Among Other Things, the Bear Was Toilet Trained

On Saturday temps were actually like October, so we took the opportunity to visit the Spring Valley Nature Preserve, jewel of the Schaumburg Park District. As described in the park district web site: “[It] is a refuge of 135 acres of fields, forests, marshes and streams. Spring Valley also features over three miles of handicapped-accessible hiking trails and a museum with natural history displays and information.”

We’ve visited it in every season, and around here October is the season of tall brown grass, falling leaves, birds in V formation. Different from the Octobers of my youth, which had some falling leaves but mostly meant that the heat’s been turned down. We had a find time larking around the trails, and when we got to the farm museum part of the 135 acres, we visited muddy pigs, horses in their barn, and chickens roaming around.

You can pretend, a little, that the preserve actually preserves something, a rendering of the prairie as it might have been 200 years ago (minus big game and Indians) or, in the case of the farm, the land as it was in about 1880. The main problem with the simulation is, unfortunately, the noise from nearby Schaumburg Road, and the airplanes that fly over regularly to and from O’Hare.

On Sunday, we saw another kind of simulation, an animated feature film: Open Season, a Columbia feature-length computer animation. I took Lilly and Ann, and for me it ended up being parental duty, since the movie was fit for kids but not those of us who’ve sat through the formula a few too many times.

The formula: an anthropomorphic animal (in this case, a bear), unsure of himself, acquires an anthropomorphic buddy animal he doesn’t like at first (in this case, an elk), but in the face of adversity (in this case, hunters) finds his inner strength and vanquishes his foes, with the help of other anthropomorphic animals (in this case, in a pitched battle with the hunters in which no one, human or animal, dies). True friendship between the mismatched pair is established, and all is well.

I wouldn’t mind the formula so much if it were leavened with even a few pinches of wit. But no. I can think of only one scene in the movie that was remotely funny for me, namely the one featuring addle-brained, bug-eyed ducks with French accents. If I were a hunter, I think I would also take issue with the depiction of hunters in the movie as psychopathic morons, too. Actually, enough though I’m not a hunter, I object to the characterization as the creation of urbanites who are nevertheless provincial in outlook. All too possible, I suppose, in the LA movie business.