We’ve seen the Bluey movie and yes it will make you cry
The undisputed number one children’s show in the world is about to drop a feature-length episode and spoiler alert: there will be tears. Melanie Zanetti – the voice behind Bluey’s supercool mum Chilli – takes us behind the scenes.
In a suburban Brisbane backyard, five young siblings have painted their entire bodies green, except for their faces, which are flowers – a rose on the girl and daisies on the boys. Another brother, spared the verdurous coating, is digging holes around the lawn for the flower children to plant themselves in. He will then proceed to whack at them with an imaginary axe.
Grisly axe-play aside (or maybe that’s part of it), the scene sounds plucked straight from an episode of Bluey – the kind of game the titular seven-year-old blue heeler and her kid sister Bingo would rope their eternally patient dad, Bandit, into.
Well, it’s not too many steps removed. It’s Melanie Zanetti, who voices mum Chilli in the series, recalling a typical scene from her early childhood before she grew up and moved to Los Angeles – where her career as a jobbing actor now runs parallel to her role voicing a character in the biggest children’s TV show in the world.
When we catch up with Zanetti over a Zoom call, she is sitting in a blindingly lit Airbnb in Beverly Hills, a neighbourhood where she has spent most of her time these past seven years, light years from the “wonderful” suburban childhood full of dress-ups and potion-making with her siblings which helped imbue her role as Chilli with a soul-hugging warmth. We’re here to talk about the feature-length episode of Bluey titled The Sign – “It’s very exciting!” she says, “it’s a masterful episode” – but also about something much bigger going on with the show, which has become a cultural juggernaut.
Dressed in a slinky floral shirt, her long brown hair bouncing with the lustre of a conditioner commercial, Zanetti is undoubtedly glamorous – a revelation to millions when she appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last year, radiating star quality as prime-time’s famous host gushed about the little kids’ show from Australia that has stormed the US.
“It’s a giant phenomenon,” Fallon raved ahead of the series’ live stage show at Madison Square Garden, and following the announcement that there would be a Bluey float at the nationally significant Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “The best show on TV, it’s game-changing.”
Although Zanetti has said “people say I don’t look like how they expected” (her alter ego is a flustered blue heeler mum who works in airport security), with her crisp transatlantic cadence she also doesn’t sound a whole lot like her character in conversation. Her co-star, Dave McCormack, on the other hand, seated beside her on Fallon’s sofa, is unmistakably Bandit. “I’ve seen more of you guys and heard more of your voices than I’ve heard my own voice in my household,” Fallon told the pair. “The kids aren’t even watching, it’s just me watching.”
It’s a quip – but there’s plenty of truth in it. The size of the audience Bluey commands globally (it’s been sold to 60 countries and dubbed in 20 languages) means it’s not just children who are devoted. Parents and even childless adults have fallen under the show’s spell. On TikTok, on Reddit, on YouTube, at a Jonas Brothers concert, these seven-minute episodes soothe something troubled in the soul of grown-ups.
Zanetti recalls a young adult fan who approached her at a comic convention last year and told her: “I’ve had a really difficult childhood, and this show is reparenting me.” And another woman who said, “I never thought I could be a mother, because of how I was treated, and I didn’t know any different, and this show has made me feel like I can be a mum.”
Zanetti bats away tears. “Oh my god, I’m going to cry.”
There comes a moment in the life of many a hit TV show when someone decides it should be a movie. It can be a cash grab, a genuine drive to galvanise the audience around a moment, or a bit of showing off: Look! We’ve made it! Some of them succeed (Star Trek II, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut), some fail (Sex and the City) and sometimes the jury is still out 17 years later (The Simpsons Movie).
But when the TV show in question is Bluey, and even when the “feature-length” episode is a mere 28 minutes long (still four times longer than a regular episode) and it’s been made for television, there are some certainties.
First, it will be a hit. It’s the number one show on the BBC’s children’s channel, eclipsing homegrown shows in the UK, while in Australia it continues to break its own records; in the US, it has topped the streaming charts (that’s kids and adult shows), beating Grey’s Anatomy and re-runs of the perennially popular Suits and Friends.
The other certainty is this: all but the blackest hearts will cry.
