Boonie Bears

When my oldest daughter was ten, she and I visited her birth city, Qingdao. Every day, we woke up early and gorged ourselves on the breakfast buffet in the hotel before venturing out to explore the city.

Most days, we ran out of steam midafternoon and headed back to the hotel for a rest before venturing back out to find dinner. Once my daughter discovered Boonie Bears, a two-hour block of every day belonged to local TV.

Neither of us spoke Chinese, and there were no subtitles, but the story was easy to understand. An inept Elmer Fudd-type character was trying to log a forest, but the clever bears who lived there kept outsmarting him.

For all the Looney Tunes silliness and cartoonish violence, there were some intriguing subtleties that I don’t think an American cartoon would have offered. The “evil logger” often gets chewed out on the phone by a boss or his father. He also cries when his mother calls him. In one episode, the forest animals help him get home to the city – not, I think, because they want him out of the woods, but because he needs to see his mother.

Once we got home, internet research told me the name of the cartoon, and I found out they made a movie of it in 2014. But so far, none of the streaming services seem to offer the tv show or the movie. I’d love to see it again with subtitles. To this day, my daughter still talks about the forest cartoon she used to watch in China.