CHIFF Review: The Polar Bear Prince is a shaky fairy tale that's trying its darndest

You can feel the Disney classics that inspired it while watching The Polar Bear Prince. Here is a musical fairy tale with an evil queen, musical numbers, and a healthy dose of darkness. The bear looks like he was pulled straight out of Brother Bear. But this Norwegian fairy tale, which opened in its home country in 2024, but is still doing the festival rounds now (including this year's CHIFF), doesn't stack up to the works that paved the way for it. It ends up being a rickety but likable musical, one whose missteps I often foudn oddly endearing.

The film's storybook opening tells us about a princess, Eira, who lost her parents while still young. The people surrounding her tried to soothe her spirit with an endless parade of gifts, leading her to become demanding, greedy, and wicked. Soon, the darkness consumed her. The land became barren, her subjects scared. And then along came a charming prince, Valemon, who was everything Eira was not: kind, curious, gentle. Eira, used to getting everything she wanted, decided to marry him, which he promptly refused. Thus, Eira cast a curse on him, turning kind Valemon into a polar bear.

That's the form he's in when our protagonist, Liv, crosses paths with Valemon in the forest near her town. Liv is a thinly drawn heroine with vague hopes and dreams: she wants to see more of the world, to go on an adventure, etc. After she literally destroys her small town's food supply, she decides it's time to seize the day, and sets off on her quest alongside the polar bear (whom she creatively names White Bear).

As you might already be able to tell, the story here is incredibly shaky. At almost every turn, I found myself wondering why the characters were doing what they were doing, why they were going where they're going. Liv's desires are so bland and bare that I kept wondering what she actually wanted. She sings a song about wanting to know more about the world, but then ends up settling down in a cave so she can learn how to read. Is that it? That's enough to satisfy her wanderlust? All while knowing she left her friends and family in starvation mode back home?

The curse situation similarly crumbles when you look at it too closely. Why Eira decided to make Valemon into a polar bear (he becomes human at night) isn't clear, nor are the stipulations she put on it. If he makes eye contact as a human with another human, he becomes a bear forever, and seemingly also goes under mind control? Like, girl, if you can mind control this man, why not just do that and make him marry you? Why all the theatrics?

So yeah, on character and story levels, The Polar Bear Prince is shaky at best. But, like I said, I kind of liked it for how much it stumbles and falls. There's something charming about watching a movie so confidently try to ape better movies. Like, I would rather watch a movie like this take a swing and end up (mostly) missing than some generic sequel to a soulless franchise. This at least has personality.

Sadly, the songs are not as easily forgiven. Maybe they fare better in the original Norwegian (or at least sound better), but in the English dub, the songs are rough. They don't add anything to the plot or reveal any hidden depths of the character. They're usually just underlining feelings and ideas that have already been clearly presented in other ways. And they feel perfunctorily plopped in rather than stemming organically from the action. I love nothing more than a musical, but in this case, I probably would've cut all the musical numbers and made this a tight 75-minute affair.

So while I can't give The Polar Bear Prince a hardy seal of approval, I'll at least say that I had a pretty decent time watching it. If it's ultimately a pale imitation of a kind of movie I love, at least it's carrying on that tradition at all. That's worth something in my book.