The other day I discovered Peetledoodle. It’s a series of shorts made by Shrimps on stilts, also known as Beatrice Peacock, and follows the tamagotchi looking kid, Peetledoodle (lulu). As of now the series consists of 5 shorts as well as other mini videos, a wide ost, and a really fun and extensive website. The creator has also answered a lot of questions about the show on their tumblr where most of their current audience seem to reside.
What’s Peetledoodle about?
Peetledoodle is a green and sweet little kid who wants to have fun and share their love with the world. The show takes place in the long gone year of 2010 and the world Peetledoodle lives in, in many ways, resemble internet from the 2010s and before. Outside of Peetle, the main cast consists of their awkward older sibling Glitz (Beatrice), Peetle’s bestfriend Margo (Beatrice), the family pet Runt the medicine turtle, and their mom (Beatrice).
While Peetledoodle is of doing some childish misadventures we also get to see a lot of their sibling Glitz who has their own teenage issues. Glitz is generally pretty down in the dumps and confused. Although older and more mature, Glitz is in many ways more lost than their younger sibling.
Glitz is seemingly very afraid to be seen. They hate how they look, they are unsure of what is ok or not to say even with close friends so they put up walls, and they seemingly have no faith in their own abilities. That’s why its so nice to see Glitz’s friends making a conscious effort to try to get Glitz to open up a little in the latest episode.
Peetledoodle themselves and many other characters seem to be inspired by the likes of Tamagotchi, the first thing springing to my mind was Mametchi, one of the more iconic characters. At one point in the show one of glitz friends even plays with a Tamagotchi v-pet.
Looking at the show, the first thing I think about is early seasons of The Amazing World of Gumball. It is somewhat of a mixed media show where live action footage and 2d animation intermingle to create a believable whole. What makes it differ from something like gumball is the characters and themes, obviously, but also that it has a lesser focus on fast paced comedy. Most of Peetledoodle is somewhat calm and although there are some jokes they seldom steal the focus from what’s happening. In the feelings and emotions the show conveys it’s a lot closer to something like Bee and Puppycat rather than Gumball although it shares some visual similarities.
The first episode is about Peetledoodle finding out that there is someone who isn’t showing up for school and they don’t know why. Peetledoodle goes on a grand journey to find the mystical absentee Margo, and when they finally meet it’s revealed that Margo is a little girl who is afraid that everyone just wants to hurt her. Through Peetledoodle’s genuine nature she can look past that and they become best friends.
To me this is mainly a comfort show. It’s a show were not much bad happens and the mistakes that are made are low stakes. It’s very sweet. The one thing, or character, that isn’t as sweet as the rest of the cast is quite clearly the regressive and mean teacher, miss Fongus (Beatrice Peacock). She is a heteronormative old lady who verbally abuse her class of 8 year old’s without really any redeeming qualities outside of Peetledoodle liking her, which Fongus don’t care for what so ever. It is never really to the level where its uncomfortable, but it is sort of odd to have such an abrasive character.
The show has improved pretty drastically since its inception. The writing is mostly what I’m looking at when I say this. The biggest thing is probably the dialogue. I just want to prefix this by saying that all episodes are incredibly charming but I can sort of feel like the dialogue is rather, especially in episode 1, somewhat stilted and delivery of some lines comes of as especially robotic.
To some extent I think this ads to the charm and I don’t exactly think it’s by mistake. It fits the esthetics of what the show is and although i might prefer how it turned out in later episodes more by some regards its still really likeable, especially from someone new to animation and story telling. It’s a little hard to know exactly what shrimp on stilts has done previously but I’d imagine this would be her first role as head creative on a project like this. If there is a previous one: please send it to me.
The art also looks a lot better especially in the latest episode. There is something to be said about the crunchiness of earlier episodes coming of as more authentic. I really think the latest episode has nailed the art style.
The website
The show is also accompanied by a website called peetledoodle.net which features blogs from the creator, the ost, the episodes, concept art, some background to the project, and more. Pretty much everything you could imagine. It’s over all a fun site to surf around on and I recommend it if you find the premise of the show interesting.
Just looking at it I can see that there has been a lot of effort put into it, it does have a couple issues however. A lot of the pages are hard to navigate to as they are only mentioned in some blog posts so if you want to find everything on the site you are gonna have to go through with a fine comb. The website seem to be written in pure html and don’t use any frame work to automatically link webpages so the blogpost for episode 5 can not be accessed from episode 4’s blogpost even though it intuitively should be possible.
You must go to a specific blog post to find the about page that actually introduces the creator and links her socials. Also episode 5 apparently have a set of blog posts relating to it in a thread but I can’t find anything like it for any of the other episodes. I don’t know if that’s cause they simply are hard to find or because they don’t exist.
These issues are pretty understandable to me. This is a rather big project mainly made by one person. All the work that has been put into this seems enormous especially given that beatrice seems to be somewhat new to web development. Although it has some flaws i generally think its a really fun addition and it’s really nice to see more things on the internet outside of YouTube.
Leave a Reply