Cultural critics have pondered the emotional resonance of Bluey in the pages of The New Yorker and British GQ. The Atlantic stated: “The emotional specificity is just as crucial as the precision of the physical humour, and the density of the world building. Bluey is the kind of lively show a toddler anywhere on Earth can understand, but it’s also a particular representation of contemporary parenting.”
In December, the UK’s Financial Times ran a story headlined “How Australia’s Bluey conquered children’s entertainment”, noting more people watched the launch of a new Bluey episode titled Cricket than the peak audience for Australia’s win against India in the World Test Championship final, which was on at the same time (563,000 viewers vs 524,000).
New YorkMagazine heralded the arrival of the second season on Disney+ back in 2021 by declaring Bluey “The best kids’ show of our time”. Last year, the title’s cooler, sister site The Cut followed up with the question: “Why is TikTok obsessed with the kids’ show Bluey?”
Dreamed up by Australian animator Joe Brumm with creative input from his wife Suzy, who is also a storyboard artist, and inspiration from their two children and pet dogs, Brumm took the show to Ludo Studio in Brisbane to make Bluey from scratch, recruiting animators, designers and more storyboarders. It was initially developed by the ABC and Screen Queensland with Brumm writing the scripts and directing episodes as he strived for proof of concept. As it took off, everyone came to the party. Guest stars over the seasons have included Rose Byrne, Natalie Portman and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Of Miranda, Bluey producer Sam Moor says: “We obviously didn’t want to ask him to change his accent, so you have to find a part that would legitimately, authentically be an American accent – so we made him a horse.”)
Although the ABC has the Australian broadcast rights, the BBC won global licensing and commercial rights at the commissioning stage. In 2019, the BBC flogged the global distribution licence to Disney. On Monday, Disney and the BBC (which airs Bluey in the UK) will release the first trailer for The Sign; guest stars include Deborah Mailman, Rove McManus (who has publicly campaigned for a role in the show since 2020) and Joel Edgerton. “As a father, I watch more Bluey than any single other thing on TV,” Edgerton tells The Weekend Australian Magazine. “Bandit puts all other Dads to shame … Turns out playing a small part in a Bluey episode is giving me a lot of cred in my household, and secretly fills me with pride and excitement.”
We visit Ludo Studio, in an unmarked office building in Fortitude Valley, for a screening in a room lined with couches and a full-size version of the watermelon rug that appears in the Heelers’ family home. Producer Sam Moor sits alongside us, first to watch a new episode titled Ghostbasket, whichwill air a week before The Sign and which, in another first for the show, ends on a cliffhanger. “People are going to go crazy when they see that,” says Moor at the end of Ghostbasket. She is laughing, but tears have formed at the corners of her eyes from the poignant storyline. The studio is emotionally invested in the show, but it’s also worth noting that it has kept costs under control – despite 100-plus merchandising deals and the spending that would ordinarily follow. The BBC has trumpeted its commercial success from Bluey sales, with a rise in revenue from merchandising from 2022-2023. (Asked about the deal that cut out Australia’s taxpayer-funded broadcaster, ABC managing director David Anderson told Senate estimates: “We don’t make money out of Bluey,” adding: “What Bluey does is provide joy to children and families all over the country and now all over the world. And that would be priceless.”)
Has the show’s budget increased since launch? “The production budget? Not massively, no,” replies Moor. “We’ve increased the team each series, to basically make it achievable. But it’s not a massive budget. I mean, animation is expensive: it takes time, and it takes a lot of people. At the end of series three, I think we were about 45 or 48 people – and then we put on a few extra people forThe Sign, because that was the big one.”
Libbie Doherty was in the ABC team as commissioning editor when Bluey was greenlit in 2017, and is now an executive producer. The “big one”, says Doherty, is “a really great milestone in the Bluey canon”. From the broadcaster’s perspective, coming up with the idea was as simple as “‘Oh yeah, I think we’re ready for a special now!’” says Doherty. “That was a great moment, and then Joe [Brumm] said, ‘Oh, I’m going to need to think about it … I’ve got to come up with a good idea.’ That took a little while – but really, from the first draft of the script, I just absolutely knew it was going to be very, very special.”
