Annnnnnnd Why Should I Care?

On “Unicorse,” the twelve-minute children’s cartoon that will save us all.

Not a puppet, but as close as the stock photo service can muster. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

First things first: I am not a Bluey parent. I know that Bluey — the Australian cartoon about a family of talking dogs — has become for Millennial parents what Sesame Street was for our Boomer moms and dads, a children’s show that’s actually watchable by adult standards. It has never been that for me, because I could never convince my daughter to watch more than a few episodes. She’s seen multiple seasons of Adventure Time. She can name several hundred Pokemon. She doesn’t give a shit about Australian dogs, and I cannot make her.

So I’m not a Bluey adult, and I’m not an adult-watching-children’s-cartoons-adult either; I just wind up seeing a lot of children’s television because there’s a child in my home, and I have to be near the TV so that she doesn’t press the wrong button and accidentally stream Saw IV.

I will put all of that aside, however for this week’s column, which is about the 2021 conflict resolution manual “Unicorse,” a twelve-minute Bluey episode that has done more to fix me — psychologically, spiritually, politically— than the core texts of several world religions. I’m going to spoil the plot for you, over the course of this column, but the show is on Disney+ and (again) takes less than fifteen minutes to…