Feeling "Bluey": Creativity, intimacy, and what keeps us afloat in these times
Watching "Bluey" on repeat is the best I've got right now.
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Confession: I have started watching Bluey, the children’s show, without my toddler.
If you’re not familiar, Bluey is an Australian cartoon on Disney+ about a family of dogs (Blue Heelers): a mom named Chili; dad named Bandit; and their two daughters, Bingo and Bluey, roughly ages 4 and 6.
Like a lot of people since the show reached American audiences during the pandemic and became a hit here, I’ve been trying to pin down: What is it about this show?
For me, maybe it’s Bingo and Bluey’s perfect mirthful little-kid giggles and peals of high-pitched laughter.
Maybe it’s the Heelers’ house. It has charming turn-of-the-century details but with an open floor plan, a generous playroom, at least two verandas, an enclosed sun deck, and a spacious yard. It’s situated on a quaint hill surrounded by mature trees, and somehow has both city and nature views. In other words, it’s the kind of family home that is completely unattainable in the U.S. post-2019. (Btw, I learned that this is an iconic kind of architecture in Australia known as “Queenslander.”)
Maybe it’s that Chili, the mom (mum!), has my exact ideal family situation: she has two girls close in age, and a partner who does most of the childcare and housework and spends hours gamely engaged in imaginative play with the children. Meanwhile, she holds down a job that allows for ample time with family and still pays for a Range Rover and the aforementioned dream house on a single income.
Maybe it’s because the show is so charmingly site-specific to Brisbane that the fruit bats, ibises, and jacaranda trees make it feel like it takes place in a dream space that is like the same planet that I live on, but also otherworldly—and these days I find myself wanting to escape to somewhere that’s just…not here.
(Yes, I have recently been daydreaming about moving to Brisbane, based solely on watching Bluey. No, I have never been to Australia and couldn’t locate Brisbane on a map.)
I am not the first grown-up to try to put their finger on exactly what makes Bluey good. New York Magazine’s television critic deemed it “The Best Kids Show of Our Time.” It has its own write-up in the hallowed pages of the New Yorker. It has a 5-star rating on IMDB and dozens of nerdy Reddit threads dedicated to dissecting and debating what makes it so great.
Everyone seems to agree that the show’s success is due to the fact that it’s funny to parents as well as kids, the same quality that has made Pixar films wildly popular. And many argue that the show’s secret is that it’s about play and childhood wonder, as many of the episodes center around imaginative games that the kids pull their parents into.
But I think the reason that I’ve gone from watching with my toddler while we cuddle before dinner, to grabbing the remote and watching myself—just a grown woman and some animated blue dogs—has to do with our particular cultural moment. I suspect I’m not the only one.
It has been a hard time. A dark time. A heavy time, people keep saying. Somewhere between the recession of Omicron and the invasion of Ukraine I found myself desperate for something to give me a little uplift from the undertow of terrible happenings on Planet Earth. As the grief of war washed over me I felt myself floundering emotionally, and I intuitively reached for the remote and turned on Bluey.
It’s not the play that takes place in the show that intrigues and endears me most (it’s a bit much at times—I don’t have the energy to play with my child for hours). Rather, it’s the play and creativity that goes into making the show. The writing is experimental and playful; it’s not like anything I’ve seen before in a kid’s show. It’s not even like anything in most adult shows.
When I first started watching with my three-year old, I encountered what is now one of my favorite episodes, named “Fruit bat.” At the end, Bluey goes to bed and falls asleep, but it doesn’t end there. Instead, we enter into Bluey’s dream with her, and then Bluey visits her dad’s dream, while she’s inside her dream.
I sat up on the couch and called to my partner who was making dinner in the kitchen: “Come see this!” I laughed, “This kid’s show has a post-modern ending; what is happening?”
The episodes don’t center the usual lessons or morality tales of kid’s shows. Even Daniel Tiger, another show that I love, sets up a dilemma that characters must solve in an emotionally healthy way—and you’re just waiting to see how the lesson unfolds. Often, there’s no lesson or cautionary tale in Bluey.
There are no facts, no lessons about shapes and colors. It’s not educational in any official sense, which I don’t think is even allowed in U.S. children’s programming. Rather, it sometimes winks at the fact that parents don’t have all the answers; Chili and Bandit get tangled trying to answer their kids’ questions. In one case, Bandit bails by throwing himself into the swimming pool when he hears himself fumbling one of Bluey’s interrogations.
Instead, the 7-minute episodes are more like short stories, or sketch comedies. Joe Brumm, the show’s creator, doesn’t have a writing team, he writes pretty much alone, based on experiences with his own kids, according to New York Magazine. He also insisted on hiring a composer, Joff Bush, to score each episode individually, instead of the canned 2-3 songs that usually repeat in kid’s shows. Bush leans heavily on classical music and melodicas, and as a result it feels like we are sometimes watching indie short films—with blue dogs.
In one episode, we enter into a dream space where four-year old Bingo travels through space and time accompanied by Gustav Holst’s symphonic “Jupiter.” It’s like a Terrence Malick film made into a 7-minute kid’s show. In another, the whole episode is centered on a wide shot of the family dinner table; for the entire length of the show the camera perspective never moves. And just when you think it’s going to end with a predictable sweet family moment, it pivots and hits you with a surprise punchline that was set up from the episode’s first line.
