We Bare Bears: The Movie
According to We Bare Bears series creator Daniel Chong, he was approached by the Cartoon Network staff with an idea for a feature film based on the series in 2018. Despite having no previous experience in film, Chong accepted the proposal, drawing from his feature animation practice and reasoning that the characters he created have an emotional depth in them and capabilities he knew that could be sustained for a long period of time. Due to the then-continuing production of the series, Chong and his team had to prepare the film while finishing the episodes at the same time, which took over several months. The film's story was written by Mikey Heller and Kris Mukai, the main writers of the series. While writing it, they were inspired by the 2018 California wildfires and the Trump administration family separation policy that were occurring at the time, which lead to a family being separated from each other as a central theme to a forest fire being written in the story's climax. Chong remarked that sensitive topic such as those wouldn't appear to be ideal in the main children's television series. He also wanted the main themes within the series to be displayed in the film, such as diversity and the reason for anthropomorphic characters.