This is probably perhaps my longest review of a series ever, and it took me quite a while to write it down, because I had so many thoughts of it that keeps coming out left and right. I also did an awful lot of editing to keep things organized, and with my very little spare time, that's quite a lot. But it's finally done and I'm laying it out there. And before I continue, this will contain spoilers, so if you want none of that, do not proceed beyond this point.
Some of you may know this already, but I have a biased negative opinion regarding Bee & Puppycat, the 5-6 minute 10-episode mini-series from Frederator Studios (now known as Wow! Unlimited) and created by Natasha Allegri. The series ran from 2013 to 2016. So that's 3 years for roughly an hour of animated content in total that costs nearly $900,000, from the same studio behind Adventure Time and The Fairly Oddparents. I don't know about you, but I find that an hour of content over 3 years is a very, very bad deal. If this were done by single animator or a really small staff, I'd get it. But this is Frederator Studios. They're not be as big as Disney's Animation Studios, for example. But they aren't exactly a really small production company, either.
Honestly, I don't give a damn on Bee & Puppycat anymore because of the incredibly long production time, of which I do not have the patience to wait that long, and move on. But after the last episodes are finally released through Kickstarter backers, and later on the VRV app, I want to put the nail in the coffin as to how much I absolutely hate this series, and be done with it for good. But before I give my all-out rant, a look back at how it came to this.
Natasha Allegri was a former storyboarder for Adventure Time in the early seasons, and is credited as the creator of the characters Fiona & Cake, the gender-bent version of Finn & Jake from Adventure Time. In fact, Fiona & Cake's first appearance in Adventure Time was the most watched episode in the show's history, before being toppled by the two-part Season 5 premiere. This is in spite of the fact that leaks of the episode came out prior to the broadcast release.
In 2012, Frederator Studios launched the Cartoon Hangover channel on Youtube to show off some of the series of shorts from their staff. One of the shorts that became a hit with the channel was Bravest Warriors by Pendelton Ward, the creator of Adventure Time. Despite its success, Bravest Warriors was met with a series of problems, but that is another story.
Later, Natasha Allegri's pilot for Bee & Puppycat was released. It's about a woman in her 20s who, after losing her job, befriends Puppycat - a creature who, as the name suggests, is a cross between a puppy and a cat. The duo then go on a series of misadventures as temp workers taking odd jobs across the universe. The pilot also had a bit of lore with Puppycat's short backstory, being once a human and an outlaw cursed to becoming Puppycat, after his fling with the Space Princess turned south.
Looking back, I would desribe the Bee & Puppycat pilot as "the Steven Universe before Steven Universe". The pilot for Steven Universe actually went online around 2 weeks after the Bee & Puppycat pilot. Bee & Puppycat was such a hit among viewers and critics that a Kickstarter campaign was formed to fund additional episodes. They managed get close to $900,000 for 8 episodes when the campaign ended on October 15, 2013. They decided to stretch it to 10 episodes, later on.
On November 6, 2014, just well a bit over a year after the Kickstarter ended, the first two episodes of the Bee & Puppycat series premiered on Cartoon Hangover, with the next two episodes coming out the following month. This is when things get pretty bad.
Now I made a first impressions review of the first 4 episodes back in 2014. The short version is everything that made the original pilot great was tossed aside and replaced with a virtually different product. Changes in character design, changes in animation, changes in the tone and writing, etc. All of this at the behest of Natasha Allegri herself, saying she really wasn't satisfied with the way the original pilot turned out, and thus made these changes. Defenders of Bee & Puppycat would probably say the changes are no different than in the case of Steven Universe when it first aired on Cartoon Network. I agree that the end product of Steven Universe differs greatly from the pilot, and in turns out for the better. We've seen these with many pilots for popular shows like Gravity Falls and Adventure Time. But in my opinion, the changes for Bee & Puppycat ended up being the opposite of its intended result. Allegri should've retained everything that made the pilot great instead of doing these changes.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it.", so the saying goes.
