Bee and Puppycat and the Spirit of Anthropology
Bee and Puppycat: Lazy in Space is a show on Netflix that is so strangely wonderful. The history of the show, and its tracings from Cartoon Hangover to Netflix is one that’s fraught with drama. This video is not about that history. There are other places on YouTube recapping that fairly well, this is not that. Today, we’re focusing primarily on Lazy in Space, rather than the other episodes because Lazy in Space is essentially a reboot, as well as a sequel all at once.
Today, I want to talk about how the show intentionally blurs the boundaries between things that are familiar, and things that aren’t. In anthropology, there’s a famous phrase: anthropology is all about making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. During the entire time watching Bee and Puppycat, I couldn’t get this phrase out of my mind.
Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar is an important phrase in anthropology because it really sums up the entire concept of what it is we do. We seek to make things that are strange to us seem way less strange, and the things that we take for granted far more strange. In other words, we seek to confuse the boundaries of the things we take for granted as “normal”.
The entirety of Bee and Puppycat shifts the concepts of what is familiar and what is considered strange. From the beginning, we see things that are very familiar to us. Bee is a young woman who is struggling. We see her get fired from her job, and she reflects on not being able to really hold one for long. She’s lonely, in a way, and wanting someone to take care of, to give her a sense of purpose and reason. At this moment, a glowing purple light shines above her and drops Puppycat.
Bee is incredibly relatedable as a character. She’s struggling with the basics of living a life as an adult - holding a job, paying the bills, and feeling connected. Despite this, she’s an incredibly positive person, always looking at the positives of things and seeing life as something worth enjoying.
Puppycat, on the other hand, is a different persepctive of a similar theme. Puppycat is more selfish and pessimistic. His interests only surround himself. While Bee is unable to keep a job, Puppycat simply doesn’t want one. When he first meets Bee, he asks what it means to be a pet, and is clearly primarily interested in the life of no work and someone else caring for everything.
These are all somewhat relatedable aspects of personalities, and approaches to a more capitilist centred life. What we haven’t talked about yet is that Puppycat is a creature that isn’t a cat, isn’t a puppy, and can talk to Bee - even though other people can’t understand him. In the third episode of the series, we see Puppycat talking to Bee’s friend Deckard, who simply comments on the beeps and boops that we hear as the audience.
Bee and Puppycat is kind of like an urban fantasy, in a way. There are elements to the show which are contemporary and real-world feeling. Puppycat loves watching television, especially Pretty Patrick, a celebrity chef. Bee texts her friends on a cell phone. We understand pretty quick that we’re watching a show that takes place in a contemporary world. However, there are things that are far more akin to fantasy, which situates the familiarity of the world into a strange realm.
In the very first episode, we see Bee punching fire. Her hands are completely burned, and yet she doesn’t seem fazed by it. In the same issue, glass is embedded in her boots, which she puts on with no issues. From the outside, we have a woman whose doing strange things, while acting in an incredibly familiar way in a familiar setting. In the third episode, we see Bee as a robot, shifting our view of her as a character incredibly similar to us - the viewer- and into something quite strangely away from ourselves. She moves from familiar to us to being unfamiliar to us, but she doesn’t drop the familiarity - blurring the boundaries between what is considered like us and what is considered unlike us.
Though the setting also becomes less familiar as the show continues on. In episode seven, Bee is excited to share an experience that happens on the island once a year - the island goes through all four seasons all in one day. This is definitely a unique property of the island that makes it feel a who let less normal.
While this type of shifting is normal for urban fantasy more generally, the entire vibe of Bee and Puppycat is more complicated. While a traditional urban fantasy would take a familiar setting and set fantastical elements in it, Bee and Puppycat present you the world as both fantastical and familiar at the same time, rather than as two juxtaposed elements.
The premise of the show, where Bee and Puppycat get sent to a space temp agency is, in itself, an example of this. We understand the conceptions of a temp agency, but one that sends our protagonists to strange unique planets is definitely a new one. Even though the set up is familiar in some aspects, other aspects are uniquely strange, such as the presence of the temp bot.
In the first episode, we get the beginning of Puppycat’s lullaby. He sets it up as needing to sing a lullaby to soothe a baby planet. The lullaby is set up as a traditional one, with a beautiful melody and a song about a prince who falls in love with a princess. However, the lullaby doesn’t have the happy ending that most stories like this told to children have. It’s also clear to both the viewer and the characters that Puppycat’s lullaby a story about himself, and yet they don’t take the time to dwell on that. Instead, they prod him about the fact that the lullaby simply wasn’t very good. The lullaby’s words are a flipping on the traditional and familiar lullaby, but also the treatment around the lullaby is also a flipping of the what is familiar and relatable.
