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A Sweet Farewell to Those Cuddly ‘Bros’ We Bare Bears creator Daniel Chong opens up about the show’s hugely satisfying movie, which also served as a grand finale.
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arly this month, fans of Daniel Chong’s hugely popular We Bare Bears got a big present in the form of a 70-minute-long movie that put a nice bow on the show, which debuted in July of 2015 and aired its final episode last April. We caught up with Chong to find out more about the charming movie and his plans for the future.
episodes for the first half of season four. There was a lot of overlap. In reality, we didn’t know that the movie was going to serve as the finale for the show when we wrote it. We just assumed that we were going to keep going, even after 140 episodes! But when it was determined that we were going to end the show, the movie achieved a nice bookend quality.
Animag: First of all, congrats ‘You can’t make 140 episodes of a show without on you very well-received We Bare Bears: The Movie. How digging into every aspect of your past and every did the idea for this movie movie and TV show that influenced you.’ come about? Daniel Chong: It started out — Creator Daniel Chong when Cartoon Network asked us to do a movie. Frankly, I had always want- How do you feel about the movie now that it ed to do a movie with these characters. We has finally landed on Cartoon Network, after had these compelling characters that could being available on digital download for a few easily exist in a long-form project since we months? always tried to give them emotional depth.I This show was based on the experience of behad a background in animated movies. [Chong ing a minority in America. So, I like that we worked as story artist on features such as Bolt, were able to end the series on this poetic Despicable Me, The Lorax and Inside Out, before note, which is about feeling acceptance and creating We Bare Bears for the cabler.] We felt quite confident that we could do it, although we had a lot less time to do it than your average Disney or Pixar movie. How long did it take you to make it? We spent about eight months on the script — and that’s while we were actually producing the series, too. We boarded the movie for over a year, while still finishing up the regular www.animationmagazine.net
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fitting in and finding your place in the world. I couldn’t have anticipated that this was the way we were going to go out, but I’m really happy that we ended with them helping others just like them and creating a utopia of sorts. Can you talk about the message of the movie and how it’s probably even more relevant now than when you wrote it? We wrote the movie when we were seeing all the news about ICE separating all these immigrant families. We’ve gone through a pandemic, witnessed the Black Lives Matter protests, and we know that racism is not going away. This is an ongoing battle that we have to fight. We wrote the script two years ago, but unfortunately, the themes are even more relevant now. Did you work with the same team that was on your series? Yes, more or less we had the same creative team. There were people coming in and out, but we had about eight or nine story artists boarding on the show. We had an extra editor on the movie. On the regular show, we clean up all the boards, then we edit it together and do all the small fixes. For the movie, we had lots of trial and error. Our board artists would do lots of roughs and story editors september|october 20
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