Carstea’s Cartoon Corner: bee and puppycat aims to please

​By: Bella Carstea

Bee and Puppycat is a cult classic for lovers of sugary sweet, slice of life, magical-girl stories or adorably furious indistinguishable animals. The show’s 5-10 minute episodes are the perfect thing to watch to wind down and fall into a magical world full of strange interdimensional temp jobs!

​    
Bee and Puppycat follows the titular Bee alongside Puppycat, her best friend and pet who no one can decide is a cat or a dog. Other notable characters include Deckard and Cass, a pair of siblings and some of Bee’s closest friends.

Although there doesn’t appear to be too much of a cohesive overarching plot, the viewers do discover that Deckard has feelings for Bee and is setting aside his career and education to hang out with her. We also learn that in one way or another Puppycat is a magical being who can dimension hop to take temporary jobs for some quick cash. A lot to take in from 10 episodes and little to no featured backstories.

Although the story feels hard to follow, the actors are incredible starring Allyn Rachel as the energetic somewhat childish Bee. Kent Osborn voices a sweet and loyal Deckard, and Ashley Burch voices the cool, confident Cass.

The art style is really bubbly and sweet while simultaneously holding on to a clean, easy to watch animation all without losing any details of characters rooms, shops, different dimensions and especially in Bee’s dreams. A really interesting feature of Bee and Puppycat is the change in character design for every temp job the titular pair takes; even changing Bee’s gender for a full episode when the duo landed in a video game with the option to change the players gender presentation helps show this.

Another really unique feature of the show is having Puppycat voiced by a vocaloid, meaning an audio software is used for his high pitched yelling as opposed to a real person. This offers the opportunity to have the character clearly speaking but the viewer can't understand what he’s saying, only Bee can. 

Although this show has a pretty scattered plot and seems to jump from incredibly lighthearted to really depressing in the blink of an eye, I would still consider this cartoon a good watch. I would recommend it to any lover of fantasy looking for a show without a tremendous amount of comprehensible plot to digest. It seems like the perfect lazy afternoon cartoon binge!

​I’m looking forward to the second season being released on Netflix in 2022, and if you’d like to see the first season you can watch it for free on YouTube today!