Little Polar Bear: The Dream of Flying [DVD] [2006] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

This whole Polar Bear series is meant for youth, but this installment pummeled that message in that this is for the very young. I doubt most people 10 years old or above would be entertained. Like the Care Bears, it is incredibly cutesy-ootsy. Like always, there are really three episodes in each movie.

This series has a little bit of Curious George in that young animals get in trouble messing with things whose meaning they don't know. In the last episode, I was reminded of "Home Alone" in that the animals trick adult humans in the same way that McCauley Culkin did more than a decade ago. Again, the youngsters drift far away from home in ways that would scare real adults if their children did the same thing.

The "Little Tiger" DVD had both foreign language tracks and subtitles. This only gave foreign language choices. The series is designed for children who either don't read or are just learning how to read. Still, I would have enjoyed the added feature. In "Fly" and "Little Tiger," all human writing is in Russian, a sign that the animals are near the North Pole. That's shocking in that come rain or shine American cartoons almost always have writing in English, no matter where on the globe the action takes place. This is a German cartoon, but the Germans didn't have their own language printed here.

In the first "Little Polar Bear," the dynamics between the polar bear and the seal were clearly a metaphor for white and Black people. In this DVD, the message is geared toward white and Brown. The polar bear says to a brown bear, "All bears are white and live in the cold." The brown bear says back, "All bears are brown and live in a warmer environment." You could just imagine an American white boy and a Mexican little girl saying that to each other. Later an adult bear says, "A bear is a bear, no matter what their color," clearly signifying the multiculturalism promoted here. As a European production, perhaps they were talking about dynamics between French Gaulois and Beurs as opposed to white Americans and Latinos.

In this film, the polar bear was raised by both parents and the brown bear was raised by her father. This contradicts true nature where father bears have nothing to do with their offspring. Usually in US media, whatever boy is on screen will eventually fall in love with the nearest girl. However, in this work the female brown bear and the female polar bear Greta never fight for Lars' attention. Perhaps romance is left out of the picture given the target audience for the work.

"The Princess and the Frog" showed some horse dung, but I would say you almost never see that in cartoons for children. At one point, Lars wipes some white matter off his face that dropped from the sky in which seagulls flew overhead. Yes, it was funny, but I wonder if parents will find it in poor taste.