Brother Bear (2003)

  Young Inuit tribesman Kenai (Joachim Phoenix) is super-excited to receive his totem animal for his manhood ceremony.  He's hoping for a saber-toothed tiger or something badass, but is instead presented with the Bear of Love.  Coincidentally, because of Kenai's haste and shoddy job of securing the tribe's supply of fish, a bear has made off with most of it.  Kenai and his two brothers Sitka (D. B. Sweeney) and Denahi (Jason Raize) track the bear up the glacier but find that a 900-lb grizzly is a bit more than they can handle.  Sitka shears off part of the ice to save his brothers, taking himself and the bear into the river below.  The bear makes it out.  Blinded by grief and rage, Kenai vows to track down and kill the bear, over Denahi's abjurations that it wasn't really the bear's fault since Kenai antagonized it.  Vengeance rarely has time for doubt, however, and Kenai chases the bear up the tallest mountain, killing it.  This angers the Spirits that live in the Aurora Borealis and they instantly transform Kenai into a bear himself.  Denahi now thinks the bear has killed two of his brothers and swears vengeance.  Kenai goes on the run, accompanied by a motormouth cub (Jeremy Suarez) who has become separated from his mother and hopes to see her at the annual salmon run.  Three guesses to how that turns out.

I don't think this is one of Disney's best works, since they had moved away from outright animated musicals to just letting Phil Collins do the whole soundtrack.  You could see that they were trying but the story didn't really come together as organically as some of their classics.  Everything just feels a little flat.  I will say, this is probably some of Joachim Phoenix's best work since Gladiator.