You, Adult Who Has Never Watched Bluey, are Probably Wrong About Bluey
Sleepytime is true capital-A Art. Fight me.
No need for a prelude or persuasion?
Skip to my list of the essential Bluey episodes free on YouTube, which includes one of the all-time great works of animation.
Oh man, did I ever hate Bluey the first time I tried to watch it.
“Why are you, a child-free adult, even watching a show about a six-year-old Australian cartoon dog and her family?” you, fellow child-free adult Reader, might reasonably be asking.
(Or, “wait, what even is Bluey?” you, out-of-touch Reader, might unreasonably be asking, given that it’s only the most-watched TV show in the world, making up 29% of all viewing on Disney+ (home of Marvel, Star Wars, and…Disney…I’ll remind you), with Nielsen tracking ratings at over a billion minutes viewed per week, week after week, another 5.2 billion views on its official YouTube channel, an influence so powerful it's making American children adopt Australian accents. Probably you should have encountered Bluey at some point before this Substack post, is all I’m saying.)
Well, as my username would indicate, I love stories, and *pushes glasses up my nose* my favorite genre is quality. While I am not a professional media critic, I have the background, standards, and broad tastes of one; I went to technical film school, spent about eight years seeing every major and virtually all minor releases that came out in every theater in my region (first Phoenix, then L.A.), reading professional reviewers like Ebert afterwards, and then writing my own reviews for fun. In a post-Pixar, post-Peak TV, post-Lego Movie, YouTube creator world, I’m acutely aware that truly great storytelling can happen anywhere. That’s why I carefully monitor critic aggregator sites, the Peabody Awards, a handful of professional critics whose taste I understand and trust, and generally keep an eye out.
Bluey was getting mentioned in “best of” lists, so I decided to watch a few episodes on YouTube. Keepy Uppy / Magic Xylophone / Shadowlands S1 E1 Full Episode (don’t click on that!), with 109 million views on the official Disney Junior channel, was the logical place to start, but it was also completely the wrong one for me.
First, every episode of Bluey begins with a 25 second role call of the four primary characters playing a game of musical statues. In order of “outs,” it’s “Mum” (Chili), “Dad” (Bandit), four-year-old Bingo, and the titular Bluey, complete with a large group shouting of Bingo’s name over the title card. While most viewers no doubt find this cute and charming, I personally fear and resent dancing, and am irked by group cheering, so it was a rough start for me.
Keepy Uppy, a simple eight minute episode about the two kids playing “keep the balloon in the air” with occasional assists and complications from their parents, was…mostly fine. The characters are cute, expressive, with jaw-dropping voice acting by real child actors. I really hated Bandit’s enthusiastic goofiness when pretending to be a balloon blowing away, but overall, the episode was…mostly fine.
Magic Xylophone, an episode where the characters cooperatively pretend that playing a toy xylophone “freezes” people against their will until released by another note on the xylophone, I kind of liked until I hated it. I found the Heeler parents’ total commitment to being equal participants in their children’s’ pretend games intrusive, and the Heeler father Bandit’s ostentatious goofiness maximally cringe. I didn’t even watch Shadowlands (I discovered later it’s actually pretty good).
“What’s wrong with parents playing with their children? That’s the best part of Bluey!” You, Millennial-or-younger or young-at-heart parent might be wondering.
Well, I have good parents and had a very good childhood, but there was a sharp divide between us during that childhood, one that was mutually enforced. Adults weren’t allowed to Pretend, not in a real way. They weren’t even allowed to watch real Pretend. I have one especially vivid memory from when I was Bluey’s age of my mother walking in on the neighbor girl and me acting out a story with My Little Pony toys wherein a hapless kidnap victim was about to be tossed into a pool of lava by Evil Barbie. I quickly hushed my friend and we both pointedly stared at my mother until she left.
Because while she and my dad might play board games or pool games or sports with my brother and me, I instinctively knew all adults had lost the ability to understand just how real Pretend was. They couldn’t comprehend the utter pathos of the pony about to die horribly in molten rock. My Pretend stories were sacred, a time for me to explore serious narratives, and absolutely not for adults who might condescend or laugh or take secret, sophisticated enjoyment in them. Adults were to stay in their lane and not attempt to believe.
