first place.

So is there really enough material to justify an entire new movie exclusively about polar bears? Yes, but only just. Unlike other more engaging films in the Disneynature family, the story of the unnamed polar bear family features too few other animals to fill the run time.

The Arctic is such a sparse landscape, and part of the conflict is how difficult it is for polar bears to find food and other animals. Watching several long scenes of the polar bears traversing the empty, frozen sea ice, however, eventually gets tiresome.

What never gets old is the cinematography - the movie is worth seeing on this merit alone. The aerial and close-up scenes of polar bears in the wild will leave you nudging your viewing companions every few minutes wondering, "How did they get that shot?"

It’s so awe-inspiring, in fact, it made me miss the days when Disney would release these movies on the big screen and donate a portion of the ticket sales to wildlife conservation funds. (Though the film’s credits tell you how to do that if you like.)

Those really interested in the subject matter, including how they filmed the movie over three years, can watch a companion documentary also streaming on Disney+ cutely called Bear Witness, also streaming for subscribers.

A quick warning: Polar Bear is Disneynature’s first PG film (instead of G) and with good reason. Some occasional shots are a bit more intense than normal, including brief moments of them eating a whale and that of two polar bears about to have a cub.

As a complete movie, the brilliant camera work makes the overall concept work in turn. But it works just bear-ly as a cohesive whole.

Polar Bear

6 out of 10

PG, 1hr 23mins. Family Nature Documentary.

Directed by Alastair Fothergill and Jeff Wilson.

Narrated by Catherine Keener.

Now streaming on Disney+ for subscribers.