Yogi Bear (2010)

Yogi Bear arrives in 2010 as a live-action and computer-animated hybrid, directed by Eric Brevig, in which Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake provide the voices of two brown bears who steal picnic baskets in Jellystone Park. Anna Faris plays Rachel Johnson, a nature documentary filmmaker who wanders into the proceedings and is promptly assigned the role of love interest to Ranger Smith. The plot concerns a corrupt mayor who intends to close the park and sell the land to loggers, a scheme foiled by a rare turtle and a hidden camera. It is a children's film of the old school, and it was reviewed accordingly, with a thirteen percent approval rating and a modest but respectable worldwide gross.

The film's moral universe is simple and its messaging is light. A park should not be destroyed for profit, and a greedy politician will be exposed. That is the whole of it. The conservation theme never stretches toward climate anxiety or corporate critique; the mayor is a small-town schemer, not a symbol of capital. Rachel exists to be admired and to install the camera that saves the day, which is a narrative function, not a statement. The cast is uniformly white, no character registers a sexual identity, and the film finds no occasion to comment on bodies, minds, or history. The bears steal baskets. The ranger scolds them. The credits roll.

There is something almost restful about a film so thoroughly untouched by the cultural conversations of its own moment. It wants only to place a talking bear on water skis and let him set his cape on fire. The result is not offensive, nor is it instructive. It is a product, assembled from familiar parts, and it makes no argument beyond the value of a picnic basket and a friend to steal it with. We classify it, we file it, and we move on to the next screening.