Somewhere in the Arctic... (1986)

Sorry, this movie sucks

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

"Somewhere in the Arctic" is an animated short film from 1988, so this one has its 30th anniversary next year already and it is a very early career effort by Andrew Stanton, one of Pixar's most famous and a 2-time Oscar winner now. He was in his early 20s when he made this one. And if you take a look at the voice actors here, you will find the names of animators mostly who managed their own careers in the decades to come, even won an Oscar too. This one runs for under 4 minutes and is pretty simplistic. The way how the polar bear is totally not scared of the hunters reminds one of Bugs Bunny and his chasers in the old Warner Bros cartoons. The way he tricks them with the help of music and books too. And finally there is a pretty solid inclusion of breaking the 4th Wall, not once, but twice even. No spoken language in here (except "My Girl"), so you can enjoy this one wherever you are from and what languages you speak without subtitles. Obviously you should not expect any greatness in here, but this was a solid depiction of Stanton's potential already. I recommend checking it out.

"Somewhere in the Arctic", along with "A story" is one of the first animations done by Andrew Stanton, the director of the successful Pixar films "Finding Nemo" and "WALL•E".In my opinion, this was a fairly enjoyable minimalistic short, which echoes some of the elements present in several slapstick cartoons from the Golden Age of Animation. Even when the result isn't at the same level of Stanton's masterpieces, "Somewhere in the Arctic", is still pretty satisfying, having a neat animation style and being very funny to watch. It also has a very nice song: "My Girl", by The Temptations.8.5/10

I saw this cute little animated short as part of the animation feature film "Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation", at an art theater in Columbus, Ohio in the late 1980s. (There may be a video version of the Spike and Mike film (not part of the Sick and Twisted series), but I don't know if this short is included or not.) The plot, as I recall, is pretty basic: a group of Eskimos are chasing a polar bear, presumably to kill it. The polar bear stops suddenly, causing the hunters to give up the hunt--why? I won't give it away, but I will hint that the reason occurs every day in every public library in the world! By the way, director Andrew Stanton went on to earn much-deserved fame with his animated films for Pixar.