Review: Bee & Puppycat “Toast Dogs Wedding Donut”

To BEE Continued?

Spoilers Below

And so, after much wait, we reach the end of the Kickstarter-funded episodes for Bee & Puppycat. The last four all rolled into a special combo platter, which is a fitting metaphor because of how much food we’re going to see. What trippy trip will we go out on, and will it come with crotch ice?

Bee and Cass are both alerted by the same message: Rent is due. It seems that Bee and the Wizard family (yes, that’s Deckard’s last name too) have been living in the same building all this time! As Deckard prepares a Puppycat-shaped curry omelet…thing, Cass calls him to her so he can drop off the rent while she continues coding. Deckard asks if she enjoys her job, and she replies that she’s good at it and she likes money. Speaking of Deckard and mindsets about careers, Cass gives him one more thing to take: his application to cooking school that he had been waffling on since “Food/Farmer”. Seems she’s filled it out for him, but Deckard’s still hesitant to leave Bee in the back burner.

I should also note that seeing this episode for the first time yesterday really shocked me for a very important reason: The animation…is so…SMOOTH. Like wicked smooth. It’s like they got a totally different animation studio to handle it, and it really flows well with everything. I’m not adept at art design talk, but this really shows that a lot of effort was put into this final batch, and it’ll pay off in a big way by the end.

But shelve that matter for now because a lady wrestler crashes through Cass’s room! This woman is Toast (who supplies the first word of the title), who used to go to the same women’s wrestling club with Cass, ranking just above her at eleventh place, where Cass was the twelfth. When Cass suddenly quit, the ambitious Toast was now the bottom of the barrel and went on a quest to learn the most drunk fighting techniques.

And now, forget all about that, because the only thing it actually adds to this episode is that an old man wandered into the room through the man-sized hole Toast left, and his dog gets really riled up by watching her and Cass fight. The dog follows Deckard out of the house as he goes to pay the rent. Bee and Puppycat leave to do that at the same time, with Bee happily celebrating that she’s able to pay rent on time thanks to her job. She runs into Deckard, being chased by the dog, who latches onto Bee’s hair before attacking a nearby bird. It seems that seeing the fighting in the bedroom has awakened its latent bloodlust! And it’s voiced by Arin Hanson of Game Grumps! And the bird it ate has entered its mind and made an alliance with it!

Okay, that got kinda weird. AND IT ONLY GETS WEIRDER. After the first eye catch (likely to designate where these episodes would have been separated if they had been released apart on Youtube), we check in with Cardamon, the juvenile land lord first seen during “Beach/Cats”, along with his dog Sticky. He unwraps some candy and places it on a plate, moving it into a dark room beeping with heart monitors. In his first appearance, Bee had asked how Cardamon’s mom had been, to which he had replied she was “still sleeping”. Now we see that he was referring to her being in a coma, which has been going on for some time if the litter of origami and several plates of candy are any indication. On her head is a paper crown with a vial of some sort of liquid around her neck. Lots of new questions, and so little time to answer them.

As Cardamon and Sticky rest beside her, a story begins playing with musical accompaniment. It tells the tale of an octopus that mistook the hair of a lost princess for another of his kind and fell in love with it. But upon learning that the hair was actually attached to someone, he offered to take the princess back to her home. As thanks, the princess gave the octopus her hair, but it soon drifted into the sea. In an attempt to keep it all from floating away, the octopus became tangled and tore itself apart. But the bits of octo mixed with the hair to become their own beings! And that’s how we have jellyfish, I guess.

Bee and Deckard make it to Cardamon’s to pay the rent, but it turns out young lord Cardy’s gotten a cold. Bee tries to come up with remedies she and Deckard can help make, but he turns them all down. Underneath them Puppycat and Sticky properly meet, with Pups not really taking a liking to the dog. This gives Cardamon a weird idea, so he asks Bee if he can borrow Puppycat for the day, and despite Puppycat’s many vocal protests, Bee eventually talks him into it. It also helps that he’s playing “Pretty Patrick”, which both of them really like to watch. It soon becomes clear that Cardamon is trying to hook Puppycat and Sticky up as some sort of dog couple, but that just ain’t happening.

