Notable as the final animated short produced and released by MGM, this 1967 film is adapted from Frank Tashlin’s 1947 children’s book about a bear who awakens from hibernation to find a construction site was erected around his cave while he was sleeping. A construction foreman accosts the bear and demands to know why he’s not working, but when the bear identifies himself the foreman insists he is only “a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat.” The bear insists he is not an employee, so he taken by the foreman up the corporate chain of command – to the general manager, the third vice president, the second vice president, the first vice president and the president – who all inform the astonished ursine interloper that he is “a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat.” The bear is then taken to a zoo where the occupants in a cage of bears affirms the executives’ insistence that the bear is not a bear.
While Tashlin’s book makes for an effective parody on gaslighting and peer pressure, the animated adaptation quickly becomes tiresome as the repeated denial of the bear’s identity results in a single joke played to death. The film’s dull visual style – a mix of limited animation with some clumsy psychedelic touches – is exacerbated by a thudding narration of Paul Frees that adds to the one-note nature of the work.
Chuck Jones produced and co-directed (with Maurice Noble) the short and he generously gave Tashlin producer’s co-credit with the hope that he could win the Oscar if the short received an Academy Award nomination – it didn’t.
Tashlin hated the film, complaining, “Up front in the beginning of this thing, when they are telling him he is a man and he is insisting he’s a bear, they put a cigarette in his mouth. Now, the picture was destroyed there, because by the acceptance of a cigarette – you never saw where he got it – by putting a cigarette in his mouth, he was already a man. You know what I mean? Psychologically, the picture was ruined. It stopped working from that point on. So that was a terrible experience.”