Another zooms in on a child’s face and goes into slow motion for a full 30 seconds as she inspects an insect crawling on a leaf, while an orchestra crescendos.
I think what speaks to my heart about this program at this moment is that here is a group of adults who have been living under the same and grief-streaked days of the last two-plus years, who have been playing and experimenting.
They have been waking up in the morning and drinking too much coffee like I have, and feeling heartsick over the headlines like I have, and nevertheless their imagination perks up and says: “What about a scene where a 4-year old soars through the universe, gives up the toy that she treasures most so that toy can gain freedom, and hears her mother’s voice through the infinite burning of the sun? And we score it to something like Wagner.”
This gives me a spark of hope. This is the energy that I need right now to fight end-times dark feelings.
This last week in “The Examined Family” Courtney Martin wrote about dark feelings, and the possibility that creativity is a form of care. “I have found—even in the midst of a pandemic, war, environmental collapse, racial reckoning, especially in the midst of a pandemic, war, environmental collapse, racial reckoning—that weird, small projects keep me alive,” she writes. She makes collages with her daughter. She writes poems.
She quotes Iraqi artist Sundus Abdul Hadi from Take Care Your Self: The Art and Culture of Care and Liberation, and Hadi poses a question that stopped me cold:
“What is the opposite of violence?”
“…her answer, as is mine, is not simply peace, but creativity and care,” writes Martin, who argues that creating “reclaims one’s energy away from destruction.”
I have had a lot of dark feelings and overwhelming anxiety lately. It’s a hard time to be on Planet Earth and witness all that we are witnessing. It’s a hard time to be raising a small child while also cultivating a positive imagination for the future and what comes next. Unabashed creativity—even and maybe especially in a children’s program— feels something like the opposite of violence to me right now.
Last weekend, Allison got us tickets to see David Byrne’s Broadway show “American Utopia.” Byrne, the musical genius behind Talking Heads and a zillion other inventive musical projects, introduced the song “I Zimbra” by explaining that its lyrics were based on a nonsense poem by a Dada artist that was recorded in 1932—a recording that simply goes on in gibberish for about 40 minutes.
The poem was inspired, Byrne said, by the art world’s creative response to the horrors of World War I. “These artists were using nonsense to make sense of a world that didn’t make sense,” he said. “Their artistic aims were to remind the world that there are people of independent minds, beyond war and nationalism, who live for different ideals.”
The crowd cheered at this, and when the music started, Allison (a big fan) stood up and urged us into the aisles to dance. And that felt something like the opposite of violence, too.
I have been thinking a lot the last few weeks about how to stay awake and engaged and hold myself accountable while the undertow of grief and world events sometimes feels like it’s dragging me under. I’m trying to avoid turning inward when there’s so much work to be done. Creativity seems to be part of the answer, and so does care and intimacy. Care and intimacy are on the list of “different ideals” that I live for.
The thing that I find most comforting about Bluey is its depiction of the intimacy of the domestic sphere, and how that intimacy layers our lives with meaning. The moment when Bluey happens to look up from the bottom of the swimming pool when she’s diving for a toy, and she looks up to see the silhouette of her parents kissing overhead. The scene where Chili catches up to her aging dad, who she’s been scolding to slow down since he’s had heart surgery; when he puts his arm around her we see from behind that in that moment she shrinks back into small child Chili, his little girl.
Care is often unpaid, and often unrecognized. Yet care creates the intimacy that is the glue between us, across generations; the thing that has lifted us across the span of time to the current moment where we still feed and clothe each other, cheer each other up, teach each other, dance with each other, keep it all going in spite of everything.
Last Friday, I cried for a while on the couch after watching war unfold. It felt hard to get up, hard to move, and the small gestures I could make to alleviate suffering felt…so small. When I left the house to pick up my daughter from preschool, I looked up and saw that that the freezing ice and rain that had been falling all afternoon had completely coated the trees with ice, making them appear as though they were made of glass. The sun came out and lit up the frozen trees, and the whole street dazzled.
When she came out of school, my daughter’s face turned up to the ice-trees in delight. “It’s shiny,” she said, searching for a word for this new experience.
On the way home we stopped to inspect a low branch, and when I lifted her I felt the camera pan in on her eyes while she inspected the sparkling crystals. Time slowed down, and the music swelled. My heart lifted. I froze the frame in my mind: one of millions of moments of shared intimacy that will stitch—are stitching—our lives together. It was enough, for the moment, to carry me through another day.
Here are my favorite Bluey episodes right now, in no particular order:
Sleepytime
Fruit Bat
The Pool
Grandad
Stumpfest
Dance Mode
I haven’t seen all of them and would love to hear yours, too. What else is keeping you afloat?
Instagram: @matriarchyreport Twitter: @allisonlichter @laneanderson
This article spoke some of the thoughts I've had since my three children (8, 4 and 1.5) and I have been introduced to Bluey. My husband also adores this show, and the music. My children enjoy watching me closely as I watch my favorite episodes: baby race, rug island, flat pack, and sleepytime.. these episodes bring tears to my eyes every time. The love and care is just so heartwarming and relatable as we navigate life with our family. Bluey has been such a gift to so many! I'm grateful for a show that has taken over our home and helped us slow down, as we do "favorite things" around the dinner table and play feather wand.
The Baby Race. I cry every single time I watch it without fail.