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From now through June 15, Backpacker is celebrating everything bear as part of Bear Month 2025.
Animation is, sometimes, the best way to learn life’s hardest lessons. Everyone remembers the first time they saw Simba trying to nudge Mufasa awake after the stampede in The Lion King. Or the importance of feeling, really feeling, your emotions as shown in Inside Out. Now, the new animated short, Snow Bear, uses a polar bear in the melting Arctic to visualize both loneliness and ecological fragility in a way I have never experienced in film.
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Aaron Blaise wrote, animated, and directed Snow Bear, which is currently premiering and winning awards all around the world. His résumé’s impressive, with years of work for Disney landing him animation credits on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and much more. His latest solo venture, Snow Bear, earned endorsements from Polar Bears International and the National Parks Conservation Association.
We sat down with Blaise days before Snow Bear premieres at Tribeca Film Festival. Here’s a snippet of our conversation. Responses were edited for clarity.
Backpacker: Tell me about your background in the outdoors.
AB: I grew up most of my life in South Florida, in the Everglades. I’ve always, always, always loved nature. I’ve always been drawn to nature, no pun intended, and animals specifically. We lived in this single-wide trailer out in the swamp, and my dream was to see the world. I kept all of these National Geographic magazines under my bed, and I would read them at night.
I would also go out and track animals during the day. I was a creepy kid. I was fascinated by biology, how animals worked, and their anatomy. I was a big fan of John James Audubon, even as a little kid, so I never had the heart to kill anything. But if I found something dead on the side of the road and it wasn’t too smushed, I wasn’t above taking it home, drawing it, and studying the anatomy. Then I’d hide the body off in the bushes and let nature do its thing. [Later on,] I’d get the bones and study [them]. I could have either been a serial killer or an artist, so I became an artist.
Backpacker: A lot of the characters you animate are animals— young Nala in The Lion King, this polar bear, etc.—it’s hard to imagine what your career would have been like without that influence from your upbringing.
AB: For a long time [animation and drawing] was just a way to make money so I could go out and explore. Very early on in my career, I had the intention of becoming a nature artist. Disney was my stepping stone to make money, to go to Africa, which I did, and to get to Alaska, which I did several times over. It was something that was providing me with these adventures. It was during that time that I really fell in love with animated filmmaking as well. I still have my love of getting to Africa. But I’ve also really fallen in love with storytelling and creating these family-friendly films.
Backpacker: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that Baffin Island inspired the scenery in Snow Bear. Have you gotten a chance to visit?
AB: It’s on my list. I want to go so bad. I’m such an advocate of getting out, researching, and doing all the proper things before you make your film. In this case, I wasn’t able to get out and see polar bears in the wild. I’m doing it backward: In November, I’m going up to Churchill, Manitoba, with Polar Bears International, and we’re going to chase polar bears in the wild.
Backpacker: Snow Bear also has a more urgent call toward the melting Arctic. Are you going to continue this kind of activism in your future work?
AB: I’m getting up in age. I’ve got less time ahead of me than I do behind me, and I want things to matter. I want to make sure I’m doing things that I want to leave behind. I’ve had some big life events: I was married for 20 years, and 18 years ago, I lost my wife, Karen, to breast cancer. It threw me for a loop. I was heartbroken for a long time, and I lost my mojo for animation, for Disney, everything. I needed to find myself again, and I wanted to do something that would make her proud.
Backpacker: You can make ties between the lonely polar bears and how you were feeling emotionally. I’m curious if the process of writing, animating, directing everything in Snow Bear helped you process your own grief.
AB: Absolutely. Now, granted, it’s been 18 years, so I’ve had a lot of time to scar over; that’s the way I always put it, because it never goes away. It’s so therapeutic to be able to put that into a film, into a story. There were times I’d be crying as I’m animating. It’s extremely therapeutic to be able to do that.
Backpacker: What inspired you to use polar bears for this message?
AB: I always wanted to create my own film. The idea of this lonely polar bear living in the Arctic, looking for a friend, popped into my head. I’m very much an advocate for taking stories and bringing yourself to it. The more I thought about it, I started feeling a lot of parallels to my own story about what my wife and I went through as she was passing away. The pain and the loneliness—the melting snow bear [in the film] became a metaphor for it.
That’s how this whole story evolved. Initially, I never had an environmental intention behind it. It was literally just me trying to get across these emotions that I had.
It wasn’t until we started showing Snow Bear to other people that they said, “I really dig that environmental slant you have on it.” And I went, “Oh, wow. I guess that is there.”
Once I saw that, I really embraced it. I added melting permafrost in the background. Then we reached out to Polar Bears International. We showed the film to them, and they got really excited about it. That’s how our partnership came together, to see if we could do some conservation in that way.
Backpacker: Do you feel like a special kinship with polar bears?
AB: Now, absolutely. Even more so than when I finished the film.
Backpacker: What do you think you and polar bears have in common?
AB: The thing that really grabbed me was the isolation. There’s this character out in the world alone, doing its thing. After losing Karen, immediately after she was gone, [I felt] that extreme isolation. Polar bears obviously live that way every day, but when they come together or find a mate, it’s almost like a celebration. In the way they play, they become like cubs again. There’s something there that I find a kinship to.
Backpacker: Is there anything else the film’s viewers should know?
AB: I hope people get the environmental message that I’m trying to get across. I don’t think we’re telling anything to anybody that they don’t already know. We have a world that’s heating up. We have a world that needs help. If it helps remind people, and it spurs them to think, I can’t ask for much more than that. If they act on it, that’s wonderful.
But also, I think animated films are looked at as just kid fodder. When all my colleagues and I make animated films, whether it’s The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast or Snow Bear, we’re making these films for ourselves and to tell stories to everybody. This is much more than just a story about a melting snow bear. It’s got a lot more depth to it. If someone else is going through those same things [like loss or loneliness], I hope it helps them as well.
