Moon and Me
Season 1, Episode 1: "Pepi Nana's Letter" (22 minutes)
USA / UK: Foundling Bird / Mackinnon and Saunders
CBeebies (preview on iPlayer)
This preview episode of a new animated CBeebies series was released yesterday, so I decided to give it a watch, as part of continuing research.
The moon and stars are out, and it's time for a little girl to go to bed. Before she does, she puts her toys to bed in her dolls' house, and we are introduced to them one by one. But when the moon shines on the dolls' house, the chief doll, Pepi Nana, wakes up and comes to life. She wanders around the house, but everyone else is still asleep. So she decides to write a letter to the moon, and sends it out the window. The letter reaches the Moon Baby, who decides to come to visit. He plays his magical calimba, which wakes everyone up. Pepi Nana reads a book which contains a recap of the plot to date, then they go to visit Storyland to have a cup of tea. When the tea is finished, they go back to bed, and the Moon Baby goes back to the moon.
Beautiful but tedious
I really can't fault the programme's visuals -- the set designs are absolutely beautiful, particularly the moon, which has an ice-like cave, and Storyland, which has lovely, lush rolling greenery -- nor the music, which although rather repetitive is charming and makes use of a small orchestra. But great googly moogly is it boring. The episode is 22 minutes long -- very long for a pre-school programme -- and has absolutely no plot to fill up that time. Several minutes are filled with the main character plodding around the house saying "tiddle toddle." It's a shame really, because there was clearly a lot of money funnelled into this programme, and a lot of very talented people worked on it, but what they were lacking was a talented script-writer. I can only assume that the programme is designed to get small babies to go to sleep, because any child over about 18 months is going to be very bored and wander off.
Educational...?
Honestly, I'm not sure if there is anything educational in this programme. Nothing explicitly so, but maybe the use of very simple sentences from the narrator might help the tiny audience to develop speech. It's hard to say.
Wait. Actually, it taught me what a calimba is, which was something I hadn't heard of before.
Available to watch online until 14 February
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