Embedded Files
At this point in the research process, I pretty much have my heart set on writing a paper on We Bare Bears. Of all 3 of the primary sources that I looked into, We Bare Bears is the one that I believe I would be most willing to spend the next 7 weeks researching and working with. I would like to do some sort of analysis on the anthropomorphism of the show, but it would also be interesting to look into the use of animals as mediators between children and relevant social issues. I bring up this secondary topic because it is something that the show's creator, Daniel Chong, himself has implied doing and is a large part of the reason he created the show in the first place.
Having come into the research process with expectations to find zero academic sources, I was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of papers on the show that were somewhat relevant. One of the papers looks into the strange state of the bears in the show, with their existance alongside "real humans" not allowing them to simply be seen as human stand-ins unlike the animals movies such as Zootopia with solely animal casts. The author, Hwang Jin-mi, the bears are the representation of a "heterogenous other in a society in the form of a bear," citing the lack of astonishment experienced by the humans around them. No one else seems to find it strange that there are three bears in their city that are living lives almost identical to an average human being.
One big draw back that I will mention is that many sources written on the topic are not in English. The source I just previously discussed was originally published in Korean and the only reason I was able to read it was thanks to Google's auto-translate feature. I am a bit concerned about the accuracy of the translation I read. I understood the gist of the paper, but there were some very clear translation errors present in what I was reading.
Page updated
Report abuse