“When the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, the fad for cutting off queues swept through Taiwan like a raging river, and even foot binding tripped and fell.” This kind of simple but smart commentary on history in more modern language is what has most drawn people to Taiwan Bar’s Animated Taiwanese History series. With their fun graphics and well-placed sound effects, Taiwan Bar’s videos turn history into entertainment, breaking it free of the staid, boring bonds of the traditional education system.

Producer DJ Hauer, a graduate in agricultural economics from National Taiwan University and still in his early 20s, already racked up experience as an animation producer, advertising cinematographer, and DJ while still in school. By his own admission, Hauer is more interested in DJing, but with Taiwan lacking the right environment for that to be a realistic career option, he had been planning to head abroad to look for opportunities after his military service. But “so much has happened in Taiwan in the past two years and it really inspired me, especially the various social movements. It really feels like things are changing, but even so, we still haven’t really gotten to the heart of the issues.” According to Hauer, the real problem is that Taiwanese don’t know where they came from, and thus don’t know where they’re going.

Before you can answer the question of who you want to be, you have to first understand who you are. To help start exploring that problem, Hauer sought out his friend Jia­jiach, an NTU history graduate he’d previously worked with on animation. Jia­jiach brought with her another friend who’d similarly been interested in exploring the problems with Taiwanese education, Thomas Xiao.

After long, in-depth conversations, the three found they shared a belief that if we want to help the youth of Taiwan out of their current funk, we need to help everyone understand better where they come from; only with a strong grasp of the past can we truly seize our future.

With this common goal in mind, the three decided to start teaching Taiwanese history, using their particular skills to create animations that fill in the blanks in the textbooks.

According to Taiwan Bar’s producer, DJ Hauer, “Taiwan Bar aspires to become Taiwan’s Studio Ghibli, Pixar, or Dreamworks.”

With Hauer handling the scoring and production, Jia­jiach in control of the visuals, and Xiao—currently a history teacher at the Affiliated High School of National Cheng­chi University—collecting and collating historical information, the team was almost ready to go. They were just lacking one crucial element to draw in the viewers.

A lifelong fan of American talk shows and comedies, Hauer knew that one thing was key to reaching audiences in an age of information overload—humor. Those that can tell stories in a humorous way, says Hauer, are “the rock stars of the future!”

Enter Taiwan Bar’s narrator, Bu­chi. Previously Bu­chi had made a short video about nuclear power and student movements in Taiwan. Despite being essentially just narration and subtitles, the video still amassed over a million views, demonstrating the particular appeal Bu­chi has.

Hauer describes Bu­chi as an automatic information processor: “You can throw 30,000 words at him and he’ll spit back a concise 3,000-word script. There’s not many in Taiwan that can do that.”

The overall production process comprises four steps: planning, writing, scripting, and post-production. What makes Taiwan Bar’s videos stand out from most others on YouTube is in the middle, from writing to scripting.

As Hauer explains, many similar videos seem made to show off how much information they have, but too much information can bore audiences, even driving them away. What’s needed is a well-packaged script that audiences will be receptive to. “Buchi’s not a student of history, so he can tell whether what he’s supposed to say is going to go over the general audience’s head. If he were a big history buff, we’d likely just end up preaching to the choir.”

Combining local elements with a youth perspective, Taiwan Bar offers not only entertainment, but also deep knowledge.

After each video is posted, viewers will get into intense discussions in the comments section, talking over details that weren’t brought up in the video and enticing even more people who previously had no interest in Taiwanese history to start digging deeper.

It’s this kind of drive to learn for oneself that Taiwan Bar Studio aims to spark.

“None of us formally studied animation or anything, we just taught ourselves how to make these kinds of videos,” says Hauer. He goes on to remark how the Internet has made it possible for anyone with an interest in something to find all kinds of information on their topic of choice, often even more than they could learn in classes.

Through his participation in several social movements in recent years, Hauer discovered that many Taiwanese youth feel lost, coming out of more than a decade’s education with no real idea what they actually want to do with their lives. “Through videos and the Internet, though, with just a couple of weeks’ work we could potentially help an elementary student find his or her passion,” proclaims Hauer boldly.

