I watched Disney's Brother Bear with my son David last week and he kept asking me, when a bear reared up, snarling and waving its paws, or a hunter with a spear came around a corner, scowling, face half in shadow, "Is that the bad guy?" I found myself answering (a lot more quickly the second time we watched the movie), "no sweetie, there are no bad guys in this story." Interesting - so much so I couldn't get it out of my head until I wrestled through it a bit.

Brother Bear is a story about a young prehistoric Inuit, Kenai, who comes to the age where he is assigned his totem by the medicine woman of the tribe. He's aghast that she's picked for him "the bear of love." The boy has two older brothers, and he soon gets the eldest, Sitka, killed when, after making a stupid mistake and driven by shame, anger, and pride, he picks a fight with a bear. He slays the bear for revenge, at which point the elder brother's spirit comes down from the aurora borealis (where all the spirits live) and turns the young man into a bear. The middle brother, Denahi, coming upon the scene a moment later, sees Kenai's discarded clothes and the bear, assumes the worst, and sets himself on a path of vengeance.

I enjoyed watching this movie almost as much as David did: it was beautifully illustrated, the story was compelling and the humor was sharp and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. (The low point was the bland, formulaic soundtrack — sorry Phil Collins.)

While watching it, though, I couldn't help mulling over the philosophical/religious worldview it might be describing. A world without villains, a world in which all spirits, animals and humans (no ruling on plants so far as I could tell) joined the great stream of light as equals following death, seems to be a pantheistic one. Which makes sense for a prehistoric hunter/gatherer tribe. In a pantheist worldview, god is everything and everything is god, so the difference between good and evil may becomes moot, or else there is no such thing as evil at all.