Fans of an adorable Australian cartoon are accusing anime fans of bombing their favorite episode after it took second place on IMDb’s list of the best TV episodes of all time, before quickly garnering negative reviews and downlisting.
Blueywhich is streaming on Disney+ outside Australia, features a family of Australian Heeler Dogs/Cattle Dogs living in Brisbane: Mum Chilli, Dad Bandit, Big Sister Bluey and Little Sister Bingo.
The show is mostly what you’d expect from a cartoon aimed at preschoolers. Each episode has the classic learning of life lessons (aka “lime lessons,” as they’re called in one episode) and family hijinks. Bluey and Bingo go to school; hanging out with their cousins, Muffin and Socks; and use their imaginations to make up games and pretend.
But unlike many kids’ shows that parents have to endure watching over and over again, Bluey is a special breed that manages to be a true “family” show with wide appeal, even for those without a child. children : New York Times named “Sleepytime” one of the best TV episodes of 2020, and it’s already been described as “the best kids’ show of our time” by New York magazine.
Bluey achieves this not only through visual and sonic beauty (the soundtrack even has its own vinyl), but primarily by showcasing the ridiculous and the serious side by side. The episode “Copycat” begins with a copycat game between Bandit and Bluey, but takes a turn when they discover a dying bird while running around the neighborhood. Bluey learns the finality of death and uses playtime with her family to process her grief.
An episode about an exhausted parent picking up take-out Chinese food with two restless toddlers turns into a meditation on the shortness of childhood.
Parents are stunned by the little things their children won’t remember, like hints of infertility (“The Show,” “Onesies”), more elusive discussions of aging and death (“Grandad,” “Flat Pack”), and how parenting isn’t always easy or straightforward (“Driving”, “Octopus”, “Sheepdog”, “Dirt”).
It’s not your average Peppa Pig, which features a bratty protagonist and parents who aren’t people outside the context of their children. Bandit himself received a lot of press for being a role model for dads everywhere, invested in his kids and his relationships with his wife and friends – when was the last time anyone heard that Daddy Pig had interests?
For a brief moment, a Bluey the episode entitled “Sleepytime” took second place, just behind “Ozymandias”, the penultimate episode of breaking Bad.
“Sleepytime” is one of the show’s most sentimental episodes, leaving kids and parents with tears in their eyes during the credits. In the season 2 episode, Bingo is in the phase where she has trouble staying in her own bed at night, telling her mother she wants to get a “big girl’s sleep”, but Chilli tells her just to do your best.
In Bingo’s dream, she and her stuffed bunny, Floppy, hatch from Earth and Moon-like eggs, and venture around the solar system to a soundtrack that heavily interpolates Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Outside the dream world, Bingo sleepwalks around the house and engages in hijinks with his exhausted family members, represented in his dream by other planets.
Back in her dream, a shivering Bingo cries to herself, but is quickly transported to the Sun to warm herself where, in real life, her mother cuddles her while she sleeps. But Bingo tells her mother that she’s a big girl now and wants to sleep alone, to which Chilli/the Sun responds, in a moment of tears as the soundtrack swells: “Remember I I will always be there for you, even if you can’t see me, because I love you.
The episode is a frequent topic of conversation among the nearly 50,000 members of the r/bluey subreddit. About a year ago people started discussing how the episode had a 10/10 rating on IMDb, but more recently a campaign has formed to get it into the top 250 list. episodes: if it got 1000 votes, that kept it at a weighted average of 10/10, it would become TV royalty.
TikTok user Walmart Seth Rogen did a follow-up TikTok celebrating the episode’s rise to No. 2 on the list.
Daley Pearson, co-founder of Ludo Studios, who makes Blueytweeted the news with a celebratory screenshot on July 31.
But ‘Sleepytime”s day in the sun was short-lived. Shortly after reaching No. 2, it began to receive negative reviews which knocked it down. As of this writing, “Sleepytime” is ranked 17th. It wasn’t hard to push “Sleepytime” down the charts, as many of the other episodes on the list have tens of thousands more ratings than Bluey, meaning that a few votes would drastically change the episode’s weighted average. In this case, 116 vindictive critics crushed the dreams of Bluey fans everywhere. On the Bluey subreddit, people have speculated that anime fans, especially fans of The attack of the Titansare to blame due to the fandom’s history of retaliatory bombings.
On Twitter, we also talk about BlueyThe recent rise of ‘s as if competing with anime fans, but Motherboard has seen no evidence of who is behind the negative reviews.
The world has been a pretty horrible place for the past few years, with tragedy after tragedy and collective trauma, it’s hard for anyone to keep moving forward. The unfettered joy and wonder of childhood is something to which, in my current stage of life, I am not sufficiently exposed. Watching Bluey gave me a taste of that, making me think deeply about the parent I desperately want to be, despite everything. And that’s something even anime fans can’t take away from me.
Season 3 of Bluey will air on Disney+ in the United States from August 10.