One of my favourite moments in the show is in the final episode, when Deckard accidentally brings home a friend from cooking school and he comments on the strange activities going around on the island. Cass, one of Deckard’s siblings, explodes out that she has always known things were strange and she’s so excited someone finally addressed that things weren’t so normal.
In fact, throughout the show, Cass is regularly commenting on the fact that the island and the people on it aren’t exactly normal. Cass calls Bee the “little old lady girl” - referencing the fact that Bee has not aged since they’ve known her which is strange. Near the end of the series, she comments that weird stuff goes on around Bee all the time.
Cass, in many ways, plays the role of the viewer. She recognises the strange things, and questions them but never so often to break the role of the understanding that, in many ways, this is also just the way things are. Cass is, in someways, the anthropologist. The one who questions, and intentionally blurs the boundaries between the familiar and unfamiliar by pointing out the questions, both those which are fantastical and those which are typical. It’s Cass that Deckard goes to when talking about giving up his dreams of cooking school, which Cass questions in the same way she does the strange creatures and plants that pop up around the island.
In fact, the conversation between Deckard and Cass in the bginning of the series helps to summaries another important theme in the work that directly plays into the strange and familiar: the exploration of the Lazy/Work dynamic. The show explores regularly the conception of following your dreams and your passion, a theme that is inherently familiar especially to animated shows. However, the way Lazy in Space approaches this theme complicates matters.
Cass, for example, is someone who once had the passion of wrestling. She still has her boxing gloves, which they use as an ice pack at one point. However, she has shifted her track to something more practical, now working as a freelance coder. Deckard references how Cass’s contentment with her new life is what makes him consider giving up on his dreams of cooking.
Despite being a very good chef, Deckard is very bad at baking. No matter what, it comes out an absolute mess. He becomes so dispondant on the idea that he debates on not following his dream of going to a culinary school because of how they expect him to also do a bit of baking. Bee, on a trip to one of their job sites, tries to convince Deckard to follow his passions, which Deckard decides to do. Even though the show doesn’t follow Deckard massively closely through his trials with culinary school, but we do see that he isn’t getting any better with it.
Another one of Deckard’s siblings, Howell, opened up a cat cafe despite not being very good at cooking himself. This was his dream, and one that he followed through with. However, we see that with Deckard gone, the cat cafe is really struggling. The bills are starting to pile up, and he isn’t sure it’s going to survive.
Meanwhile, both Bee and Puppycat don’t really have passions outside of things that aren’t really work related. Bee cares far more about hanging out with her friends than working, and Puppycat isn’t really interested in work at all. It’s Bee and Puppycat together which involve the Lazy dynamic. While we almost constantly see Cass working, we typically only see Bee and Puppycat working on the few times they need money for something. And yet, this being lazy in space isn’t necessarily seen as a bad thing.
What Bee and Puppycat show us is that finding your passion and following it into a vocation may work out, but it also might not. And giving up your passion for something more practical may also work out for the better, like Cass, but also might not. And while some aspects of this theme is familiar, like the push to follow your dreams, some of isn’t - like the failure that happens after the push is made.
And then there’s the presence of the wish crystals. Wish crystals appear in the third episode, and after, there are a lot of strange activities around the island. According to Moully, who is making wish donuts, you have to eat the whole thing for it to work, and only sometimes can the wish work out. The odd way it works out means that Cardamum’s wish to have his mom wake up doesn’t happen the way he wishes. Deckard, also, got a small shard in his head. He sees himself baking and being happy, which pushes him to finally go to culinary school. However, he doesn’t become magically happy and successful at baking when he goes to school.
Bee and Puppycat gives us familiar themes but ones that are presented in new and unfamiliar ways, either through the way the show is presented, or the way the themes are presented. The setting, mixed with the storylines and the vibe of the show all intermix to present something that is both amazingly familiar and so distinctly unfamiliar at the same time. The show actively works to blur the boundaries between the same and the Other, the familiar and the unfamiliar. The result is a show that presents the otherworldly aspects in ways that makes the viewer feel an affinity and familiarity with them, while also actively questioning the parts of our lives that are similar and familiar to them in a way that they typically reserve for the unfamiliar. The creatures and characters that would typically be conceived of as the “Others” in the show become the great familiar characters we connect with - the robotic Bee’s body and way of living is incredibly unfamiliar to us, but her personality and characteristics are amazingly familiar.
Through the blurred boundaries of familiar and strange, the show forces us to question what has been considered ‘normal’ to us, as well as what has been considered ‘not normal’, and to push ourselves to relate more normality to that which is different, and question the normality of that which is the same.