 Starring: Bart The Bear, Youk The Bear, Tcheky Karyo, Jack Wallace
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Year Of Release: 1988
Plot: While foraging in the mountains, a mother bear is killed when she accidentally dislodges a boulder. This leaves her little cub all alone in the world. He tries to survive, striking up an uneasy alliance with a large male bear. However hunters are out in the woods trying to get bear skins, and they wouldn’t mind capturing a cub either. |
I wonder what would happen if they tried to make The Bear today. 21-years ago, the film managed to get endorsements from both the World Wildlife Fund and the American Humane Association, but it’s difficult to see that happening now.
The film is a fascinating attempt to tell a story about bears, using real animals and very little dialogue (the only speech comes from the two hunters), and yet still find a way to get the audience to see the creatures as far more than just dumb creatures. While the ways it tries to forge this connection between audience and animals sometimes work and sometimes don’t – the bear’s dreams and hallucinations are just plain odd and a little silly – it is a fairly unique and rather beautiful film, even if its message does rely on grafting human emotions and reactions onto the animals.
However while the film argues strongly to be nice to our fellow creatures, you have to wonder what they put the put little bear cub through to film it. The poor little thing has dogs barking in its face, gets chased by a puma, finds itself plummeting through the air when the log underneath it gives way, is put on a tiny bit of wood floating down a river and God knows what else. Even its alliance with the fully-grown male bear put it in danger. In the wild, male bears often kill cubs, and so for the movie they had to spend ages training the adult animal with a soft toy, in the hope it would get used to things that are the size and shape of a little bear. Luckily it worked, but goodness knows what would have happened if it hadn’t.
When the movie was made in the late-80s, the filming was monitored by the American Humane Association and the movie was given a clean bill of health, with them saying no animals were harmed during the making of The Bear. In fact they were prepared to hale its attempt to get people to empathise with animals.
However if they tried to make the film now, it’s difficult to imagine it’d get the same response. In fact they’d probably end up with naked PETA models invading the set and protesting. There’s been a massive change in the way animals are used in films in the last couple of decades, partly in response to changes in what people perceive as cruelty, and partly because of advances in technology. Back in the 80s, if you put an animal through some mild discomfort nobody seemed to mind too much, but that’s completely changed now.
Particularly with undomesticated animals, the rules and regulations over what you can and can’t do with them while filming have changed enormously, largely because people no longer like to see anything where it looks like an animal might be doing something against its will, or which it wouldn’t want to do. It means it’s much more difficult to work with animals than it used to be, unless you’re getting them to do fairly ordinary things (e.g. people riding horses, dogs running around).
Another reason for the change is the advances in technology. With CGI, the advances in green screen technology and various other new digital effects, it’s now much harder for a filmmaker to argue that they actually need to have a real animal doing anything it might possibly be distressed by. For example, it would be very tough to argue that you needed to put a real bear on a log that’s sticking out over a sheer drop, with a barking dog at the other end, and then pull the ground out from under its feet. They did it for The Bear (and indeed the little animal wasn’t harmed), but it would be difficult to argue it was necessary in this day and age, when you could use CGI or green-screen technologies to get the same effect.
It’s also true that when people in showbusiness say never work with children or animals, it’s not just because it’s difficult to get them to do what you need them to; it’s also because there’s a lot of rules and red tape involved. While adult humans can work ridiculously long hours, do dangerous stunts, and generally be worked within an inch of their life on a film set (within reason, of course), you’re far more restricted once you get kids or creatures involved.
For example in the US, if you have an animal on set, even if it’s just a few spiders, you also need to hire a professional animal handler to oversee them, and there must also be a representative from the American Humane Association on set at all times, to make sure the working condition for the animals are up to par and that the director isn’t poking a monkey with a stick whenever the camera is turned off.
You also have to keep detailed records of everything you do with an animal, and not just in case something goes wrong. For example, one of the peculiarities of the British ratings system is that while there are few specific legal restrictions on what can and can’t be shown in films, one of the few places where the BBFC has a legal obligation to act is in cases of animal cruelty. UK law states that you can’t have any scenes in a film that show actual cruelty to animals (although peculiarly you can kill an animal in a film, as long as you don’t do it in a way that the law considers to be cruel).
If there is such as scene, the company behind the movie must then provide documents detailing exactly what happened during filming, and proof that the animal wasn’t treated cruelly (although slightly oddly, if there’s real harm to a human in a movie, the BBFC isn’t legally obliged to question it). If the BBFC isn’t satisfied with the documents provided, they have to cut out that part of the movie. One example of this is in James Cameron’s The Abyss, during a scene that supposedly shows a rat being dunked in a breathable liquid. Of course in real life it wasn’t a breathable liquid, it was just a rat getting half-drowned in water. While the rodent survived its ordeal (and it just goes to show what was permitted on Hollywood film sets in the 1980s, even with the permission of the American Humane Association), the BBFC decided it showed animal cruelty and so any shots of the rat underwater were cut out of the film in the UK.
While the BBFC didn’t cut anything out of The Bear, it’s undoubtedly difficult to see this film getting made today in the way it was back then. Indeed, director Jean-Jacques Annaud later made Two Brothers in 2004, about tigers, which used a lot more technology to get around the fact it couldn't use real animals to do the sort of things that had been fine when he was making The Bear. It ensures thay the 1998 film is pretty unique movie, which due to changes in how animals are now treated in film, is likely to stay that way.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: Be Cool - Or, the reasons why MGM is now on the verge of bankruptcy
NEXT: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms - Or, why we should appreciate the world's lack of giant radiation lizards
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
