Research Blog Post 3

My humanistic research question is going to revolve around the strange anthropomorphism that exists within the show. The relationship between the protagonist bears' animality and their humanity is too complicated for me to even try to fully explain in this short blog post. I would never be able to do it justice in this amount of space and would probably just leave you more confused, so I'll just make it a topic for a later date. One key concept that I will explain now is the idea of the "funny animal". Loosely defined, a "funny animal" is any character in a comic or cartoon that is "recognized as embodying nonhuman animal types and qualities," but also "bear[ing] little visual or behavioral resemblance to actual nonhuman animals." The main characters of the show, Panda, Grizz, and Ice Bear, all exist in the show's universe as "funny animals."

For most intents and purposes, the bears act like and are treated as any human beings and are essentially human beings in the bodies of bears. The show itself has even sort of acknowledged this by introducing characters that are obviously meant to be the human dopplegangers of the bears.

I also want to discuss how bears' animality is used as a visual metaphor for their otherness and how having animal characters can make difficult concepts more digestible/understandable for children . So far, I haven't been able to figure our how exactly I am going to compile all of these topics into just a couple of focused humanistic research questions. I will have to think it over more carefully first and discuss my ideas with someone else since that usually helps me get my thoughts more in order.

There are not very many secondary sources about We Bare Bears, so I need to do some more research into sources that are about the general topics I want to cover in my paper. I feel fairly confident that there are many sources covering the issue of anthropomorphism in children's cartoons and other related topics.