Top Ten Bears in Movies
I just saw Cocaine Bear last week, and it will surely go down in cinematic history as one of the most entertaining movies to feature a bear—certainly the most entertaining to feature a bear high on cocaine.
With the release of Cocaine Bear, I finally had the perfect opportunity to do a top ten list that I have wanted to do for a long time. This is my countdown of the top ten best bears in movies!
Honourable
Mention: The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986)
At number ten is the true star of the eco-horror flick Prophecy, which follows a bunch of uninteresting human characters being menaced by Katahdin: the horrific result of nature being polluted. She’s a huge mutated mother bear with partially melted skin. Prophecy is not a good movie, but the mutant bear saves it from being a total loss. She isn’t a scary movie monster, but rather a hilarious one—unintentionally. The bear suit is floppy and fake (with actor Kevin Peter Hall inside, later most famous for Predator and Harry and the Hendersons), the melted skin looks like cheese pizza, and it moves in an awkward way, but every time it comes on screen it’s gloriously ridiculous. She also makes what I think is one of the funniest kills I’ve ever seen in a horror movie: swatting a young boy wrapped up in a sleeping bag so hard he strikes a tree trunk and explodes into a cloud of feathers.
This bear is a little tougher to explain, because it’s just so horrific and unique. I didn’t love Annihilation, but I did think the horror scene this bear was part of was one of the scariest scenes of any movie from that year. In a strange area called “The Shimmer” an alien presence is mutating all life forms, and a team of scientists discover just how deadly the mutations can be when a mutated bear attacks them in a house while most of the characters are tied up. This bear has absorbed the DNA from one of their comrades it killed earlier, which not only has messed up its face, but has also given it the ability to use her voice, which initially tricks them, then torments them, as they try to remain still while it lumbers about, screaming in a distorted human voice. The only down side to this bear is that the incredible practical effects they used during production were replaced with CGI in post-production. Even though the visual effects aren’t top notch, all other aspects of the execution make it a seriously effective and frightening bear scene. Fun fact: the name comes from the name of a rail station in East London, because the VFX creator also worked on the bear at #7 on this list, whose name also comes from a rail station.
Most of us remember having at least one stuffed teddy bear when we were kids. Seth MacFarlane had the great idea to write and direct a movie about what would happen if a child’s stuffed bear came to life—and continued to live with him as an adult. MacFarlane lent his voice to the character aptly known as Ted, which makes him sound an awful lot like Peter Griffin from Family Guy, but aside from this and a few other elements that are very clearly derivative of MacFarlane’s long-running adult cartoon series, Ted is a pretty funny movie with yet another very unique bear in a big role. Mark Wahlberg actually does a pretty good job acting alongside the foul-mouthed CGI creation, and they both returned for the sequel three years later. I actually thought Ted 2 was funnier than the first Ted, but regardless of what you think of either movie, you have to hand it to Ted for being a great movie bear—and probably the only one to have had sex with a woman, smoke weed, get drunk, and sing a song about being afraid of thunder.
I loved the character of Paddington as a kid, in both the books and the cartoon series, but it wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that the live-action movie adaptation, which used CGI to bring the anthropomorphic young bear to life, finally came out. Paddington is a movie best described as delightful, and the character of Paddington (named after the famous rail station) is a charming protagonist, for both kids and adults alike. The CGI is quite good, and his characterization is spot-on, from the coat and hat and British accent (voiced by Ben Whishaw) to his love of marmalade. Even though they changed his origins a bit, it works for the world established in the film, and his interactions with the human characters are nearly flawless. Paddington returned for Paddington 2, and will hopefully be returning for a third movie in the near future.
Next up is another bear from 2014, but coming from a completely different kind of movie compared to Paddington. In real life there are no lovable talking two-legged bears obsessed with marmalade, but there are black bears in the Canadian wilderness that might pose a threat to campers. It’s a simple premise with a slow build-up, as a young couple go camping in the Ontario backcountry, get lost, and get stalked by a bear, which attacks them in their tent. It is one of the most intense animal attacks in any movie I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen many), and after the attack scene it’s a nail-biting fight for survival until the end. The filmmakers used a real black bear instead of CGI or a person in a bear costume (two bears were used during filming, in fact), and it adds a level of authenticity that most horror/thrillers featuring bears lack. The bear’s behaviour is also quite realistic, which helps make it one of the most frightening black bears to ever appear on film.
As a child, I was utterly petrified by the bear that abruptly enters the fold in the climax of Fox and the Hound—an animated Disney film that, up to that point, is pretty light on tense scenes and scary moments. Copper (The Hound) is trailing Tod (The Fox) along with his master, and they stumble into an absolute mountain of a bear. This thing has blood-red eyes, huge teeth, and a monstrous set of roars and growls. In terms of audio, this is the scariest sounding bear in any movie by far. Canonically, it’s just known as “Bear” but the name I gave it is a fictional Latin one that translates to “Satan’s Bear” and if you take one look at him you can’t tell me I’m wrong! I put this in my Top Ten Scariest Disney Moments because as far as animation goes, I’ve never seen a bear as scary as this one—and this is supposed to be a children’s movie! The bear meets its fate at the bottom of a waterfall not long after it appears, but in those few precious minutes of screen time it successfully manages to be one of the most memorable parts of the film and one of the flat-out scariest bears in cinema history.
