The greatest movie ever made..!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

. . . this animated short illustrated the downhill slide in store for the Union Label Middle Class True Blue Americans during the next half century as the Nazi Confederate Poor Losers they'd defeated twice percolated back to the surface from Hell in order to wage an End Times War against the Little People that can only culminate in an Apocalypse. Seldom have the rapacious decimation of Nature that Capitalism requires been depicted more succinctly than in the opening sequence of THE BEAR THAT WASN'T. The Gobbling Shovels of Greedhead "Progress" are enough to give any kid nightmares, as is the cloud of second-hand smoke unleashed upon the hapless bear when he wakes up from hibernation a scene later. Frank Tashlin's story personifies Virginia Burton's LITTLE HOUSE in the bear, before trotting Big Money's ursine victim through Joseph K.'s Hellish Ordeal of Franz Kafka's seminal novel, THE TRIAL. As with Trumplestiltskin in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, no one is willing to shout out that the Emporer of Greed has no clothes in which to hide his undersized, teeny tiny T-Rex hands! Just as the bear loses his last vestige of Freedom in the One Per Center Billionaire Fat Cat Sweat Shop, America teeters on the brink of becoming a "Right to Grovel" Non-Union Pit.

I just saw this last night on BOOMERANG. I could have turned it off, but it was like watching a train wreck. I had to research it and found that it was based on a children's book written in 1946; the author was said to be very unhappy with this animated version. The argument is always "But its for kids, not for adults, right!" Yes! There are so may quality animations for kids out there, why waste time on junk like this! It is everything that was wrong with the late 60's - 70's animation. Stuff like this almost killed the animation art form. In fact it was the last feature to be produced by the MGM animation group. P.S. - The lowest rank this form allows is "1 star", I wanted to give it "0".

While Chuck Jones remains best known for his Warner Bros. animated shorts, he also directed a couple of interesting pieces after he left WB. Probably best known are "The Dot and the Line" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", but another one is "The Bear That Wasn't", an eerily prophetic look at the industrial age. Based on a short story by Frank Tashlin (also a former WB director), it portrays a bear hibernating, only to wake up and discover that there's a now a factory surrounding his cave. While the cartoon maintains a lighthearted tone, it does get fairly serious - if inadvertently - when the bear tries to explain his predicament. Representatives of each successive echelon tell him that he's just a man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat.At the very least, we see the invasion of the natural world by industry; one might interpret this cartoon as a precursor to "The Lorax". But inside the factory itself, not only do they force the bear to perform labor similar to what Charlie Chaplin did in "Modern Times", but there's the hierarchy displayed when we see the president in his throne-like chair. Not to mention the fact that they do everything possible to berate the bear out of knowing that he's a bear.But even beyond all this, the cartoon brings to mind the fact that these factories have since shut down and moved production to the Third World. Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" is a prime example of what resulted from such a situation. In other words, first the factories destroy their natural settings, then they abandon the areas and let them rot. This is what we have become as a society.All in all, I certainly recommend this cartoon.

I had never seen this ten minute long Chuck Jones cartoon before. It's one of his very best. The colors are mindbending, as are the animation and drawings. I felt alternately robbed that I had never seen it before, and happy that I finally did get to see it! 9/10