We Bare Bears and the Asian Experience

Emily Yoon
Jun 13, 2021
2 min read

Written By Emily Yoon

Today’s cartoons are often mindless, mile-a-minute jalopies of ideas that are as crudely humored as they are structured. It’s rare to see a cartoon worth watching for anyone beyond the juvenile demographic, and even rarer for an intelligent, well-structured series chock-full of metaphor and moxie to make its way to the mainstream.

“We Bare Bears” is such a show.

On the surface, it’s another show about animals living in the human world: already been there, done that with “Mickey Mouse” or “Tom and Jerry.” But “We Bare Bears” goes deeper: it’s actually a metaphor for the Asian-American experience.

Creator Daniel Chong told NextShark, “The show is super personal and it’s really everything that I love and who I am, it’s been kind of encapsulated in the show.”

“The show is super personal and it’s really everything that I love and who I am, it’s been kind of encapsulated in the show.”

Set in the epicenter of Asian-American life, the Bay Area, “We Bare Bears” follows three brothers as they navigate the ins and outs of the big city. Audiences get to watch Grizz, Ice Bear, and Pan-Pan deal with real-world issues ranging from environmentalism to online dating from an optimistic, can-do perspective.

Created by a team of Asian-American animators, “We Bare Bears” lovingly touches on often overlooked aspects of Asian immigrant life. The audience doesn’t just get episodes about K-pop and anime, though these are much-adored topics. Viewers also get to experience a Korean Thanksgiving, complete with jap-chae (Korean glass noodles) and fold-out tables that allow everyone to sit together on the carpet. And the bears’ friend, the plucky four-year-old Chloe, shows the double-sided reality of being a “child prodigy.”

But “We Bare Bears” doesn’t stop at cultural aspects of Asian life. Chong also manages to indirectly highlight the alienation that comes with being an Asian-American: when characters speak in Korean, the show doesn’t provide subtitles or dubbing. However, despite the language barrier, the English-speaking bears and their Korean-speaking counterparts forge a genuine connection through food and games.

What I love about “We Bare Bears” is it doesn’t diminish Asian issues or reduce our rich cultures to stereotypes. The challenges we face are highlighted in a way that’s palatable for a wide range of audiences, and the rich cultural synthesis present in the Bay Area (and other parts of America) is on full display. Though “We Bare Bears” might be a children’s show, the grit and optimism the four bears display is a timeless representation of what it means to be Asian American.