In 2001, Chiba Stearns founded
Meditating Bunny Studio Inc., now based in
Vancouver and formally in
Kelowna. His short animated films,
The Horror of Kindergarten (2001) and
Kip and Kyle (2000) were screened at film festivals and were bought and aired by the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for their show
ZeD. His 2005 autobiographical animated short,
What Are You Anyway? was created on a pre-license fee from the CBC and explores issues of growing up half-Japanese and half-Caucasian in a small Canadian town. It has screened at over 40 international film festivals, and won the award for Best Animated Short Subject at the
Canadian Awards for the Electronic & Animated Arts. Chiba Stearns also writes and lectures about
Hapa and mixed-race identity, cultural awareness, and the animation process. He coined the term "Hapanimation" to describe his unique blend of North American and Japanese animation styles. In 2011, he co-founded
Hapa-palooza, a Vancouver cultural festival celebrating mixed-roots arts and ideas. For the festival, he curates, Mixed Flicks, a showcase of films made by multiethnic filmmakers and panel with mixed-race actors and media makers. His 2007 animated short film,
Yellow Sticky Notes, won the
Prix du Public at the
Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and Best Animated Short Film at the
Calgary International Film Festival. It was animated with just a black pen on over 2,300
sticky notes, and is a reflection on the filmmaker's tendency to become overwhelmed with "to do" lists made up of yellow sticky notes. The film has screened in over 80 International Film Festivals and won 10 awards. After the film's international premiere at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, Yellow Sticky Notes, became one of the first films acquired by YouTube's Screening Room. Yellow Sticky Notes was nominated for a 2012 Emmy® Award for Best Human Interest Feature/Segment after it aired as part of the KCTS program Reel Northwest. Chiba Stearns's first feature-length documentary and animation hybrid,
One Big Hapa Family, released September 2010, explores the lives of children of all ages from interracial marriages and how they perceive their mixed-race identities at a young age. The documentary begins after a realization that Chiba Stearns has at a family reunion which sets him on a journey of self-discovery to find out why everyone in his Japanese-Canadian family married inter-racially after his grandparents’ generation. The film has since gone on to screen at over 20 film festivals and win 6 awards.
One Big Hapa Family has also screened at many North American universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Cornell. On top of filmmaking, Chiba Stearns's animation studio, Meditating Bunny Studio Inc., has created commercials and viral videos for clients such as 3M, Generali, and Sharpie. In 2010, his short animated film,
Ode to a Post-it Note, won the Webby Award for Best Branded Entertainment at the 15th Annual Webby Awards. The film was commissioned by 3M Canada to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Post-it Note and features Post-it Note inventor,
Arthur Fry. Chiba Stearns also directed the Sharpie Pens commercial "The Proposal" in 2010. As a follow-up to his 2007 animation, Yellow Sticky Notes, Chiba Stearns has assembled 15 influential independent animators from across Canada to participate in a collaborative anijam entitled, Yellow Sticky Notes | Canadian Anijam. To create the film, the animators are asked to utilize what Chiba Stearns has coined "animation meditation" to self reflect by only drawing on 4x6 inch sticky notes. The film has since gone on to screen at over 60 international film festivals including Hot Docs and Ottawa International Animation Festival. Chiba Stearns' second feature-length documentary,
Mixed Match (2016), explores the complexities multiethnic people with rare blood diseases face when trying to find bone marrow donors. The film has screened at over 30 international film festivals and won 5 audience awards as well as the Best of the Northwest Award at the Spokane International Film Festival and the Grand Prix for Best Documentary at the Houston Asian American Pacific Islander Film Festival. In 2018, Chiba Stearns wrote and illustrated his first children's book, Mixed Critters, an ABC book of hybrid animals. In 2020, he released his second children's book, Nori and His Delicious Dreams, about a mixed Japanese Canadian boy who dreams of sleeping in foods from around the world. Chiba Stearns collaborated with Sansei artist Lillian Michiko Blakey to co-write and illustrate the graphic novel, On Being Yukiko, released in January 2021. The book features an intergenerational story with themes of Japanese Canadian history and identity. Chiba Stearns was the creative director and directed over 60 episodes of the hit pre-school television series, The Treebees, which has amassed millions of views on YouTube. As an educator, he currently teaches at the
Emily Carr University of Art and Design and taught classical animation at the Centre for Arts and Technology. == Awards ==