Catherine Keener narrates and performs as the lead ursine presence in “Polar Bear,” the latest Disneynature documentary to be released on Disney+, just in time for Earth Day. Directed by Alastair Fothergill and Jeff Wilson, the film chronicles a female polar bear’s journey from a cub who travels by the side of her mother and brother to a mother of her own, navigating the shrinking ice flows and the seal population on which the bears depend. are for their survival.
Flashback stories aside, “Polar Bear” is as simple as these family-oriented animal documentaries come, with Keener being a one-woman personification of the polar bears’ lives. In one scene, as the main character struggles with her brother while their mother hunts a seal, Keener jokes, “I wanted to help her, but I was busy.” In another, when the starving family is forced to eat seaweed during the lean summer months, Keener expresses her distaste for the sea algae as a child forced to eat spinach at the dinner table.
This can get tricky: in the beginning, the film establishes male polar bears as an imminent threat to the central family, then quickly returns when it’s time for our protagonist to find a mate. But to its credit, “Polar Bear” doesn’t just play in the snow; there’s a very deliberate ongoing line of conservation, highlighting how climate change has negatively impacted the Arctic’s ecosystem, and the film ends with an afterword encouraging donations to Polar Bears International.
Polar bear
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Check out Disney+.