Filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud is an old hand at working with actors who lack basic communication skills and walk around on all fours. No, not Mickey Rourke. We're talking about animal actors — bears, tigers and other cute, furry creatures capable of mauling an unsuspecting cameraman with one swipe of the paw.

Fortunately, no crew members were hurt during the making of ‘‘Two Brothers,’’ Annaud’s heart-melting sibling love story about a pair of orphaned tiger cubs, ripped from the Cambodian jungle, who teach their human acquaintances a meaningful lesson about loyalty and the dignity of nature.

Guy Pierce (“L.A. Confidential”) gets top homosapien billing as Aidan McRory, a turn-of-the-century adventurer who shoots and kills the cubs’ father while plundering statues from the ruins at Angkor Wat. McRory adopts one of the cubs, later named Kumal, while the other, later named Sangha, escapes into the jungle with their mother.

Soon, Sangha is also captured, becoming the doted-on plaything of the local French administrator's young son (Freddie Highmore). Despite the boy’s affection for the animal, Sangha is eventually shipped to the Cambodian emperor (Oanh Nguyen) as a gift, where it lives in solitude, groomed for public battle. Kumal suffers an equally unkind fate, falling into the clutches of a circus troupe that demeans and abuses him.
One year after their capture, Kumal and Sangha, now fully grown, are pitted against each other in a death match for the amusement of the emperor and his subjects. It’s the keynote scene in “Two Brothers,” soppy but beautifully staged and thoroughly irresistible.
Annaud (“The Bear,” “The Name of the Rose”) manages to coax reactions out of animal actors that border on anthropomorphic: surprise, love, sympathy and dejection. Even on film — actually, “Two Brothers” was shot, handsomely enough, on digital video — the animals are captivating, whether they’re comically hijacking meat trucks or fixing the camera with a fearsome, deadly gaze.

Often, their performances are more emotionally vivid than those of their human counterparts, though Pierce is serviceable as the soldier of fortune who sprouts a conscience and disavows his tiger-killing ways.

Naturally, the movie ends with a plea to preserve the planet’s dwindling tiger population, and the message, on the whole, is very even-handed. Still, one must always question the ingenuousness of a filmmaker who decries animal captivity when his animal actors are, after all, captives themselves.