And then came the waiting. If you're a Kickstarter backer, you'd have to wait until August of 2015 for episodes 5 and 6 to come out. For non-backers, 5 & 6 won't come out until November of 2016. That's a solid 1-2 years for roughly 10 minutes of animation! And there's still 4 episodes to go! Does Frederator expect the Bee & Puppycat viewers to still be excited for the remaining 4 episodes after waiting this long? Apparently, Frederator believes so, as the final four episodes of "Season 1", according to them, finally went available to Kickstarter members in November of 2016, while non-backers can watch it on Cartoon Hangover's new premium channel on the VRV app. A general release is planned sometime in 2017.
By comparison, it takes 9 months to complete an 11-minute episode of Adventure Time, according to Pendleton Ward in an inverview at the A.V. Club. However, that production time is due mainly to the Adventure Time staff making several episodes at once. Otherwise, the time it takes to make an episode would've been much shorter. 6-9 months is also the standard timeframe to produce one Anime season in Japan.
What I'm saying is it takes a lot of time and effort to produce an animated work. And I should know, as I've done a few myself with the fan-made Kunio-kun series and even with pre-made sprites and Flash, it's still time consuming. That said, proper management of time and resources, a diligent staff, and a good direction of the production overall, will result in an incredible piece of animation that is well worth the wait. It took Studio TRIGGER 2 years and around $600,000 to complete their 2nd film of Little Witch Academia, to so much praise from viewers and critics alike, that a TV series is already planned for a 2017 release. That same dedication and proper management also allowed Studio Madhouse to produce and release the One Punch Man anime series in just 7 months after its announcement to a huge acclaim.
As for Bee & Puppycat? It had none of that. Poor management, a not-so dedicated staff, and so on. And the result is a very poor product that truly deserves its criticism. If it takes 3 years for Allegri and Frederator to produce an hour of animated content, they should have just made it a film instead rather than a series of shorts, at least to mitigate the flak myself, and others like me, give Bee & Puppycat.
Instead, Frederator wanted to capitalize on Bee & Puppycat's popularity and tried to push it as hard as possible to everyone's faces. So we got the first 4 episodes brought out that wasn't very good at all. Then Frederator doubled-down by announcing Bee & Puppycat related merchandise, which I would assume it didn't do so well because I have not heard of anything from the Bee & Puppycat line that ended up being best sellers. Anyone out there can tell me how well the "Butt-Cleavage Crab" T-Shirt has sold?
As for Cartoon Hangover's channel on VRV, which costs $3 a month, aside from watching every released episode of Bee & Puppycat and Bravest Warriors, what else is there? Cartoon Hangover hasn't released any new animated content for over a year. I don't know about you guys, but I'm not going to binge-watch every "107 Facts of X", episode for my $3 subscription fee. Did I mention as well as that VRV is currently only available in the US?
I could go on all day, but I assume at this point you get it - Frederator just shot themselves in the foot with how they run things. It's why Bravest Warriors is now being co-funded and co-produced by Nelvana, now Corus Entertainment - the same company behind shows for REALLY young kids like Clifford The Big Red Dog; The Care Bears; Chuck and Friends; Handy Manny. You can tell where I am going with this.
Bee & Puppcat is already a done deal, though Cartoon Hangover refers to the 10 episodes as being Season 1. If they are seriously going to produce a 2nd Season of Bee of Puppycat, forget it! I'm not going to wait another 3 years just to watch another hour of shorts that's just as bad, if not worse than what we have right now.
Now that I'm done ranting with how the series was produced and the awful way it's managed, it's time for me to rant on the series itself. I'm going to skip the first 4 since I've talked about it before already, and instead focus on the remaining episodes.
One of the things that got many people interested in the pilot for Bee & Puppycat is the latter's backstory, and viewers are hoping to learn more of that particular part and its resolution. Aside from a reference or two here and there, unfortunately, the series has never bothered to look into Puppycat's story again and is sending a subtle, yet cold message to the viewer that we should get used to it in that Puppycat will remain in his form for life. If this is what Allegri intended after all, why bother with the backstory then? Just have Puppycat be Puppycat and make it a slice-of-life adventure, and it'll be fine.
