All of us want to be loved, and we all need to feel a warm connection. Sometimes we don’t even know how badly we need to feel that bond until we don’t have it anymore, and in the stunning animated short film, Snow Bear, one polar bears journeys through his environment to find someone that looks like him. This is a film that is as emotionally affecting as it is beautifully animated. Legendary animator and director Aaron Blaise gifts us with a film about longing and finding love and companionship just when you need it most.
**This interview contains slight spoilers for Snow Bear.
Blaise spoke to me about his film while he was visiting Churchill, Manitoba with the Polar Bears Initiative (PBI). The group is the largest non-profit conservation group for polar bears in the world. in Manitoba. In this northern Canadian town, you are able to see polar bears walking freely (Churchill was the setting of the 2021 shortlisted documentary short, Nuisance Bear).
Blaise directed the underrated 2004 Disney film Brother Bear in 2004, and you may know him from his work on films like Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Mulan, Aladdin and Wolfwalkers. His work as an animator wowed us with characters whose movement is as memorable as the songs they sing or who voiced them. Snow Bear features no dialogue but carries huge swaths of emotion, and his love of animating animals is always a north star for him.
“Back in 1997, Disney was developing a film called Bears, but there wasn’t anyone working on it,” Blaise says. “I jumped on it since I love animating animals so much. I ended up inheriting the film and ended up directing it, and that’s how I wound up with Brother Bear. I did a commercial for John Lewis, the department store in the UK, in 2013, and it was huge campaign. There was another bear in that. I wasn’t thinking about bears when this came along, but I was thinking about this emotion that I wanted to play with on screen, which is loneliness. This want for companionship. This story is a metaphor for my own life. I lost my wife to breast cancer 19 years ago, and this is kind of the story of us coming together. The pain and absolute turmoil of her loss. I felt adrift for years until I got my feet back under me and found love again. This was taking all of that personal journey and creating this story, but I wanted to make it palatable for a broader audience. I wanted to do one character, because I wanted to animate it myself.”
Snow Bear tells the story of a polar bear who can’t find a friend. Other animals seem scared by his size (or maybe his reputation?), so he walks around this vast, icy world alone until he creates a friend for himself out of snow. The bear’s face, though, sticks with you. He projects so much joy, pain, and silliness in his big eyes.
“I always want to create a character that you can get behind and you can identify with,” he says. “One of the things about that is that this want for companionship and connection is universal. Everyone wants that at some point in their loves. One of the reasons why I made it with no dialogue is because I wanted it to play across linguistic and cultural barriers and just play for the world.”
Blaise’s film is one of the only ones that I’ve ever seen where the surroundings made me feel temperature. You know when you see ice or snow, and you just remember how it feels against your skin? Snow feels different than ice, but the world isn’t just plain or stock white. Blaise points out how the white isn’t just white.
“People will ask me how do you portray a white polar bear in a white environment, but it’s not all [that color],” Blaise says. “I’m looking at snow right now, and there’s different shades of grey and white and all sorts of textures. I let the palette kind of represent the tone of the story as it was playing through. For instance, when the bear discovers that he can make a companion, everything is bright and colorful and almost candy white. I wanted it to be playful. Then we moved into more blues and a lot of snow falling as they are having fun.”
That comedy comes through even further when the bear is having the time of his life with his new friends. You almost forget that his new friend is made of snow.
“The key is balance,” he says. “At the heart of the story, it’s a very emotional, deeply sad story. It’s uplifting in the end, but those only work when you have something to contrast them with. I don’t want everything to be a downer all the way through, so it’s my job as a filmmaker to bring people along with me. Even if it’s just an 11-minute film. I want it to be a literal rollercoaster of joy and sadness and being on the edge of your seat. I’m very structure oriented in the way that I approach my storytelling. I wanted to establish the world of this lonely guy, and I wanted to see him discover friendship. Once you feel that friendship, it hits you harder when the friend starts to melt. You’re going to feel it.”
We all know the risks of having a friend made of snow and ice, and one moment is so emotional that it reminded me of the Rankin/Bass Frosty the Snowman from 1969. If you remember the greenhouse scene, you will know exactly what I am talking about.
“That’s ineveibale when you’re telling a story about a snow character, right,” he jokes. “I’m qute a bit older, and back in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when I was watching that, I still remember watching it for the first time when Christmas snow was falling outside. It destroyed me.”
Another reason why Snow Bear stands out is because of the glorious 2D animation. So little feature films are produced this way that when one comes along, it always sticks out. I love how you can see the different thickness of the lines of the bear or you can see the imprint of the artist. You get lost in the story, but it creates a connection between animators and their audiences. The entire world is so vividly created. The perspective will blow you away. Blaise doesn’t think this style will ever go away, but he speaks about the purity of the art form.
“My business partner, Nick Burch, and I always say that in the late ’90s and early 2000s, they just took 2D off the menu,” Blaise says. “It’s not that it was any better or worse, but they just took it off. It’s a wonderful medium, and one of the reasons why I love it so much is that there is no keyboard filter. It goes through your hand and onto, in my case, the screen. I drew on a computer screen, but it’s still hand drawn. There’s purity to that, and when we talk about seeing the imperfections, to me that is the hman touch. I don’t mind a line crawl–I wanted that. I wanted to see that this was drawn by a person. At the same time, I want you to forget that you’re watching drawings, and you’re just being sucked into the film.”
Snow Bear will stream on YouTube beginning November 27.
