Bluey, the Unreliable Narrator?
Currently there is no bigger thing in our house than a fun little cartoon out of Australia called "Bluey." Emmalyn (my nearly four-year-old) loves it. Marieta and I laugh and cry at it frequently. Even Elliana (our five-month-old) loves the music and steals a glance every now and then. Beyond being a lot of fun, it is incredibly heartfelt and emotionally spot on. Currently all 50+, seven-minute episodes are available on Disney Plus and needless to say we have watched them all, multiple times.
Marieta identified immediately how much the show's ethos lines up with our style of playful and attachment parenting. Bluey is the six-year-old playfully curious first born kiddo, Bingo is the four-year-old Bluey doppelgänger with a very big heart, Chilli is the too-smart-for–her–own–good, cautious, free spirit Mom and finally, the father dog "Bandit" is very much a variation of me; fun-loving, down for all kinds of silly games and adventures, and maybe cutting a corner here and there. Each character gets their chance to shine and as the episodes roll on you learn a lot about their different personalities. If you'll allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for the rest of this post... you might learn about the secret storytelling frame of entire show.
By Episode 12, "Bob Bilby," the viewer has learned a great deal about the show. Bluey is the main character, but definitely not a dominate main character. She is not in every scene, but appears in every episode. In the preceding 11 episodes the show has played with magical realism, oodles of childhood wonder, family fun, self discovery, extreme playful parenting, and childhood self-discovery. Bob Bilby on its face is a story about not spending too much time on time wasters such as playing video games, streaming videos, and watching cartoons (a meta-commentary I love). The real world is much more interesting and is where real memories are made and personal character formed. An important lesson on its own, but after my fourth or fifth viewing I really think the show is telling us a secret about Bluey and her family.
So if with those stepping stones in place to narration theory (I don't know if that is what people call it, but that's what I'm gonna go with), the viewer could extrapolate that the entire show is actually an older version of Bluey recounting her childhood. Feel free to close this tab at any moment, but for fun IF that is the case, let's re-examine the evidence; Bluey's Dad is so devoted he is willing to be virtually beaten to a pulp, play any wild game his children can dream up, is never at work (a joke that is repeated a few times in the show), and sacrifices practically everything about himself outside of being a father. Also, he is able to fix any problem either before it festers or immediately after it occurs. What does that sound like? Well personally it sounds like the rose colored glasses of nostalgia.
Is there evidence to support Bandit isn't the Uber Dad? Well that's where Bob Bilby comes into play. In that episode, Bingo is the main character and brings home a puppet from school that she is supposed to show a good time, then return to class and share a photo album of their adventures. Early in this adventure Bluey and Bingo introduce the puppet to their tablet and watching videos on it. For the entire second act of the episode they are not only glued to the tablet, but Chilli and Bandit secretly snap photos of their kids zombified by the tablet. Eventually Chilli surprises the kids with her secret photos and they are forlorn that they wasted their time with Bob Bilby and spend the rest of the episode rectifying their mistake. Story over right? For Bluey, Bingo, and Bob sure, but if you look at tablet time photos you also see Bandit is in almost every shot simply looking at his phone.
No one can provide 100% of their attention to entertaining kids. We all need a pressure relief and in the 21st century that is frequently stealing a few moments looking at our smartphones. But Bandit deep lounge, phone locked in every picture? Maybe Bluey's belief of her near-perfect father is a slightly skewed by the creep of time. Maybe he's just a fun Dad who slacks just as much as the rest of us. The pictures Chilli took are physical evidence, not memories. So maybe Bluey is an UNRELIABLE narrator. If so, that makes the show even better!
Some of my favorite programs are either told as recounts of show events like "How I Met Your Mother" or were originally conceived around this potential like Scrubs. In How I Met Your Mother, the main character Ted Mosby is recounting his wild 20s and 30s to his kids as the years before he found and fell in love with their mother. One of Ted's best friends and romantic rivals is Barney, a sexual hound (and by any measure, a criminal), but since it is Ted telling the story there is a very good chance he is subjectively painting Barney as the villain. Maybe Barney was just a Cad. In Scrubs, the main character of JD narrates every aspect of the show, including storylines he is not even involved with. One episode ends with JD writing his narration into a journal. Recently on the official show rewatch podcast, the creator of Scrubs has revealed there was at one point a plan to have the entire show be a flashback recount of JD's early doctoring years. Both of these shows use their unreliable, subjective narrators to heighten the fun and amplify laughs.
If Bluey is a subjective, unreliable narrator that would explain so much of the zanny fun and story telling tricks in the show. This shouldn't be seen as a criticism of the program at all, if anything the exact opposite. I haven't done any research on the creators or writers of Bluey, but in season one alone they have used an incredible amount of storytelling tricks, including an episode where the story is told in reverse. With the unreliable narrator layer tacked on top of each episode you get the chance to return and examine every episode for narrative flights of childhood fancy and consider why some experiences become ingrained in our lives, forever.
Bluey season two has already aired in Australia and is creeping onto basic cable in the US. We don't have cable, but my parents do and we've been able to see a handful of season two episodes. Season two takes the fun and emotion of the show to entirely new level. Fans across the U.S. are eager to find out when the new season will hit Disney Plus and whenever it does, you better believe I'll be watching with bloodhound like intensity, trying to sniff out another layer of storytelling wonder.
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