‘Cocaine Bear’ roars into 2024 Oscar race for Best Visual Effects: ‘She outmatches The Revenant bear every time’
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While “Avatar: The Way of Water” solidifies itself as the Best Visual Effects frontrunner at this year’s Academy Awards, we can at least pretend until “Dune: Part Two” opens in roughly 10 months that the 2024 race is still any film’s to lose. If the VFX branch’s past admiration for photorealistic animals is any sign, Elizabeth Banks’ “Cocaine Bear” stands a good chance of taking part in next year’s conversation. Universal just released the horror comedy to a $22 million opening weekend and generally positive reviews.
Garnering particular praise is the CGI/mo-cap wonder Banks and her crew came to endearingly call “Cokey the Bear.” Christy Lemire (RogerEbert.com) writes that a great deal of the film’s draw is “the look of the creature itself, which is surprisingly high-tech for a cheesy, silly movie.” Dan Bayer (AwardsWatch) similarly highlights the movie’s visual veracity, saying, “It’s clear that most of the film’s budget went to making the bear feel as real as possible, and she has a wonderfully tactile feel.”
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Developed by Peter Jackson’s New Zealand-based Wētā FX—the same visual effects firm that worked on the “Lord of the Rings” films, Jon Favreau’s “The Jungle Book,” both “Avatars,” and Matt Reeves’ “Apes” trilogy—Cokey is a combination of digital engineering and physical acting, but not, as IndieWire’s Sarah Sahchat notes during her interview with “Cocaine Bear’s” invisible lead, Allan Henry, in the traditional sense. Henry, trained by motion-capture acting veteran Andy Serkis, “did not have tracking markers all over his face for animators to turn into digital muscle movements, but he provided a crucial reference point to create Cokey’s eyeline, physicality, and emotional state,” helping the the actors emote opposite the bear and the VFX team place her within the frame.
Without that level of technical precision, the horror comedy’s physical gags wouldn’t work nearly as well. As Henry himself explains, “The artists at Wētā just took the reference that I had and enhanced it and augmented what I was doing. They could see where to put the bear. But my second role was for the performers so that they had, you know, natural and organic timing and reactions and the influence and impetus from something being beside them.” The grueling work required the 210-pound stuntman to move as a quadruped while wearing a prosthetic head and meter-long extensions for his arms and legs.
Banks’ insistence that the film be shot outdoors—County Wicklow, Ireland stands in for Chattahoochee, Georgia—rather than in front of a green screen pays off beautifully, allowing natural lighting and color to complement the VFX work. “My biggest concern was that the bear be photorealistic…it had to feel like a Nat Geo documentary about a bear that did cocaine,” the director told Variety. At the same time, Banks admits that the crew tried to stretch the truth as much as possible in order to capitalize on the picture’s sensational premise. “Everything was based in reality, but then we always reminded ourselves, ‘But it’s also on cocaine’…can the bear run a little faster…jump a little higher than a bear typically would? And the answer to that, we decided, was, ‘Yeah, why not?’”
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The VFX and animation teams, supervised by Robin Hollander and Carmelo Leggiero, respectively, conducted extensive behavioral studies in order to augment the bear’s movement and stature without requiring too much of the audience in the way of suspending disbelief. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, producer Chris Miller said, “They studied actual crazy things that bears do, bear movements and stuff, and then we goosed it a little bit.”
The Oscars VFX branch is one of its least genre-biased–past winners and nominees include “Free Guy,” “Tenet,” “Transformers,” and “The Lone Ranger”–and would have no qualms honoring a horror comedy. Cokey is another technical achievement for Wētā, which has Middle Earth, Pandora, and a thick section of the MCU catalog to its credit. In “Cocaine Bear,” their alchemy inspires awe not only for the bear’s design, but also a stunning climactic sequence on a waterfall ledge that, for obvious reasons, couldn’t be achieved practically. As for the cinematic showdown that’s on everybody’s mind, Banks is betting on her film’s drugged-up, eponymous apex predator, commenting, “[She] outmatches ‘The Revenant’ bear every time.” The question is whether Cokie can, as Leonardo DiCaprio’s wrestling partner did, also snag an Oscar nomination.
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