You might be a little surprised to see this bear a few spots from the top, as it was part of an Academy Award-winning movie, and even made an appearance at the 88th Academy Awards! Well, it was actually a person in a bear costume, and the actual bear in The Revenant was brought to life by ILM putting CGI over a man in a blue body suit who acted out the scene with Best Actor-winner Leonardo DiCaprio. The scene in question is what the movie is most famous for: DiCaprio’s character High Glass accidentally gets between a couple of cubs and their mother, and the momma bear savagely attacks him. This scene will make you cringe and hold your attention for its entirety. The CGI is extremely well done, even though you can still tell it’s not a real bear, but after seeing Cocaine Bear it’s clear we’re in a new era of filmmaking: they don’t need to use real wild animals in films anymore, they can make computer generated ones, and honestly, I’m okay with that. Animals belong in the wild, not in Hollywood, and as much as I’ll miss seeing real animals on screen, I won’t miss hearing about animal abuse and will be more content to know the actions of the animals on screen were not the results of exploiting an actual one.
3. The Cub - The Bear (1988)
I know I just said I don’t mind that real bears aren’t used in movies very much anymore, but two of the all-time best movie bears are as great as they are because they weren’t made with CGI or hand-drawn animation, they transcend being just animals and are actual characters, played by real bears. The Bear was made by French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud who cast one of the great bear actors (who we will talk about more shortly) as the large male Kodiak Bear, and in the role of the Bear Cub he cast Youk the Bear, who is one of the most well-trained young animals from any movie of this era, and that’s saying a lot, considering some of the other animal-centric films of the time (such as Cujo (1983), Milo & Otis (1986), and Homeward Bound (1993)) as well as the other great bears on this list. All her interactions with the other animals in the movie are wonderful, and it’s not a case of just one scene being a standout—the whole movie is about them, not human characters, and they carry every scene. To be what is essentially a child animal actor and yet still be so versatile and on point, all while acting next to one of the titans of animal actors? Youk definitely earns a spot in the top three.
Disney may have given us one of the scariest bears in all of cinema, but they also gave us one of the most endearing and philosophical. Technically the character originated in the works of Rudyard Kipling, but for Disney’s adaptation they wanted to soften the dark content of the stories, though Baloo’s role remained the same. He is a friend and mentor for the “man-cub” Mowgli, and is usually depicted as a member of the sloth bear species, making him fairly unique in that regard. In the original Disney version, Baloo is most famous for his song “The Bare Necessities” and being very laid back, but other versions of the character have appeared in a number of subsequent film adaptations. He was played by a black bear in the 1994 live-action version of The Jungle Book, was depicted using CGI for the 2016 version (voiced by Bill Murray), and even returned in animated form for The Jungle Book 2 in 2003 (voiced by John Goodman). A more book-accurate version appeared in Andy Serkis’ grittier non-Disney live-action/CGI hybrid Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018), and was voiced by Serkis himself, who also did the motion capture for the character. Baloo has proven to be a versatile character, and one of the long-time representatives of the great movie bears.
1. Kodiak - The Edge (1997)
I wrote a whole review for The Edge for my Favourite Films Series, which I will link below, so to minimize the risk of repeating myself, I’m going to keep it brief as to why the bear in The Edge is the greatest bear in the history of bear movies. First of all, the film he’s in is great, which helps immensely, and the way I see it, The Edge is to bear thrillers what the shark in Jaws is to shark thrillers: it’s the best there is for what it is. The Kodiak was played by Bart the Bear, who is the best bear actor to have ever worked in Hollywood. He was in Clan of the Cave Bear, he played the large male in The Bear, and here, he’s at his absolute best, chasing after Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin in truly terrifying fashion. Even though like the shark in Jaws he only gets a few minutes of screen time throughout the whole film, the impact he makes is huge, and this was one of his last roles. Whether your favourite role Bart played was in The Edge or The Bear or any of the other films he appeared in, one thing is clear: he is the greatest movie bear of all-time.
Did I leave out any of your favourites? I didn’t even get to talk about Brother Bear or Disney Nature’s Bears or Grizzly Falls or Kung Fu Panda or even Yogi Bear or Winnie the Pooh. I will be focusing more on Bart the Bear in a future post, so stay tuned for that, coming soon!
Reviews:
Backcountry: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2020/10/backcountry-2014-review.html
The Edge (Favourite Films): https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-edge-1997-review-favourite-films.html
Prophecy: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2014/10/prophecy-1979-review.html
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