{"id":176780,"date":"2025-12-10T00:14:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T00:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/176780\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T00:14:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T00:14:07","slug":"a-disney-director-spent-3-years-animating-this-beautiful-short-on-his-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/176780\/","title":{"rendered":"A Disney director spent 3 years animating this beautiful short on his own"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disney’s Brother Bear has always felt a little overlooked among the company’s roster of animated features. It lacks the name recognition of a centuries-old fable like “Sleeping Beauty” or “Snow White,” and parts of its story seem divided between impulses, veering back and forth between a melancholy drama inspired by Native American shapeshifter tales, and a more modern comedy. But it features spectacular animation sequences<\/a>, and it’s built around heartfelt messaging about the connection between humanity and the natural world.<\/p>\n

Both those latter elements come into play in “Snow Bear,” an 11-minute short hand-animated by Brother Bear co-director Aaron Blaise, now featured on YouTube. Blaise, a supervising animator on The Lion King and Mulan, once said in an EW interview that he took on Brother Bear as his directorial debut “so that I could animate bears.”<\/a> He returned to that obsession with “Snow Bear” \u2014 a representative for Blaise says he personally produced 11,000 drawings for the film, over the course of three years making the film on his own.<\/p>\n

\"An
\n Image: Aaron Blaise<\/p>\n

The wordless short follows a lonely polar bear wandering the Arctic in search of a friend. As it tries to connect with other animals, it’s rejected \u2014 until it builds a friend out of snow. “Snow Bear” is sweet and kid-friendly, but underlying it is a message about the threat climate change poses to polar bears<\/a>, as the polar ice caps disappear, and their habitat alters. A statement about the short says Blaise teamed up with the advocacy group Polar Bears International<\/a> to make “Snow Bear.”<\/p>\n

A five-minute making-of featurette about the short, also featured on YouTube<\/a>, explains how Blaise reached out to Oscar-winner and Brother Bear composer Mark Mancina to create the music for the short, and how he brought his own background as a painter into the animation, design, and color selection for the project.<\/p>\n

Blaise also created art for a companion card game inspired by the short, currently on Kickstarter<\/a>, described as “a mash-up of Rummy and Uno with a sprinkle of puzzle building thrown in.” The campaign, already fully funded, runs through Dec. 28.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Disney’s Brother Bear has always felt a little overlooked among the company’s roster of animated features. It lacks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-176780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}