[charming instrumental music]

Note: this was originally published in Weighted Tangents, my Substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

I’ve recently become a huge fan of Bluey. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I sat down to watch a curated selection of episodes1 — I don’t have children, I don’t spend any time around children, and despite my love of animation, children’s TV in general doesn’t appeal to me. But I love Bluey. If you had shown me the episode Rain devoid of any context, I would have thought it was a contender in an animated short competition. From the beautiful scoring to the storytelling told without a word, I was captivated from start to finish. It was so much more than a children’s cartoon, it was art.

I think I first heard about Bluey in a tech Slack group, and it didn’t register as anything important at the time. In all honesty I had conflated it with Blue’s Clues — a popular series that had a major impact on the younger millennial cohort and was about a decade too late for me — and I dismissed it as a cultural phenomenon that wasn’t relevant to me.

But Bluey is nothing if not persistent, and mentions of the show continued to crop up in conversations, in Slack and Discord groups, on Twitter, and finally in my animation classes. And it wasn’t just parents talking about Bluey! Friends without children are captivated by the show, suggesting there was more to this series than I had first assumed. And so being both curious and in need of a newsletter topic, I knew the time had come to see what all the fuss was about.

The writing on Bluey is charming and sharp, the animation is expressive, and the few episodes that I watched were very clearly made for adults and children in equal measure. And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t expect to experience the extreme range of emotions I experienced in any given seven minute episode. I wont run through each episode I watched, but the two I keep thinking about are FaceyTalk and Camping.

Faceytalk

FaceyTalk had me howling as Bluey’s friend Muffin dialed up her deviously defiant behavior over the course of a video call, and suddenly had me tearing up when Muffin’s parents had a quiet background conversation where the father shares his desire to be equally involved in the parenting responsibilities, but feels like he isn’t being heard. The conversation is quiet, touching, and thoughtful, and happens in the background of kids being kids because the conversation isn’t for kids - it’s for the adults watching.

Camping

Camping had me in a chokehold from the drop, and by the four minute mark I was in tears, floored at how deftly the show made me nostalgic for the temporary friends I made as a child. You know the ones — the friend you made at summer camp, or on a family trip, or when visiting an out of town relative — where you bond instantly, have the greatest of times, and then never see them again. These fleeting friendships are one of the bittersweet joys of life, and it was fun to think about where my temporary friends had ended up in the world.

I don’t have any profound conclusions from an afternoon immersed in the series, but I do recommend it if you want a little break from the realities of the world and to spend some time with lovable characters who find delight in the every day.