Part of: 2025 Nellie Wong Magic of Movies Essay Contest
Looking at Snow Bears
If I had to pick one short film I saw to talk about it would be Snow Bears by Aaron Blaise. I like this movie because the bear was lonely but tried to find ways to have fun and be happy. I don’t live in the arctic but it reminded me of my first day at Madera because, just like the bear, I was in this big place and I had no friends. All I wanted was someone to have fun with and that’s when I met Maxwell. He was my first buddy at school and everything just got better and better from there. When you see the bear in the movie it looks big and tough because it’s a large polar bear but when they zoom out he seems so small in the place where he is living all alone. Its like being in a big new school.
I liked that this was a movie and not a book because I could see exactly what the creator wanted me to see and what he was thinking the bear should look like. When I read a book I can imagine how something looks but I can’t see exactly how the picture should be. Watching this made me wonder if the maker had something sad happen to him. Maybe he was lonely sometime and making this movie helped him not be lonely anymore. The person who made this movie probably had to get a whole team of other people to help him and maybe he made all new friends. I think the movie was trying to say that you should just stay happy and keep trying and things will get better. At the end of the movie the bear has a whole new family so he isn’t lonely anymore.
It’s super cool that the person who made this movie did all of it by hand. It made me think ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. When I grow up I want to be a video game creator because you can make whole worlds just like the one in this movie. I create things in my Minecraft world and in Zelda Tears of the Kingdom all the time. I even made a snow biome with a whole terrain of ice and snow just like in the movie. Me and my friend Jack are going to create a video game world where Link and Zelda, from Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, have a son and Link gets covered in gloom and their son would be half lite and half-darkness. It’s cool when I can work with other people to create ideas for games. I also like to use Legos and build monsters and weapons in my room when I feel lonely because when I do I feel in charge. Being creative is fun.
I like this movie because I felt lonely like the bear when I started school at Madera. I wanted the bear to have a happy ending and I also have a lot of friends now. It’s kind of cool to be able to make people watching your movie feel a certain way. I want to do that with my video games.