This essay was commissioned by Tomo_also_wonders via Twitch. You too can commission criticism at my Patreon.
Preamble
All modern television animation bends through the vortex of Adventure Time. Bee and PuppyCat is an especially direct descendant; showrunner Natasha Allegri worked on Adventure Time as a storyboard revisionist and character designer. Most famously, she designed the gender-swapped version of Finn and Jake, Fionna and Cake.
Allegri's involvement in Adventure Time allowed her to pitch her own idea for a two-part short on Cartoon Hangover, a questionably sustainable attempt to bring television-quality animated shorts to Youtube. Bee and PuppyCat was as much of a hit as that venue allowed for. To expand those shorts into a series, Allegri and co. broke the Kickstarter record for most successful animation project in the platform's history. After a season of short webisodes, PuppyCat was picked up by Netflix with the promise of much more to come.
Nothing was released for half a decade.
It's impossible to know whether the delay was caused by COVID complications, behind-the-scenes drama, or the laboriousness of any animation process, but it took until 2022 for the next season to arrive on Netflix. The first three episodes of this quasi-reboot cover the same ground as the webseries before breaking into new territory. That makes the 'first season' of Bee and PuppyCat a creative process that has spanned the last decade. This puts it in a unique position to comment on our contemporary era of work culture.
Lazy Labor
He said me haffi work, work, work, work, work, work
-Rihanna, "Work"
Bee and PuppyCat begins with a firing. By 'firing,' I mean a destructive baking mishap at a cat café caused by Deckard (Kent Osborne), close friend and coworker of our hero Bee (Allyn Rachel). Bee's characteristic selflessness makes her take the blame with her boss Howell (Kumail Nanjiani), which leads to a firing. By 'firing,' I mean that Bee is terminated.
Bee is despondent about her termination even though she acted altruistically: "I guess I kinda feel like a loser or something." Bereft, aimless, her walk home is interrupted by a magical portal that spits out PuppyCat, a cute hybrid creature voiced by VOCALOID Oliver in a mélange of coos and trills. From that moment on, the two are inseparable.
Cohabitation comes with its fair share of baggage, and it isn't long until Bee feels the financial pinch of unemployment. Fortunately, PuppyCat's collar bell can transport the pair to Temp Space, where they receive Temp Work from Temp Bot, an anthropomorphic televisual screen a la the Nick Jr. face.
Bee and PuppyCat is a show about the modern workforce. More specifically, it is about a collective orientation to labor and how it domineers our identity. The typical episode structure begins with intimate interactions between denizens of a small island community, the sleepy comfort of which is ruptured by a sudden need for cash. Thus our heroes return again to a temp agency that literally devours its workers. All roads lead to work, a psychic burden so immense that the show must sublimate it as Fantasy Adventure.
This gives Bee and PuppyCat a schizo* vibe, with a harsh divide between domesticity and labor that frequently resists obvious thematic stitching. There is no cozy familiarity in the far-flung reaches of outer space, only alienation. Bee and PuppyCat are assigned demeaning uniforms (though Bee does appreciate the extra pockets). Their complaints are typically shuffled off by the self-absorbed Temp Bot, whose voice actor changes from episode to episode. Once they arrive at their destination, there is either a total lack of supervision, or far too much. In one case, the presence of other Temp Workers spikes Bee's social anxiety, but she realizes the path of least resistance is to just copy what they're doing.
*I don't intend the comparison to belittle a serious mental health disorder. I believe there could be a compelling structural reading of the show through the lens of schizophrenia, though that is not this essay's purview.
There are many allusions to the absurdism of the capitalist supply chain. Bosses hire them for no other reason than to make cruel jokes. Donuts are tossed into portals without any information about where they go or who wants them for what. At one point PuppyCat takes a dump in a pointlessly off-limit space toilet; PuppyCat's magical feces make the toilet immaculate, and the starstruck supervisor thanks them profusely before reporting them for breaking the rules. They are pursued from job to job by menacing pitch-black hands, a stand-in for the omnipresent specter of consumerism.
As our world tumbles deeper into late stage capitalism, the fantasy of job security has been obliterated. Career paths are littered with landmines. Salaried positions have gone the way of the Dodo. Rent, insurance, food, medicine, home repair-- all of these pressing needs must be financed by ungainly collections of part-time jobs, or sketchy self-employment hustles. The result is a labor force that bounces from gig to gig, never settling into a rhythm, never cultivating meaningful expertise, never enjoying a paycheck consistent enough to plan for next week, next month, next year.
Disrepair is an uncommon theme for a cartoon, but it is a primary preoccupation of this universe. Everything is falling apart, nobody knows what they're doing, and all must bend to the whims of a neverending parade of capricious bosses. To quote a duck clock mounted on a bedroom wall,
Remember you love work
Don't stop working
Amidst all this noise exists an ensemble of folks quietly fighting for a sense of purpose, yearning to have time and resources enough to figure out who they really are. The intentional earnestness of these sweet characters becomes a radical act of resistance against the dehumanization of the work force. One such exchange gestures towards the dawning of class consciousness:
"Not everything is about getting paid. Sometimes you just gotta work for your own, you know, thing. Or for other people's thing."
Our protagonist is a dynamic person filled with nuance and the capacity for greatness, but she cannot divert her fate as just another Worker Bee.
Pet Problems
I will become this animal, perfectly adapted to our music halls.
-Andrew Bird, "Anonanimal"
The history of human rights has seen a series of hard-fought ruptures in what we collectively understand to be a human. Abreast of that question is another: what does it mean to be a subject?
Bee and PuppyCat engages with the post-postmodernist struggle of humanimality by building a world of flummoxing anthropomorphizations. TVs with faces, plants with mouth, bugs with personality. In one of the show's best scenes, PuppyCat bickers with a cricket who calls him ugly until PuppyCat stomps the bug into the grass. It responds, "The ground is soft... and my body is hard... and you're still ugly." Another memorable scene features a surreal interaction between Crispin (Deckard's brother, played by Tom Sandoval) and the vehicle that he's repairing. After he stubs his toe and winds up to take a swing at the vehicle, the clown (?) cricket (?) motorcycle (?) telepathically (?) exclaims, "Don't hit me. Don't hit me. Crispin, don't hit me, you big ol' weirdo!" At this point, Crispin starts punching a pillow and the scene becomes about managing negative feelings.
Animals and objects are portrayed as unwitting accomplices in human drama, sometimes wielding their own agency but always filled up to the brim with human projections.
These threads all commingle in the figure of PuppyCat himself. He and Bee's relationship is mediated by money. This is evoked in a recurring question: Who pays? PuppyCat is implicated when groceries need to be bought, or when he runs up the bill on mobile game microtransactions. Indeed, it is PuppyCat's role to transport them to Temp Space for menial labor. The temporary nature of the work is refracted by the temporary nature of their relationship: PuppyCat believes he is only there for a short while to escape the gaze of the intergalactic agents who pursue him. He resists the idea that they are building a home together, and represses the complications of what that means. All this comes to a head in an episode about his stress eating, which functions as an avoidance tool. For reasons more thematic than logical, PuppyCat's stress eating literally prevents him from resolving into a single form. In an economy of uncertainty, with our roles and wallets evershifting, the plausibility of commitment recedes like a ghost.
PuppyCat is dumb and violent and mean, but he's also a magical space prince AND outlaw AND dog AND cat. The show obliterates the idea that what we are is one coherent thing. Instead, our aspects are interdependent and contingent, vying for prominence, shading us into complexity. Our title characters' relationship oscillates from moment to moment: Parent and child? Owner and Pet? Roommates? Siblings? Every character in the show carries an overflowing capacity for containing many selves. "Part of me is sad, all the other parts are confused though."
