Brother Bear - Kenai

Here are some early sketches for Kenai's face. I wanted to come up with something different from Pocahontas and stay away from Mulan as well, so I was looking at a lot of faces from the South-Sea for reference , even Korea and the Phillipines, Eskimo as well.
I wanted Kenai to be in the middle of his puberty , so I tried to give him a girlish attitude as well, long thin limps for example a alltogether puppyish feel.



This is almost the final design of his haircut, but it took me a long time to come up with it and keep it simple. I wated a lot of time and pencilmilage to come up with something fancy .





This is one of many costumestudies. I was looking for a way to anticipate the transformation into a bear in his costume, so I was going for a way of dressing, where he would just throw over some furs in the morning, that would also correspond with his impatient and impulsive character. I also liked the warpaint in this particular sketch. This sheet got into ther internet somehow and the buzz was, that Kenai was going to look a lot like Mowgli, but actually this was just one drawing of maybe a hundred.



In the early version of the skript , Kenais father, Chilkoot, would be the one who got killed instead of his brother,by Kenais fault of course, butthey finally realised that that was too close to Lionking , so eventually Chilkoot had to go and was replaced by Denaii.