When Harald Siepermann worked on Walt Disney’s Brother Bear, the story was quite different. While the final movie revolved around the three brothers Sitka, Denahi, and Kenai, an earlier version of the story focused on the brothers Sitka and Kenai, and their father Chilkoot. And it was Chilkoot who gets killed due to Kenai’s negligence. “In the early version of the script, Kenai’s father, Chilkoot, would be the one who got killed instead of his brother, by Kenai’s fault of course,” commented Harald Siepermann. “But they finally realized that that was too close to The Lion King, so eventually Chilkoot had to go and was replaced by Denahi.” Although the story changed frequently during Harald’s involvement on Brother Bear, this drastic change only came after Harald wrapped up his work on the project, and therefore never made designs for the character Denahi.
However, Harald did do quite some exploration for Chilkoot, the father of the boys. Below is a selection of Harald Siepermann’s first series of designs:
