Top Ten 2022

Film is suffering an existential crisis. Screens, audiences, and the number of film studios are shrinking. Vultures herald the death of the medium, just as vultures have done during every other major shift in form.

Film has responded with an outburst of spectacle. The megaconglomerates keep churning out lazy movies 'too big to fail,' but they are countervailed by a resurgence of passionate films of substance. RRR, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Top Gun: Maverick, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Nope, even Moonfall are populist films whose artistry demands the biggest screen possible. To be sure, they can be enjoyed in miniature, but part of you may walk away pondering what you could have had...

A medium develops in conversation with itself, and we are blessed to be shepherded through these tumultuous times by the guiding hands of Steven Spielberg, Jordan Peele, Todd Field, David Cronenberg, and all the other great masters of the motion picture.

The Worker Bee and the Puppy Cat

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.