Identity, subjectivity, perspective, environment, these factors are all more variable than we would prefer. This makes it hard to know how to hold each other accountable, but it also makes it possible to play. As per an old man who insists on visiting the Cat Cafe even when it's closed, "I come here to get away from my dog." Our roles are not absolute. Sometimes you need a break from your beloved canine companions, sometimes you need to thumb your nose at your space vigilante status, and sometimes your pet needs to help you pay rent.
Brutish Beauty
But we don't do things because they are easy hm? We do them because they are profitable.
The above quote is unattributed in my notes. Possibly it came from this very show. In any case, it exemplifies the aesthetic attitude of Bee and PuppyCat. Cuteness, cruelty, and disaster are all treated with the same casual approach.
Take the show's utter disregard for doors. Another sibling of Deckard, Cas (Ashly Burch), has her wall exploded by her former wrestling rival Toast (Terri Hawkes) who is seeking honorable vengeance. The Kool-Aid method remains Toast's entry of choice for the rest of the season. Even after she moves into the same house. Even after her and other sibling Merlin (Doug Smith) conceive a child (????). And she isn't the only character who does this. And the show chooses the penultimate episode to finally acknowledge the pragmatic financial ramifications of a destroyed wall.
The island is an ecosystem prone to thoughtless acts of violence, though they never feel that bad. Temp Space is an even more essentialized form of this brutish beauty. These Mario Galaxy-esque planets are a pastel phantasmagoria of surprising physics and inscrutable cultural norms. If the sleepy island vibes are a lot like Animal Crossing, the Temp Space sequences are more akin to the dangerous but deeply felt worldbuilding of Hayao Miyazaki (who is clearly a heavy influence on many of the character designs). The show never strays from this anti-tension between perilous circumstances and lackadaisical attitudes, at least until its final moments.
The effect is one of going through a stressful workday numbed by countless previous stressful workdays. Life or death situations are shrugged off. A failing business is met with a sigh. Discoveries of intergalactic life and faster-than-light travel are taken in stride. This intentional softness works as a sort of coping mechanism that lets the audience swallow heavy themes. It's a dreamy vibe, and it means that the comedy bits don't always hit, but they never flop either. They're nestled.
It stresses me out, if I'm being honest. My anxiety stems from the uncertainty over when these brutalities will finally carry consequence. The show is at its very best when this hidden melancholy breaks into the foreground, as with PuppyCat's wondrous dreams. His tragic space prince origins are unspooled to us in gorgeous, ethereal silhouettes, a whole universe of backstory that exists within the petty and inattentive PuppyCat. Perhaps the show is trying to teach us something about processing the drudgery of life at the cusp of apocalypse.
Weeping World
And so I cry sometimes / When I'm lying in bed / Just to get it all out / What's in my head ... And I scream at the top of my lungs / What's going on?
-4 Non Blondes, "What's Up?" (via that He-Man video)
Undergirding these spiraling economic anxieties is a low-buzzing but all-encompassing environmental terror. In my lifetime, we have gone from spirited debate about whether the climate is changing to a deranged embrace of our unnatural unraveling. This generation was dealt a dying hand and is refused the opportunity to do anything but rearrange the cards.
Our lack of intergenerational guidance runs through Bee and PuppyCat in the form of absent parents. This absence melds with the overproximity of environmental disaster in the form of Violet (Jennifer Tilly), the mother of a small child named Cardamon (Alexander James Rodriguez) who has been comatose on life support for an unknown period of time. Her duties as landlord have fallen to the adorable Cardamon, who approaches everything with a severe know-it-all attitude to trick himself into believing he's in control. His job of maintaining his mother's properties grows more and more complicated due to incidental cross-pollination from Temp Space: after ingesting a wish-giving donut, Violet's unconscious tears transform into a sort of spherical magical waste that cannot be properly disposed of due to chaotic effects on the environment (the aforementioned plants with mouths, etc.). Meanwhile, Bee's father does experiments on another planet, or lives in a box that repairs her robot arm, or something. Oh yeah, Bee is a robot.
