Joe Brumm Talks Bluey’s Success

Joe Brumm, the creator of the global megahit preschool show Bluey, took part in a keynote conversation with Kristin Brzoznowski at the TV Kids Festival today, discussing the genesis of the hit Australian series and why it resonates so broadly with kids and parents alike.

“I wanted to make an Australian version of Peppa Pig,” Brumm said of how the show came about in his TV Kids Festival session, which you can watch in its entirety here. “Peppa Pig showed a fairly normal British family just going about their lives. The stories weren’t superhero adventures or flights of fantasy. It was just families doing normal things. I wanted to put a little bit of Charlie and Lola in there, too, really going into the kids’ point of view of it. That was the genesis of it. And I missed working in series. I wanted to get a big studio environment around me again.”

The series draws heavily from Brumm’s own life, he said. “The show is all from my life. It was based on all the weird games I play with my two daughters. Almost every game in the show was at one point played by my kids and me and my wife. A lot of the situations, a lot of the places they go to, are things we would do. When it came time to write the scripts, that’s what came out.”

Brzoznowski, the executive editor of TV Kids, asked Brumm about his nuanced portrayal of family life in the series. “I made Bandit [the father of Bluey] act and react similar to I would and Chilli [the mom] similar to how [my wife] would. Once you get enough episodes racked up you could start to get an idea of what Bandit was like as a parent. OK, that must be what I’m like as a parent—although somewhat less exaggerated. It was never a conscious [decision that] Bandit is going to be a modern dad who does this and that and the other. I just put him in the situation, and then those actions came out and you could assess what he was like afterward. That’s probably the best way to do it. If I sat there and said, right, I’m going to make him this sort of dad, it wouldn’t have felt right, and it would have been putting the story and the comedy second. It was the cart leading the horse a bit.”

On what makes the series a co-parenting dream for parents, Brumm noted, “I had that in mind. I sat through a lot of kids’ shows with my kids. You soon really appreciate the ones that are entertaining for you to watch. Around the house day-to-day playing with the kids, there’s so much shared laughter in the games. It’s not like you have separate senses of humor. Your sense of humor becomes dad humor because it starts molding around what makes your kids laugh. I thought, there’s so much shared laughing going on, and surely there’s a way to put that in the show, so it hits both generations. I don’t write jokes; I just try to create funny, absurd situations, and then the humor just rolls out of that. The kids and the parents laugh at different things, but it’s still the same situation. I try to find a humorous situation that is entertaining for slightly different reasons for the parents and the kids, but it’s a shared thing. I try to avoid blatant adult jokes. There are a few in there, the ones the kids don’t understand. Some do sneak in. It’s nice to hear from parents who sit down and watch with their kids because that was what I wanted to do.”

Brumm then discussed the qualities of emotional intelligence incorporated in the series’ storytelling. “It’s such an emotional experience, having kids. And being a 4- or 5-year-old, there are so many big emotions they deal with. The whole seven-year period is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster [as a parent]. So there are plenty of veins to tap into. Again, I just look at my life and my wife’s and friends and family and find these common touchpoints. And I do a lot of reading. Other people’s point of view. Psychologists. What’s underneath those issues. I think I’m good at picking what to include. What emotional thing does that kid have going on? And then it’s a matter of not trying to clobber people over the head with it. I just try to take a character on an arc. Most of the stories are emotional arcs. I steer away from too much moralizing or teaching abstract things like spelling and all that. It’s quite relatable because the little emotional lessons the kids learn are usually something you still use as an adult. When I can get a script right, it’s the little kid learning the seed of that thing, but we’re also seeing how the same emotional pattern still plays out 40 years later when you’re the parent.”

Brumm then took TV Kids Festival participants into the process of crafting a season of Bluey. “It starts with me writing the episodes. Once we have those, we’re all under one roof in the middle of Brisbane at Ludo Studio. There are 50 or 60 of us. It’s not a co-production, so we feed it into our storyboard artists. We have a series director along for every step, and we’ll brief the storyboard artists and create the animatic from there. I’ve tried to borrow as much from the feature film, Pixar and Disney [model] and iterate those animatics as much as I can, get them right, re-record, cut and change around, so the animatic is ready to go. And then we have a bunch of great art directors who will mine photographs of Brisbane and Queensland and try to capture the feel of this city, which is a big part of the show. We use CelAction [a 2D animation software], which I learned in the U.K. It’s what Peppa Pig and Charlie and Lola use. I brought that here; we’re a CelAction studio. That pipeline begins—design and background. And then into layout. And we have four teams of five people who animate an episode. Every four weeks, an episode comes out. We have a great VFX department that does old-school hand-drawn animation. And then it goes outside the building to sound, where my brother [Dan Brumm] puts the sound on. And then Joff Bush has a team of musicians, and we’ll have a big music session and sit for hours going through each ep. The key to it is, myself and Rich [Jeffrey, series director] have our hands on everything, but we try to be a studio, especially with the animation, that gives the animators some freedom to act those lines out. The result is lots of lovely, quirky, cool bits of animation.”

Brumm writes the bulk of Bluey’s 52 episodes per season, with just two or three per season co-written with others. “We tried a writers’ room. It didn’t work for the show, to be honest. The episodes didn’t feel like Bluey to me. I quite enjoy it. In a lot of ways, it limits the show to a certain extent; it limits how much we can do. But I’ve worked 20 years to get to this point. I love writing, making short films, so I wasn’t in a big hurry to give them away.”

On managing various extensions of a show, Brumm is of the opinion that animated shows aren’t “meant to change mediums. It’s fraught with peril but it’s necessary because it’s what pays for the show. It’s been a real learning experience. I’ve learned I don’t want anything to do with it! There are too many voices in the room, too many competing interests. My strategy is to keep making the show really strong and people will still love the brand.”