User Reviews

This short film is really amazing. Both technically and emotionally. If you have the chance, watch it.

The animation is gorgeous and the attention to detail is outstanding.

As a chilean born and raised in Chile under Pinochet, the story touched me specially, it reminded me of my childhood and specifically my father.

Even if you don't know the background story of this country, you will be able to identify some common elements that the main character have to struggle in order to achieve the story's climax.

I'm gladly impressed of the talent and knowledge in technology that this group of chilean filmmakers have. Well deserved awards and Oscar nomination!

I was able to see this film thanks to a local showing of The Manhattan Short Film Festival. The sole fully animated feature of the 10 entries (matched with a stop-motion piece), this is a masterfully told story.

In a multi-layered presentation, an anamorphic bear tells the tale of his kidnap from his wife and child, to a circus where he is forced to perform ever more elaborate tricks. He eventually devises a method of escape, returning to his beloved city to tell his tale through a mechanical panorama box.

Though the themes are dense, it is a deftly mature tale that I believe would still manage to delight a child. And yet, this film manages to capture the eclipsing of love through wordless story that reaches emotional height I've only felt previously in the introduction of Pixar's Up. Seek this film out.

The first thing to do is get all thoughts of Pixar, Aardman et al out of one's head. The narrative of this film does not follow conventional Hollywood lines, even though a superficial understanding of the plot can be attained in this way.

The story is of a male bear who makes a living with a portable peep show illustrating the adventures of a male adult bear, who is dragged away from his family and off to the circus, escapes, and is reunited with his family. The male bear in the peep show is clearly a representation of the male bear running the peep show. But does the peep show represent his own life? At the start of the film, we see him doing minor repairs on the peep show before setting off to work. The house is otherwise empty and it is very early in the morning - far too early for his wife and son to have left the house before him.

So what is going on? Is the bear relating a complete work of fiction in the peep show? Is he giving a distorted view of what happened (i.e. it was his wife and son who were taken away and he was left behind)? Did he really escape but his family had left the house when he returned? Was in fact all of it true and there were other reasons why the mother and son were out of the house before him that morning?

The film allows all these interpretations. For those who think there cannot be a happy ending, look carefully at the film. The marital bed has clearly been slept in by two bears. The kitchen chairs are pushed back as if the son and the mother had left them like that (if they had gone, the chairs would be pushed neatly under the table). The son's room is tidy, but maybe the son is a tidy young bear). Perhaps the bear's melancholy expression is triggered by memories of what he almost permanently lost, rather than of current loss.

The point is that the film is *meant* to hold these multiple explanations. There is enough evidence to support lots of different arguments, but not enough evidence for one explanation to be conclusive. And that is the whole point of the film. It is meant to be unsettling. The film is a clear allegory of life in Chile under Pinochet, where opponents were routinely executed or exiled. Families were left uncertain what happened to loved ones, and, tragically, many still are in that awful position of uncertainty. But for some there were happy endings - many people who were exiled did return after Pinochet's fall, and were reunited with their families.

It is this sense of melancholy and uncertainty and the multitude of outcomes that the film brilliantly evokes.It is small wonder that this film has also been warmly greeted in countries with similar experience of repressive regimes.

What I found particularly poignant was the young bear who saw the peepshow, and for whom the whole thing was clearly just an adventure story. Perhaps that is as it should be - burdening future generations with too much worry and regret is unwise. But there is an added pathos that what is an adventure for the cub is clearly a huge emotional burden to the older bear.

I think this is one of the finest allegories ever to be filmed.

This short was the winner of best animated short in 2015, beating out very strong competition from things such as World of Tomorrow (my personal favorite of the ones I have seen). Bear Story is certainly a worthy winner though because it is made up of tremendous animation within a clever narrative frame, and delivers an emotional punch as it ends.

The story sees an old bear working on some mechanical device. Later we see him on the street where it turns out he was building a mechanical diorama which he then plays for kids. The diorama plays out the story of a bear captured into a life of performing in a circus, and separated from his wife and son. From a technical point of view I loved this idea of an animation within an animation; it allows a change of style while also justifying the diorama style within a clever narrative. And of course the narrative itself is great. It not only captures us up into caring about the bear via his mechanical version, but it makes us focus on this telling of the story, providing us with a happy ending. When returned to the real life we get some smiles which continue this feeling, however since it puts us back in the real world, it allows us to remember the empty rooms and the fact he was alone – thus that his story is not totally true, but rather what he wishes for – a very impacting way to close it out but done in a very restrained way.

A really well designed and executed film; a deserving Oscar winner, and well worth seeing.

"Historia de un oso" or "Bear Story" is an 11-minute animated short film from 2014 that managed to score an Academy Award nomination for director Gabrial Osori this year. The frame of the film is basically the present while the past is everything in-between. A grown-up male bear tells us the story of his life, how he found love, was taken to a circus away from his family, but fought his way back. It's a bit generic and all too predictable, but there is some solid emotion in here. It may have worked even better with a different style of animation. I found this one a bit too mechanical and robotic, even if that's probably the intention of the film. But that is just personal perception. The emotion is also the only area where this film really delivers. Comedy and drama could have needed a bit more tuning in my opinion. As a whole, it was a good watch, even if I, unlike the Academy, would not list this Chilean short movie among my favorite choices of the year.

I am more than glad to see that more animation is being is produced in Latin America during the last years, and while it is true that some of those animation are not exactly of a stellar quality, at least we have the chance to see small, marvelous gems like this one.

Without any single spoken word, "Bear Story" manages to be a moving tale about separation and loss, but also has a hopeful background, all told with a quite charming animation style that makes it a captivating experience from beginning to end, serving as an effective allegory to express the way families were torn apart during a murderous regime, a lesson that certainly should be always remembered, especially during times like this, in which the current generation seems more than willing to forget the past and tend to romanticize many questionable figures.

8/10

I loved this short film, it was my favorite in the compilation of Oscar nominated shorts. It is a sweet story, but it also touches on the brutality of man's exploitation of animals for entertainment. I believe the bear who builds the diorama is the son in the story, not the father as another reviewer has claimed. The son tells of his father's kidnapping from his family by circus henchmen. The reason I believe it is the son and not the father is the fact that the family is reunited at the end of the diorama, so there would be no reason the father would be all alone, building it and then showing it. The animation is amazing. I have never seen anything like it. The diorama sequences really look like antique tin toys. If the committee votes on the quality of the animation, this is the clear winner. If based on content, World of Tomorrow has the edge, possibly Sanjay's Super Team as well. Overall, this is a great little film and it deserves all of the awards/accolades it has received to date.