So Mother Nature is passive and tainted, and Father Science is a derelict tinkerer. Our characters are left with a mess. They wouldn't have the faintest idea how to fix things even if they weren't too busy with interpersonal drama, financial struggles, and depressive laziness to problem solve.
Cardamon is a sympathetic figure, perhaps the most sympathetic figure in the show. This is dissonant with his role as landlord, the most class-antagonistic "profession" this side of cop. But the commentary isn't one of 'landlord with a heart of gold.' Cardamon is actually quite demanding and officious, between bouts of kindness. Rather, Cardamon's story is about the ways people fall into hierarchical roles because they don't know how else to be responsible for their surroundings. Cardamon's need to do right by his absent mother even manifests as an anxious tendency toward tattletaling, which pits the rest of his elementary class firmly against him.
Again and again, the same question emerges: Why aren't the adults doing anything?
Millennial Malaise
This is what art is to my generation.
That quote is from the brother of the fine fellow who commissioned this essay. I tend to be skeptical of generational discourse. So often it boils down to ridiculous and arbitrary dividing lines that make us unnecessarily hostile towards the experience of others. "90s kids will remember" as an aesthetic preoccupation rarely engages with the tectonic cultural, geopolitical, and technological shifts that contort the ways we relate to one another.
Bee and PuppyCat is a successful exploration of the Millennial diaspora precisely because that is never what it tries to be. It avoids reducing its subject matter to easily digestible truths. Indeed, PuppyCat is so committed to its "Worldbuilding > Lore" mentality that many of its plot revelations end up cast aside, sloppily integrated, or entirely forgotten. I quickly realized I had to stop trying to figure out what was going on if I was to enjoy myself. You don't watch Bee and PuppyCat to 'find out what happens next.' You watch it to wonder.
I found myself wondering about birthdays. How could I not? There are two straight episodes featuring a surprise party, making for three episodes about birthdays in a four episode stretch. That's either terribly lazy writing, or a pointed motif. Birthdays do carry a lot of symbolic weight. The purpose of the day is to celebrate the continued life of our loved ones, but it is inextricably bound up in commercialism. Meanwhile, the existential melancholy of aging gets buffeted by the immediate social pressures of the ceremony. Birthdays are often a forced reckoning. Where are you at, what are you doing, and are you enjoying yourself enough? We see characters react to their milestone with a whole range of emotional responses from apathetic repression to overzealous enthusiasm. Birthdays are well-described by the title of episode 1, "again for the first time."
There is a productive lack that comes from falling short of expectations. The experience of being a worker in the early twenty-first century is one of near-total alienation. We are thrust into a system that we don't remotely understand, one whose reasons for being have sunk into the gloom of history, or have been intentionally suppressed. Just as in life, we rarely find out why things are the way they are. We are simply told how to fit in. Additional inquiry is met with hostility. We are left with the same question as Cardamon: Why aren't the adults doing anything?
Yet even in the lurch of bewilderment and exploitation, these characters are soft with each other. There's beauty to be salvaged from malaise, in the time spent waiting for work, in the shock of a broken computer, in the awkward small talk during a shift break. Hell, Bee occasionally takes loved ones back to her places of employment to have some fun!
Bee and PuppyCat is about the omnipresence of oppressive systems, but really it's about how they don't define you. Even the grabby hand villains are just doing their jobs like the rest of us. "Caring is the first step toward poor workmanship and disaster," advises a corporate training stooge. Well, maybe poor workmanship and disaster can be the first steps toward love.
How silly would it be to shrink away from radical honesty and solidarity when we are all teetering on the precipice of existential obliteration? With more open discussions about mental health, deterritorializing politics, and worker's rights becoming the norm, Millennials are waking up to that very revelation. Or revolution.
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