We’ve sworn not to reveal any spoilers but the chain of events that are set off from Ghostbasket to The Sign are a culmination of the 151 episodes to date. For the fans, there’s joy and devastation. As with most Bluey episodes, the narrative veers from uproarious fun to tender vulnerability, and explores the consequences of everyday adult decisions on children. All viewers will relate to the themes of upheaval, disruption and change. In a sense, it’s a return to appointment viewing – even if that appointment is at 8am on ABC-TV on a Sunday – but of course, there’s a constant eye to streaming. “From a network point of view, those specials are often really great family co-viewing,” explains Doherty, “on a weekend night when you’re a bit tired, and you don’t want the kids to watch a whole 90-minute film – but maybe a half-hour film, a lullaby and maybe a single Bluey episode, then off to bed. It’s very much a viewing convention that works well with that preschool audience.”
In Puppets, a beloved Season Three Bluey episode, Bandit uses a hand puppet called Unicorse – an uncouth, smart-mouthed unicorn with a penchant for kicking against authority. The girls play along with him, even while knowing he’s a toy. At the end of the day, Unicorse tucks Bluey into bed. An exchange follows:
Unicorse: I’ve been thinking: how can you be sure you’re not a puppet?
Bluey: [giggles]Don’t be silly! Night, Unicorse!
As Bluey closes her eyes to sleep, the camera gradually pulls out to show the user interface of CelAction2D, the program in which the series is animated and the hand of Joe Brumm, working his magic. It’s the only time the show has ever broken the “fourth wall”, piercing the veil between the world the animators work so hard to create and the very place they’re providing an escape from. From the outset, Libbie Doherty was not fond of the idea. “It’s one of those rules – we don’t often break the magic for preschoolers,” she says. “It’s not our job as a network to spoil Christmas, or break those paradigms. There’s no network in the world that would do that, because that’s the job of a parent.”
So even before the episode was made, robust discussions were had. Producer Sam Moor says: “I think Joe would love to inspire the next generation of animators – and that’s what that [decision] was driven from, to show kids, ‘This is how it’s made.’ There was a lot of conversation around whether it was going to upset the kids, who’d go, ‘Oh, my gosh, Bluey’s not real!’ But we were absolutely certain that no, this was the right thing to do.”
“Once we saw it all come together, we agreed that it was worth putting out,” says Doherty. “The producers were right, and I was wrong – which is OK.” It’s fair to say there’s some close management of this unicorn of a TV show. “It’s really good sometimes to be challenged,” says Doherty, “and make sure that we’re not overcorrecting.”
Beth Harvey, the show’s animation director, was a fan of the puppets idea. “I thought, ‘Well, if I was a kid, I would love to see that,” says Harvey, who recalls studying the special features and DVD extras of Disney and Studio Ghibli films to learn more about the craft when she was growing up.
Harvey, 32, is sitting in a cafe in the city’s east, where we’re surrounded by the quotidian symbols of Brisbane suburbia that Bluey renders so vividly: a family of magpies warbling to one another in a garden bed, garbage truck drivers empty recycling bins, and a brief rain shower that forces dog walkers to take cover under the eaves. Near our table, several mums with babes in arms chatter away over coffee. They may not know it yet, but Bluey is about to enter their homes in a big way.
Harvey loved drawing as a kid and was keen to pursue it as a career. She met Joe Brumm in 2010 as a second-year animation student at Griffith University. “He was a lecturer, and he was probably the best thing that happened to that course,” she recalls. “He walked in like a bit of a surfer dude: T-shirt, boardies, thongs. But he knew his shit – he’d just come straight from being in London for 10 years, working on different shows, and he was fresh. He taught us all the principles of animation. It was very hands-on, which I think led to us all being better animators at the end of our degrees.”
As a graduate Harvey struggled for two years to find work in animation, relying on part-time jobs. Brumm – who was then running Studio Joho from an office in Hawthorne – gave her an intensive tutorial in the animation software CelAction. She was a fast learner, and that four-day crash course led to her showreel being discovered online. Harvey was headhunted to work at studios in Britain and Ireland, before she returned home to Brisbane to work in Brumm’s studio on a strange new idea for a TV show starring a blue heeler puppy.
