It’s hard to forget the wonderful 1966 movie, “Born Free,” which delighted audiences around the world. This weekend, another film is poised to take its place.

Based on an original script by French director Jean-Jacques Annaud (“The Name of the Rose,” “Enemy at the Gates”), Universal Studio’s “Two Brothers” is set in Indonesia during the early part of the century. It recounts the story of two tiger cubs who are captured and separated, then forced to fight one another in the ring as adults.

Guy Pearce (“Memento,” “The Count of Monte Cristo”) plays Aidan McRory, a hunter and author who regularly loots the jungle of its precious artifacts, and who unwittingly sets into motion the events that will pit the animals against one another.

“I feel very empathetic toward animals,” Pearce said, explaining why he had taken the role. “So much of the time, I think they’re confused and lost and trying to survive and just trying to find love – all the things that we’re doing.”

With its anthropomorphic projections, “Two Brothers” harks back to Annaud’s 1989 film, “The Bear,” in more ways than one, particularly the manner in which it makes protagonists of the tigers, walking them through a conventional plot arc. Annaud used close-ups, tracking and cutaway shots to heighten the illusion of understanding and even sharing the complex emotions of the animals.
 
“When I wrote the script, I could not have imagined that the tigers would have so many expressions and sounds,” Annaud said. “With 'The Bear,' it was enough for the bear to look right, left or up, and I would intercut. But with the tigers, there was such a variety of expressions in their eyes, in their mouths and in their ears that we had to get it exactly right.”

Getting it right meant using 32 different tigers – 26 from France, 2 from the United States and 4 from Thailand – many of which were not yet born when the filming began. All of the tigers were transported to Cambodia, where the film was shot, including the vine-covered Temples of Angkor, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The film plunges us into the world of tigers, encouraging us to root for the two brothers as they undergo painful separation from their parents and each other, as well as the confusion of living among strangers in a foreign world. A subplot involves a young boy (Freddie Highmore) who adopts one of the cubs, eating, playing hide-and-seek and even sleeping alongside the baby tiger.

“Most children identify very easily with animals,” Annaud said. “Our world, which is full of words, is very difficult to comprehend, whereas the body language of an animal is very easy to understand. Also, young tigers are like [children.] They have the same problems – and the best thing is to be with the people we belong to.”