WMG / Little Bear

Little Bear and all the other animals are just figments of Emily's imagination.

Because someone had to do this. The whole series is a fantasy of a little girl who suffers from Parental Neglect and a dysfunctional home life. The forest is her imaginary Happy Place and Little Bear is her favorite Imaginary Friend, while Mother and Father Bear are the Good Parents she can only dream of having. This explains the show's in weirdly different levels of anthropomorphism between different animals. Granny isn't real either – in the real world, she died, but Emily keeps her alive in her fantasy and imagines living with her because she thinks that would be better than life with her parents.