(Lest anyone wonder, I have no idea how I acquired this conviction. As a child of the ‘80s, my parents allowed me an unthinkable level of autonomy to play unsupervised while also maintaining strict hierarchical authority over lifestyle. Meals and bedtimes were imposed, not negotiated, and bad behavior was punished, not “corrected.” This probably contributed to the conviction that we were meaningfully different classes of people without overlapping skills.)
So perhaps with this background, it makes sense that I watched “Keepy Uppy” and “Magic Xylophone” and decided that Bluey was about and for helicopter weirdo parents so enmeshed with their children they couldn’t leave them alone.
Gross. I dismissed Bluey entirely.
But the YouTube algorithm refused to dismiss Bluey. Episode after episode was suggested, and, when I didn’t click on episodes, the algorithm suggested Bluey analysis, specifically Pugly’s How Bluey Made Everyone Cry with this Powerful Deaf Representation (A Turtleboy Deep Dive). That seemed weird, so I clicked, and discovered the truly enormous amount of technical work that went into animating Australian Sign Language (with four digits rather than five, no less!), and also the incredibly sensible way in which the Deaf family were depicted, which is to say, as pointedly not being “special” but rather just like any other family.
YouTube, far more aware than I that I’d boarded the train to cartoon canine Queensland, insisted I watch Pugly’s How the Miscarriage in Bluey Changes EVERYTHING (Exploring Emotional Distress in Miscarriages) next.
What the fuck? How did this show go from a cartoon dog dad’s cringe over-commitment to silly games to miscarriage? I clicked.
By the end of the analysis, I was starting to wonder if maybe the Bluey episodes I watched weren’t representative of the show in general (spoiler: they weren’t!). I watched a third analysis, and then a fourth, and then it occurred to me I should probably…you know…give actual Bluey episodes another chance.
And I’m glad I did, because Bluey is an exquisitely accurate observation of humanity, depicting universal experiences of childhood and parenthood with a crafted specificity and nuance. It’s so interested in being about the larger patterns that we see in real men and women and boys and girls that it’s quietly and very firmly disinterested in tiresome ideological agendas. Real dads tend to be more like this, and real mums tend to be more like that, and real boys and real girls often have overlapping interests but consistently differing focuses. #sorrynotsorry, Kathleen Kennedy.
There are dozens of wonderful episodes in the series current 150 episodes, which is an astonishing achievement on its own, but one particular episode stands amongst the greatest works of animation of all time.
Yes, you read that right.
That episode is Sleepytime, available on YouTube. Every word and note and frame is perfect in a way that would require a much longer essay to fully analyze. When you see it, you’ll get it. BUT! Don’t click on it yet.
The Essential Bluey Episodes on YouTube
While Sleepytime can stand on its own, it is greatly enhanced by having an understanding of the characters.
And so, for you, dear Reader, I have assembled a curated list from the limited collection of episodes available on YouTube. It’s almost impossibly difficult to rank them - many episodes of Bluey are equally all terrific - but the following sprint so that Sleepytime can launch into space.
Pass the Parcel - In which everyone discovers that resilience is far more precious than equity.
The Pool - In which everyone discovers that responsibility isn’t boring.
Mini Bluey - In which the quiet part about parents having a favorite child is said out loud.
The Yoga Ball - In which Bingo learns that we must be responsible for saying “No!” when someone hurts us.
Baby Race - In which actual parents in the audience are made to cry.
Faceytalk - In which the show somehow also manages to produce one of the funniest animated shorts of all time (this doesn’t have anything to do with providing background for Sleepytime, but I couldn’t NOT include it).
And, again, the masterpiece that is Sleepytime:
The music in the last third of Sleepytime is actually O God Beyond All Praising. https://open.spotify.com/track/4vTboLXMDA7miKyWMeB0n0
Okay Faceytalk was better than it had any right to be