How Cocaine Bear was surprisingly inspired by Disney's The Jungle Book

If you have headed out to the cinema in the past few days, you may have checked out Cocaine Bear - a film based on the true story of a bear that ate 70lbs of cocaine.

Sounds like it couldn't get further away from a PG film, right?

But you'll be surprised to know that Cocaine Bear was actually inspired by Disney's The Jungle Book.

Cocaine Bear is a film directed by Elizabeth Banks, with the likes of Ray Liotta, Keri Russell, O'Shea Jackson Jr, and Alden Ehrenreich as part of its cast.

And of course, its leading star is the eponymous Cocaine Bear.

Or Cokey, as she was nicknamed on set.

Rather than using a real bear, she was instead created using a mix of CGI and motion capture, with motion capture performer Allan Henry tasked with creating the bear's movement.

And in a new interview with Slash Film, Henry spoke about the task of bringing Cokey to life - which led him to look into a particular source for inspiration.

Disney / Allstar Picture Library Limited. / Alamy Stock Photo

He said: "The challenge was trying to move as close as I could to how a bear would move, the pace that a bear would take, the way that a bear would breathe and explore the environment around them.

"Yeah, I looked at bears that have been in media, like the bear from The Revenant. I worked on 'The Jungle Book' — at Weta, we did some stuff, so I looked at what we had done with Baloo for those sequences.

"But a lot of it was nature documentaries and CCTV footage and camera footage of people who were like, ‘There’s a bear in my backyard tearing up my car'."

While The Jungle Book is a rather magical story, Cocaine Bear is anything but that.

Universal Pictures

Since its recent release, Cocaine Bear has beat all expectations, earning an impressive $23 million from box office in its opening weekend in the US.

However, many were surprised to learn that there is actually a true story behind the film.

The actual bear that digested the cocaine was unfortunately found dead, with a number of empty packets scattered around the animal.

It was soon realised that it had ingested one of the ten duffel bags containing the contraband.

The medical examiner who looked inside the bear found that it had nearly everything under the sun wrong with it.

"Cerebral haemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it," they said.

Later on, the bear, which is also named 'Pablo Eskobear' was stuffed and can be seen at the Kentucky For Kentucky store in Lexington.