REVIEW: ‘7 Bears’ Is Annoying, But At Least It Sort Of Has A Point

7 Bears (Les 7 Ours) is a new animated Netflix Original series for children starring seven excruciatingly annoying identical bear brothers in fifteen-minute riffs on classic fairy tales. Directed by Guillaume Rio, every episode begins with a narration explaining how it will twist the classic story, and then proceeds with a very “boy show” approach to comedy before ending at least with some kind of lesson about listening to others, or not being selfish.

The first episode of 7 Bears lays it all out immediately. They fart a lot. They scratch their butts a lot. And they often have a “boys rule, girls drule” attitude. Each bear is exactly the same, has the same voice acting and cadence, and the same over-the-top personality. They’re constantly yelling “Brothers!” at each other, driving home the boy humor in the show.

The dialogue is mostly quippy one-liners and repetitive jokes that may work on young children but grow old very quickly for the adults watching along. Not all episodes are created equal. Some are more aggravating to listen to than others. And at least the reworkings of the characters are interesting sometimes.

7 Bears is an extremely gender-essentialist take on children’s programming.

Snow White is a bratty character who just annoys the bears, but Rumplestiltskin is Stumblebumskin, a gnome who goes around kicking people in the butt. There’s a witch who’s not all that mean and has an emo/punk daughter, and Prince Charming has a brother, Prince Charmless, who helps take the boy characters down a peg, at least.

You can only tolerate fart jokes and a bizarre obsession with raw potatoes for so long, so 7 Bears deserves some props for having 20 different plots, interchanging the same set of characters somewhat creatively for different stories and situations. The cast is also racially diverse, which is far from a given in a show with a minimal artistic palette.

Besides the seven intentionally identical bears, each character is bespoke. You’re not going to mix one up for another. It would have been easy for 7 Bears to fill itself with copy-and-paste background characters, but keeping things to just the dozen or so characters with names and personalities actually helps the show stay in one clear lane at a time per episode.

7 Bears could be a lot worse than it is.

While the show is premised on the bears’ naivety, they do tend to learn some kind of lesson by the end of every episode. The lessons aren’t hammered home all that hard, so it might be easy to completely miss them, but they are baked into every plot.

Whether they’re learning to be less judgmental or to take care of one another better, at least they’re sort of learning something. Of course, it’s mixed together with lessons about how girls are annoying and being gross is fun, so it’s not exactly wins all around.

7 Bear is quite annoying, being not all that pleasant to look at or hear, but it could be much worse. For every element of “boy humor,” there is at least an attempt at balancing it with kindness or attentiveness. That’s far from a given in children’s entertainment.

7 Bears is streaming now on Netflix.