Aaron Blaise gives drawn animals believable movement and feeling. We respect his care, though Brother Bear shows how easily a director's wish to teach understanding can get in the way of an interesting story.
Fi1m perspective
In Brother Bear (2003), humans can look monstrous when a bear does the looking. That reversal gives Aaron Blaise and co-director Robert Walker a promising way to make a familiar plea for understanding feel uncomfortable. We were touched by Joaquin Phoenix's warmth and the expressive drawing, even when the lesson had become obvious. The frustration is how often the film reassures us that understanding others is good, rather than making that change of mind difficult.
His earlier work helps explain where that feeling comes from. As supervising animator on Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994), Blaise worked on Rajah and young Nala respectively. His approach starts with animal anatomy and observed behaviour, and places particular weight on what a character is thinking or feeling. Those are useful instincts for a director: an audience needs to believe in the creature before being asked to care about it. Brother Bear was his feature directorial debut.
The film's expressive hand-drawn animation is its strongest reason to stay, but the familiar story keeps it from becoming absorbing. Blaise and Walker have an idea that could accommodate humour, unease and a proper reconsideration of human behaviour. Too often they settle for restating the virtue of sympathy, while the over-insistent songs leave too little room for the pictures to work. We can admire the care in the drawing without recommending the whole film on the strength of it.
With Snow Bear (2025), Blaise returned to directing in a smaller form: an eleven-minute, wordless, hand-drawn short about loneliness and connection. He wrote, directed and animated it himself, making around 11,000 drawings over three years. That move makes sense for an artist so interested in the feeling carried by an animal's movement. A wordless short puts more responsibility on the drawing and removes the option of spelling out every lesson in dialogue. That is the direction we would like to see him pursue, provided the animals are allowed to do more than illustrate good advice.
Biography
Aaron Blaise is an American animator, film director, painter and art instructor. Born on 17 February 1968 in Burlington, Vermont, he graduated from Ringling College of Art and Design in 1989.
He worked as an animator and supervising animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios on films including Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995) and Mulan (1998). From 1997 he served as a director for twelve years, co-directing Brother Bear (2003) with Robert Walker; the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature.
After leaving Disney he founded the online art school Creature Art Teacher and has directed short films including Snow Bear (2025).
