Animation

Were you aware there is an adorable stop-motion show on BBC featuring Rastafarian crime-solving mice? It’s called Rastamouse, and you can check out music video clips from their band here. Did I mention they were in a reggae band? No? Well, they are. They also skateboard and rollerskate. If this is what got on the air, I would very, very much like to see what pilots were turned down. Not because this show is unworthy of air- it’s delightfully charming with excellent animation combining a flat 2-D feel with stop-motion puppetry, a bright and pleasingly summery color palette, and a redemptive message where ‘villains’ often become helpful community figures by the end.

No, what boggles my mind is several executives gave the green light to a children’s show steeped in a culture where weed smokage is not only prominent but part of the religion, and manage to tiptoe around this basic fact every 3 seconds. Numerous plots center, as seems normal for a mouse-city, on cheese. But the fact character Zoomer keeps calling it ‘sweet, sweet cheese’, numerous varieties and types are touted, and everyone in the city loves it so seems…slightly suspect. Again though, they’re mice. What else would they be obsessed over?

Here’s a short preview of the show, which alas focuses less on fantastic cheese than it does on the show’s message of ‘making a bad ting good’:

I cannot get over the charm of this show- I know it’s made for wee’uns but every clip I watch I get sucked into their brightly colored, Jamaican-patois mousy world. It’s not released in the US yet and clips are sparse on YouTube, but hopefully this show will make it stateside soon. It may even help convince a generation to legalize dat sweet, sweet cheese.