Wonder Pets!

Wonder Pets! is my new favorite show. And, since it's on during the educational block of Nick Jr., no commercials! It is cuter than anything on tv.

There's a guinnea pig, duckling, and turtle who are all class pets in a school house. When the kids go home for the day, the adventues begin. The tin can phone rings, and someone is calling because some kind of adorable baby animal is in trouble. In the 90 mins I spent watching Wonder Pets! I saw them rescue a kitten trapped on a piece of driftwood in venice, a baby penguin stuck on an iceberg, a baby triceratops stuck between some rocks, a baby unicorn with his horn stuck in a tree, and a bird trapped on the top of the statue of liberty. So the Wonder Pets assemble their fly-boat out of wheels, a frisbee and a sail, and set off. And through teamwork they accomplish everything and sing a song about it: How's it gonna work? Teamwork!

Did I mention that the whole thing is mostly all in song?

I think the animation style looks an awful lot like south park, but apparently it's not:

The style of animation used to create Wonder Pets! is called "photo-puppetry." It is an original style of animation created for the series that allows animators to manipulate photographs of real animals. I think kids will identify with the characters because they look so real and huggable.

And it totally looks like someone just popped the thing out of a computer in like an hour. But apparently every episode takes 33 weeks and "A live orchestra performs each episode, and the music is written by some of Broadway's top composers." But they sing the same songs every episode, and often multiple times per episode, they just substitute the current word or animal of the day. I really like formulaic tv.

We’re not too big
And we’re not too tough
But when we work together
We’ve got the right stuff