“As a kid, I thought, ‘I’m going to work at Disney’,” says Harvey. “But then I realised no, I actually wanted to be part of the Australian animation industry, and I wanted to be part of a small company that would grow. Little did I know that working with Joe and Ludo would grow quite quickly. I was working with Joe before Bluey, and there were seven or eight of us working on animated shows for a while; we went from that to now 45 people. It’s a massive jump.”
She was promoted from animator to lead animator, to now working as an animation director; Harvey and her colleague Claire Renton oversee four teams of five animators. When the show is in production, they’re regularly overseeing work on eight episodes at a time, at different stages of development, and occasionally jumping back on the tools themselves.
The way the dogs are drawn is deceptively simple. Not as rudimentary as Peppa Pig, the cartoon blockbuster Brumm worked on in the UK, but highly stylised. Hardly doglike at all – until you notice their tails wagging when they’re happy. But the frames showing the Heelers’ home, their suburbs and campsites, with their candy-hued palette that makes Brisbane seem to exist in perpetual sunrise; are true art.
“I do love the designs and the attention to detail – especially at the beginning of Season One – creating the ‘Brisbane aesthetic’,” says Harvey. “That’s where you get all those colours from: the art directors going out of their way, riding their bikes around different areas of Brisbane to capture the lighting, the architecture, the plants, the typical trees you’d see, whether it’s the jacarandas, the poincianas – they captured a lot of that.” It’s all there in full force in The Sign which is, in a word, dazzling.
Cue more tears. “I’ve probably watched the whole thing about seven or eight times, but it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve watched it, I’m still tearing up,” says Harvey. “It’s probably also that combined effort of everybody on the team; you’re thinking about the experience that you’ve had with them in making it. I don’t think I’ll ever not cry.”
You could say Bluey’s precious fourth wall was pierced again to some extentwhen Fallon revealed that the cast record their roles separately. On-screen wife and husband Zanetti and McCormack had only met for the first time to appear on his show. “I’ve recorded in LA, in Australia and also recorded in Florence, in Latvia, in upstate New York – wherever I happened to be filming I just jumped into a studio”, says Zanetti, whose credits since arriving in LA include the low-budget Edgar Allan Poe biography Raven’s Hollow, and Gabriel’s Inferno, a pulpy three-part erotic romance film series based on Twilight fan fiction.
Others in the cast record episodes separately too. McCormack, was frontman of 1990s Brisbane indie rock band Custard but now lives in Sydney. “You Zoom in with either Joe or Richie [Richard Jeffery] who are directors,” explains Zanetti. “You’ve got a tech person and you do your little solo.” How on Earth does it come together? “I think it’s good casting, good writing. And Joe [Brumm] is so specific. He knows exactly what he wants, but then he’ll also let me go play and give him a few options.” And then? “Sometimes he’s like, ‘Oh, that’s good. Like, let’s go in that direction’.”
As for The Sign, “This one is really special. I have seen it in its entirety, which is unusual – normally I only get to see the finished episodes when the public does.”
On Reddit, a thriving community of 170,000 convenes to discuss Bluey with intense devotion. Right now, there are several threads dedicated to predicting the plots of the new feature-length episode, where wild theories fly about. One Reddit user speculates on floral crowns Bluey and Bingo wear in a still from The Sign (the kind you see on flower girls) while another has created a bingo card for the “big” episode with squares such as “Frisky is Pregnant”, “The Heelers sell the house”, “A death in the family”, “Completely random guest actor,” and of course: “You cry”.
Over on TikTok, there are some 300,000 videos in the #Bluey hashtag, where Millennials and Gen Zs make crazed videos about how the show has helped “heal their inner child”.
Does Zanetti, who doesn’t have kids, know why Bluey has resonated with, well, everyone? “I think there is a level of escapism and a level of comfort,” she ponders, choosing her words carefully. “It’s something to hold on to that feels like there’s good in the world, and there are people who care even when the world feels like a complete dumpster fire.”
“It hits a place in you where beauty and sadness brush up against each other, in an intangible way. It hits us in a way that we can’t articulate, but that we feel, maybe, when we see a piece of artwork. I think that’s one of the powers of animation.” b
Ghostbasket premieres at 8am on April 7 on ABC-TV, followed by special episode The Sign at 8am on April 14.
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