This is not a Bluey essay. Still, it’s worth acknowledging that in 2024, Joe Brumm announced that this past spring’s episode “Surprise” was, in fact, the last serialized episode he would be working on (save your tears, he’s pivoted to the movie). “Surprise” is the end of Bluey as we know it, and its future is uncertain.
So how did Joe Brumm’s last seven-minute Bluey go? Well, in the opening moments, Bluey asks her mum, Chilli, “What is having children like?”
“Well,” Chilli replies, “it’s a bit hard to explain. It’s lovely, but it’s also – ”
Bluey is disappointed when Chilli is cut off, but then her lesson plays out before her. Her dad, Bandit, is enlisted by Bluey’s little sister, Bingo, to play “children”—he’s the dad and she’s the mum. He has to rock the baby (a koozie mug with a ball in it) and sing it a lullaby. Bandit would rather not play (he wants to watch a cycling race on TV) but both his daughters want him to—in addition to playing “children” with Bingo, he’s enlisted by Bluey to play an elaborate spy game involving a massive toy gun that fires foam balls. “I’m gonna be hiding, and I’m gonna surprise you, and I’m gonna shoot you with this,” she proposes, demonstrating the might of her weapon.
“Got it?” both girls ask at once. Bandit’s got it. Cradling the koozie baby, he sneaks off to watch TV, but he’s assaulted by Bluey’s surprise attack, left to run from her barrage of balls. He sings to Bingo’s baby, fleeing frantically from a thorough pelting, all while he’d really rather be taking a moment for himself.
Finally, Bandit ends up curled up on the kitchen floor in the fetal position, protecting his “baby,” singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” while he tries to keep the koozie-child from the world’s assaults. It’s such a difficult task he’s almost in tears. But here’s the moment: “Bluey!” Chilli crows, pointing at her prone husband. “That’s what having kids is like!”
Yeah, I figured, watching the episode this past April. That’s what it’s like.
And this is also what it’s like:
This past summer, A24 inauspiciously released (buried) Janet Planet, the feature filmmaking debut of Annie Baker, America’s greatest living playwright (in your humble author’s humble opinion). The film is a celebration of the mundane; Baker is renowned for her copious, scripted use of pauses, and even for sitting in the audience timing those pauses to make sure the air is filled with as much quiet as possible. Baker’s quiet is an invitation to pay attention—to allow the air to fill with potential. A Baker pause says more than many plays say on an entire page.
This is what Janet Planet is like: we follow Lacy (the dazzlingly naturalistic Zoe Ziegler) through the summer of her 11th year, a time defined by the Baker pause—Lacy walks quietly to her piano lessons; she quietly observes a work of abstract theater art; she stays home to watch Clarissa Explains It All, among the few signposts anchoring us to the 90s in a story that otherwise floats freely in the rural Western Massachusetts breeze. Janet Planet is a film so subtle it speaks in a whisper, but then, abruptly, it shouts.
Summer is over. Lacy has climbed onto the school bus once more. Time to go from the lazy days of summer to what a title card ominously informs us will be “THE FALL.” And what fall will that be? Surely, autumn is a lovely time for contra dancing, the form of New England community dance that we find Lacy and her mother, the planetary Janet (Julianne Nicholson), attending in the film’s last three minutes.
I still can’t quite be sure why the contra dance scene attacked me the way it did, so perhaps we can figure it out together. It is the fall; this is Lacy’s fall—if not from grace then at least from some sort of childhood innocence. As Janet and Lacy arrive, they’re told contra dancing isn’t about being good or bad. “Lacy has made it very clear to me that she is not going to contra dance,” Janet announces as they enter, and Lacy settles in a chair by the wall. The music pounds—if you’re not aware, contra dance music is uniquely thrilling, at least if you’re inclined to be entranced by bouncing fiddle, pounding piano, and thudding feet. Janet dances. Lacy watches. We observe Lacy from a distance. Janet dances. We move closer to Lacy, and a man settles next to her. What does he want from her? Seemingly nothing; all right. We move closer to Janet. Why does my heart begin to pound? And why does Lacy’s face fall?
“I’m here with my mom,” she tells the man who asks if she’s OK. So she must be fine. Janet whirls, dancing with one man then another. We cut from man to man; it’s impossible to keep the kaleidoscope straight. Just like the boyfriends who have passed hazily through the summer days, Lacy can’t quite get a read on these men touching her mother—the woman she’s meant to have all but exclusive rights to touch. Is this why Lacy’s mouth tightens when we move closer still, as close as we can reasonably get? Is this why her eyes seem to fill? She sets her face, something in her hardening. Something has happened. It’s a Baker pause. It’s implication: silence that shouts. The music surges. Lacy tries to smile, but it’s impossible, and her eyes widen ever so slightly.
This is the fall.
That’s what it’s like.
And this is what it’s like:
I can’t quite account for why the trailer for The Wild Robot—a CGI feature adapted from Peter Brown’s 2016 novel and pretty handily the greatest film ever made by Dreamworks Animation—made me want to sob. And yet every time I caught it this past year before whatever family feature I brought my children to, when that eerie autotuned arrangement of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” soared across the soundtrack while that wild robot communed with nature, my eyes welled up. I wasn’t even sure what the movie was about, but it didn’t matter; it was clear this was destined to be something special.
Turns out, I was right. I caught The Wild Robot at home one Friday afternoon with my kids a few weeks after it hit theaters (is there anything more 2024 than the vanishingly tight theatrical-to-VOD window?). And this is what The Wild Robot is like: it’s a ‘funny talking animals’ movie, but it transcends that label almost immediately, whether by virtue of the lush watercolor-style animation or by virtue of a story that swiftly distinguishes itself as special.
