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.
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.