Aaron Blaise has made his short film Snow Bear available on YouTube. Blaise is a former Disney animator who worked on The Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas. The project took him three years to complete and consists of about 11,000 hand-drawn frames.
The film follows a young polar bear travelling through an empty, hostile environment in search of companionship. Blaise drew every frame himself, created the backgrounds in Photoshop, and animated the work in TVPaint. The short has collected nearly 40 awards at international festivals.
Viewers have responded strongly to the film’s traditional 2D style. Many comments focus on the visible hand-drawn craft and contrast it with fast, automated AI tools. For some, that contrast links directly to the film’s themes. Several viewers point to AI’s heavy resource use and note that the story plays like an elegy for both a threatened species and an older era of animation. One comment reads: “I started sobbing because this is genuinely what AI is trying to take from us: heartfelt real hand-drawn animation, and the environment and habitats that these animals live in.”
Others mention the precision of Blaise’s drawing. A repeated observation concerns the subtle sexual dimorphism between the male and female bears, handled without exaggerated or cartoonish features.
Blaise has also launched a Kickstarter campaign for a Snow Bear card game based on the film’s characters and setting.