Fetch
One dog. Both roles. An entire invented championship, complete with a field, a crowd, a scandal, and a medal ceremony, played entirely alone.
Solo short · 3 min
An animation studio
Bear Wade Studios
Animated shorts that make kids laugh out loud and leave grown ups something to feel.
The idea
Generational Laughter
Every short is built to land twice, in the same moment, for two different people on the same couch.
The kid laughs
Real gags. Pratfalls, reversals, a dog tripping over his own tail. Physical comedy a six year old can follow with the sound off.
The grown up feels it
Underneath every joke sits something true. Loneliness, patience, the moment nobody was there to catch. The ache arrives with the laugh.
The laugh and the ache are the same object.
The slate
Pantomime first. No dialogue anywhere.
Three original shorts set in the Understory, the wild backyard world of Wally, Ruthie, and the crew.
Wait for It
Wally finds something wonderful in the Back Forty. Ruthie freezes. The loudest dog in the yard learns that the biggest invitation is going quiet.
Two hander · 3 min
Shell Shocked
The whole crew, one very bad plan, and a stunt nobody thought through. Ensemble chaos with a heart underneath it.
Ensemble · 4 min
First up: ten finished seconds of animation, run through the full pipeline, before anything else ships. Proof before promise.
The way we work
A small studio with a long process
Sixteen steps
Every short moves through the same sixteen step animation process, from spine to score. No shortcuts, no skipped gates.
Story earns the tech
Modern tools do the heavy lifting so one filmmaker can carry a whole pipeline. The tools never pick the joke. The story does.
Built to rewatch
A short is done when a family plays it a second time on purpose. That is the only metric the studio answers to.
The filmmaker
Twenty three years behind the camera. Now behind the characters.
Bear Wade Studios is founded and run by Bear Wade, a documentary filmmaker and four time Telly Award winner whose work has aired on PBS.
After two decades telling true stories for real people, the studio is his answer to a simpler question: what would he make for his own kids?
- Four Telly Awards
- PBS documentary, Paving The Way
- 190K subscriber YouTube channel co founded and grown to 18M views
- Documentary work at BearWade.com