We open on Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), a Rozzum robot programmed to help. That’s her prime directive, and when she lands on an island after a shipwreck, she becomes the inadvertent caretaker of a gosling whose family she accidentally crushes. Imprinted upon by the baby goose, Roz becomes a befuddled mother, unsure how to care for a baby but knowing only that she’s programmed to “always complete [her] task.” And right now, that task is ensuring the survival of her “son,” Brightbill, whom she shepherds from hatchling to adolescent.
By that time, Brightbill needs to be thinking about migrating if he’s going to survive the winter. He needs to leave his mom; it’s not personal, it’s nobody’s choice, it’s just the way that it is. So Roz must do what is not in her nature: teach a goose to fly. She does her best; it goes badly at first. Roz can’t show him how to fly, but she can use the tools at her disposal, mathematically analyzing his attempts in order to maximize the possibility of success. The other geese laugh as Brightbill fails, but Roz tells him he just needs more speed.
“Ready?” she asks as he climbs onto her shoulder.
“I guess I have to be,” he says reluctantly, because that’s how it is.
And then Roz starts to run. She stumbles. Today’s attempt was a bust. The next day, she tries again. This time, Brightbill takes off, and Roz lets go of the line tethering her to her son. She hears him shout, “I’m up!” He surges forward, and then he’s flying over a cliff, and off above the open ocean. This is the test.
“I do not know what to do next!” Brightbill shouts, and then he falls. Roz catches him.
“Go again.”
The trailer for The Wild Robot made me believe I might need to cry. This scene in The Wild Robot absolutely did me in. I prefer that my kids not see me cry if I can help it—we can debate another day whether this is healthy—and I effectively kept it from them, but my goodness was my chest heaving as Brightbill got a little better every time, all so he could one day leave behind the person (well, robot) he imprinted on the day he was born. Roz always completes her task, and her task is to do whatever she can to ensure her child soars. Against all odds, she does it. And as I wept, one thought was chief in my mind:
Yeah, that’s what it’s like.
And this is what it’s like:
Nobody watches Trying, which is absurd, because it’s the best show on TV (well, streaming). The series, which runs on AppleTV+ in the US, follows the exploits of Jason (Rafe Spall) and Nikki (Esther Smith), a young—though, by season four, not that young—couple who are, generally, trying. In the first season, they’re trying to conceive; by later ones, they’re trying to adopt; and by this past year’s episodes, they were trying to parent the two foster children who finally (by virtue of an interseason years-eliding time jump) call them Mum and Dad. Theoretically, Jason and Nikki have now done it. They’re done trying. But this is a show that celebrates just how tough it is to try during this trying trial we call life.
In one of this season’s major arcs, Jason decides to launch his own football club specifically for adopted children—a group, he’s learned, that notoriously struggles in team sports. This is a league “for all those kids who don’t fit in,” he tells Nikki. “It’s a team where everyone gets a chance.”
Before their first game, Jason attempts an inspirational speech on the theme of resilience. The kids aren’t receptive, immediately starting to taunt Jason for his apparently big head. But he powers through, and raises his voice.
“They wanna label you,” he tells the kids. “You’ve had it your whole life, haven’t you? They wanna say that you’ve got oppositional defiant disorder – ”
“Shut up, no I don’t!” pipes up an oppositional, defiant boy.
“Or that you’re difficult. Unmanageable. Dysfunctional. Strange.” Jason takes a deep breath, ready to move towards the point, but then the whistle blows and the kids are off. Jason is dismayed. “I was taking you on a journey, and I hadn’t got to the up bit!” he calls after them. “So don’t let that sink in!”
Oof, if that isn’t what it’s like. You want to inspire and empower your kids, but this whole life thing operates without a script or a playbook, and more often than not, you end up tripping over what you meant to say, teaching a lesson you never meant to impart, and just hoping it doesn’t do any damage. That really is what it’s like.
“Sometimes, in order to survive, we have to become more than we were programmed to be,” Roz announces in the only words audible in the tear-jerking trailer for The Wild Robot.
That’s what it’s like. To survive the coming years, we’ll need to adapt. That’s what it’ll be like. I’ll need to adapt as a parent, but I’m well-trained, having spent nearly a decade with small people accumulating on my shoulders, stretching their wings a little more every day while I run, picking up speed a little at a time. That’s what it’s like: we all want to soar, and I have the privilege of teaching a few people, no matter how little I may know the way. I’m programmed to complete this task. And yet.
“What do I do?” Janet asks Lacy at one point in Janet Planet.
Lacy is astonished. “You want me to tell you what to do?”
“Yes,” Janet confirms frankly after a long pause.
So do I. That’s what it’s like. I want an adult sometimes, but (for better or worse) that’s me. So I make judgment call after judgment call and hope the cascade of game-time decisions adds up to an inspirational message they can take with them on their flight. That’s what having kids is like: you sing a lullaby, you try to position your shoulder so that it’s you absorbing the blows, not the child (or koozie), and you wait. You hope for the best.
You pause.
“Pauses should be at least three seconds long,” Annie Baker writes in the script for her play The Aliens. “Long pauses…should, of course, be even longer.”
Sometimes you need a lot of long pauses—to regulate, maybe. To catch your breath. Or to remember to remember to appreciate it all, because it’s going so fast.
But that’s what it’s like.