Twenty years ago, Hauer says, if you were into a TV series, you’d have to be in front of the TV at a certain time every week to catch the latest episode. But today people will watch an episode, see if they’re interested, and then download the whole series, bingeing it in a weekend, or even a day. Similarly, today anyone with an interest can spend hours and hours gorging on related information until that information becomes knowledge. Education, Hauer believes, should function the same way.

This is why Taiwan Bar Studio have begun their “passion project”: eight-episode series on virtually every subject, aimed at 12- and 13-year-olds, enabling them to watch the pilots of each series, choose what they want to know more about, and then keep going through those series. The idea is that they should be able to get a good grasp of their subject of choice within a month.

Over the coming five years, Taiwan Bar aim to expand their scope to cover some 30 to 50 different subjects in animated form, all freely available to watch. Ultimately, the studio aims to spark a grassroots revolution in education in Taiwan.

Limited-edition products, headlined by mascot Beer the Bear, sold out rapidly, giving Taiwan Bar a valuable shot in the arm.

This project has been the brainchild of Thomas Xiao, who has a passion for transforming education. “I’m more the business guy,” Hauer laughs, “I do want to change education, but I also want to prove that it’s possible to make a living as an animator in Taiwan.”

Dissatisfied with the NT$22,000-a-month starting salary for animation assistants in Taiwan, Hauer decided to become his own boss and hire people at NT$30,000 a month. In late 2014 Taiwan Bar began recruiting more staff, and within a month the promise of a reasonable paycheck had attracted a crowd of outstanding young talent who had all but given up on their dreams of having a career in animation. Sometime in mid-2015, they also plan to move out of their 30-square-meter studio into a larger office.

Reading this, you might well wonder how a company making free videos could afford to pay more than major production houses.

Much of this is down to the adorable mascot for Taiwan Bar’s history series, Beer the Bear, a Taiwan-Beer-drinking Formosan black bear. While he may not have any lines, Beer has become the star of the show and won the heart of many a viewer. So popular has he become that when Taiwan Bar put up a limited-edition Beer plush toy, within three months they’d sold out of the entire 1,000-unit run, earning over NT$2.5 million. More importantly, though, this success gave Taiwan Bar a huge boost in confidence.

Endemic species like the Formosan black bear, Mikado pheasant, and Formosan landlocked salmon play a variety of distinctive roles in Taiwan Bar’s videos, adding extra local color to the stories.

While trying to make a living with YouTube videos may be a brave decision in Taiwan, in the US it’s becoming increasingly common.

American business and tech news website Business Insider recently remarked that being a “YouTube celebrity” had become the new American Dream, and in 2014 the most popular YouTube stars were making seven-figure US-dollar incomes. Around the world there are tens of thousands of YouTube channels with annual incomes over US$100,000, enticing more to try and follow in their footsteps.

In the Chinese-speaking world, though, profits from digital content are still not fantastic, with just a handful of video game channels making over NT$100,000, and virtually no educational channels earning nearly that much.

“This is our chance,” exclaims Hauer. “Taiwan Bar has already proved that audiences aren’t averse to educational videos. It’s just that most of them are so boring.” By his own admission, Hauer isn’t all that creative; he just had more guts and more drive than others, jumping at an opportunity he had seen.

Taiwan has a wealth of skilled animators and creative spaces, as well as a multicultural environment, and all these could help make the island a beacon of hope for aspiring digital content creators in the Chinese-speaking world. Opportunities, though, can be fleeting. “If we don’t pick up the pace now, we’ll soon be left following others,” says Hauer. This is why Taiwan Bar is seizing the opportunity presented by the popularity of its Animated Taiwanese History series, growing the team and launching a second wave of videos covering three new fields to give audiences something fresh.

With a clearer idea of where they have come from and a vision for where they’re going, the four young men at the heart of Taiwan Bar have the imagination and motivation to usher in a new era of digital content in Taiwan.