I personally never read any of the comics of Bee & Puppycat, so I don't know if any of Puppycat's backstory was explored in the format, or if the comics are canon to the shorts. All I know is that the comics was cancelled after 11 issues. This is according to Boom! Studios that publishes the comic series itself.
At any rate, the remaining episodes focuses entirely on Bee to reveal that she is not what she appears to be, and that she is actually an android. Watching the first episode onwards, Bee's backstory has been planned from the beginning. However, nothing is resolved from that either as if Allegri and her staff intended that part of Bee's story to be used in the next Season. As I said before, no one is going to wait another three years for that arc to come up. She should have just lay it out on this series in full. Instead, she and the writers decided to bring additional backstories regarding the minor characters and a good portion of it is dedicated to parts that are completely non-sensical.
There's this one scene that features a story of an octopus mistaking a full flock of long hair of a princess as being another octopus and falling in love with it, that ends in a tragedy. Apparently, that whole segment is just to explain how Jellyfish was made and it lasted nearly 3 minutes. What does it have to do with the overall narrative of the series? NOTHING AT ALL!
Another scene that came out earlier is of a character named "Toast", voiced by Terri Hawkes, the American voice of Sailor Moon from 1995 to 1998. Toast pops out of nowhere challenging Deckard's sister to a wrestling match for the title of the lowest-ranked wrestler. Again, this has nothing to do with the main narrative.
Finally we have Cardomon, the child landlord of Bee, who has his own backstory of his mother in a comatose state. We never know what happened, and I suspect again this was to be reserved for the next season. As for that guy from "The Room", that has a role in this series, he only got a cameo. All this combined with the eyecatches by Ko Takeuchi, the artist behind the Wario Ware games makes it seem like the show has gone over the budget. If true, that would explain the campaign to sell merchandise, and having the series up on VRV - meaning it had the same financial issues as Bravest Warriors and is struggling to get out of the red.
There is just so many opportunities for Allegri and her staff to put out all the lore they want and have it resolved in these final episodes. But instead, they want to introduce these lores, tease it for the next season, and have random stuff happening to fill in the rest of the runtime. It just feels like a total waste.
If Natasha Allegri and the production staff at Frederator Studios wanted this to be a slice-of-life series, then make it a slice-of-life series. If they want this to be a lore-based story, make it so. But you can't switch one with the other for its own sake! Rebecca Sugar has carefully planned out the stories for Steven Universe and was able to produce slice-of-life episodes that can be seen as is, while also providing an overarching plot. It's a style she learned in Adventure Time, and has been applied as well in Regular Show, and by extension, the Amazing World of Gumball. Allegri's approach to this is tease after tease with nothing to fill in for it other than say "Hey, look at these cute character designs! Would you love them for me, please?"
Eye Candy only applies if the animation itself is to be seen as a piece of actual art, or as a piece of entertainment value. Bee & Puppycat fails to achieve any of that. At the very least in the final episodes, they finally fixed the color and lighting, so I get to watch those episodes without having eye strain, unlike the previous ones. Unfortunately, that's the only thing I give good marks for this series.
Bee & Puppycat had a lot of potential to be among the many animated works that would've made its mark in the 2010s alongside the likes of The Amazing World of Gumball and Gravity Falls. It sadly just falls apart from production to distribution, and the final product after years of waiting ends up being a complete waste of time and money, especially the latter for Kickstarter backers. There's no justication for all of this mess. And if Natasha Allegri and Frederator are serious of a Season 2, I'm left with cringe and disgust rather than with any excitement at all.
If after all of this, you still enjoy Bee & Puppycat, I've got nothing against you for that. Do what you will. As for me, I'm done with Natasha Allegri and her staff, and I'm done with Bee & Puppycat and I refuse to invest my time and money for a Season 2. I would rather invest that on the new seasons of One Punch Man and Attack on Titan, because those works will deliver and it will be worth the wait. Bee & Puppycat isn't worth anything at all,
so I give it a final rating of 1 out of 5.
