Edward

While on vacation, eleven-year-old Jonathan and his younger sister Sophie get lost in the deep woods. While Jonathan is looking for Sophie, she discovers a mountainous bear and befriends him. Jonathan thinks the bear kidnapped her and "hires" a hunter to take him down, but he soon realizes the bear is a friend and must stop the hunter. There's the environmentalist message for you. This movie was made in 2011, but the graphic appear older. Movements are choppy and unrealistic. Not a lot of detail went into things, making them look rather smooth. The animators seemed too lazy to properly move the characters' mouths. The mouths only jump around. Then the they simply threw the script in, so none of what they say matches the movements. Occasionally, their mouths wouldn't move at all. For a children's movie, there's a decent bit of gore. Jonathan sticks his whole arm into the bear's tongue to remove a bullet, and adding to the gunky blood from the wound, Jonathan's arms a covered in blacking blood, as well as splattered across his face. There was a rather unsettling scene where Sophie falls from the bear's head. It looked like a good five story drop, and she lands flat on her back. For the brief second we see her, she's not moving. I thought she was dead from the terrible thud, but when the hunter angrily grabs her, she's perfectly fine, unharmed. Oddly enough, she seemed to pull a muscle when the hunter lifted her arm up. Yet she wasn't hurt from the fall. There was some unnecessary violence, I think, for a kids' movie. In a slightly disturbing scene, the hunter squeezes a small bird in his hands out of anger. Then he launches it at a tree. The poor thing was squashed and its eyes stayed open while his bird friends mourned over him. It might startle some viewers. On top of all this, Jonathan cursed in the beginning of the movie. It's dotted with small things, like "darn" and "idiot." But an eleven-year-old is not supposed to drop the S-word. A lot of obvious goofs: When Jonathan first meets the hunter, the hunter makes a bandage out of leaves and puts it on Jonathan's arm. In the very next shot, it's gone and never returns. The wound is also gone. The animators didn't take the time. For some reason, the bear, who is hundred of feet tall and long, is afraid of two small dogs. That makes no sense; a regular bear could attack the dogs. Unexplainably, frogs create rain. The hunter dies from collapsing rocks, and without music, it's quite sudden and, as I said before, probably unnecessary. The whole movie has a dark, eerie feel. The sky is always cloudy, the forest is always covered by a foggy--literally and figuratively--veil. Not something cheerful. Did not enjoy it and don't recommend it.