Another thing to note as we enter the latter half of the story, and start following Bee and Deckard around the house for some quality love interest time, being with Bee seems to give Deckard the confidence to throw away his school application, but his weak cook arms can’t reach the dumpster, with the crumpled letter landing in front of Bee. She’d seen him filling one of these out at the end of the farmer episode, but hadn’t said anything. Now it seems like she knows that she’s the one keeping him from fully moving on and pursuing his own goals and dreams.

After more hijinks, Puppycat finds his way into the CardaMOM room, where Cardamon explains that he thought making two dogs get married would make him sort of a prince, and princes are able to wake sleeping princesses. It’s as heartbreaking as it is confusing. He then asks Puppycat if he’s ever been in love, making him remember the princess he nearly ran off with when he was a man. Lots of callbacks to previous episodes, many appreciated.

Bee confronts Deckard about the letter, asking him why he tried to throw it out. Deckard says that he’s fine with how things are, asking Bee if she WANTS him to leave. But of course, she doesn’t, even if she can’t bring herself to tell him to move on without her. It’s hard enough that she might lose him, but being the thing holding him back just makes it worse. Not that they have time to process this as they hear Puppycat trying to make a break for it through a window…if he wasn’t so fat, of course. Though in trying to get him free, a new temp job letter appears. Bee plans to use it to help Puppycat get free, but it sends her and DECKARD away, which is a first. Bee tries to explain things, but Deckard starts freaking out, not helped by a glitchy (possibly baked?) Temp Bot trying to fry him. Turns out the job is some sort of baking work, which is the job Bee had with Deckard before she was fired (just before the events of the pilot!).

A final eye catch as we enter the ring-shaped baking realm, where a tiny geometric dude commands a giant marshmallow guy to roll “baking stones” into dough. The job this time is to supervise the cloud guy while his boss uses the bathroom. The meal of the day is donuts, which gives Deckard a chance to show off his baking talents in front of Bee. We also get a sense of what kind of business is run here: the donuts are handed into a giant black hole in the center of the ring, through which they are exchanged for things like money, toys, and, sometimes…nothing. Marshmallow guy doesn’t sleep and is really passionate about his work, so he puts all his time and effort into making more treats to hand out into the void that he can’t see. He doesn’t always get something back for it, but he does it for his own sake.

Deckard tries making a donut to send out, but for whatever reason, this upsets the hole, as it sends tentacle hands out to grab everything in sight, which tears the place apart! That dude is so fired…or he would be if he wasn’t being pulled into the void. Bee tries to hang on, having an uncommon amount of strength for that amount of weight to pull, but even that isn’t enough. At least he died as he lived: constantly going through holes. Bee hears a crunch which doesn’t spell good things for that guy, but also releases ribbons from her arms, which emerge from the portal to reveal broken and damaged machinery. The shadowy hands continue to wreck the place, putting Deckard in mortal danger, but Bee blocks an oncoming boulder from crushing him before destroying the portal with the deep fryer and heading home.

Back at home, Deckard washes his face and finishes packing for school, finally making up his mind to leave. After having a rowdy goodbye with his whole family, he heads out on a train, leaving a note with Cass to give to Bee. Whether it was seeing Bee turn out to be a robot, almost getting killed, or something else is unclear, but he’s finally getting out of his own way. Bee leaves a cookie from the job with Cardamon, telling him it will give him a wish if he eats it. This also gives Puppycat a chance to escape, which leads him to find the dropped machine bits that…look just like him. And while eating the cookie doesn’t grant Cardamon his wish, his mom DOES start…crying jellyfish? As Deckard’s train leaves what turns out to be an island, Puppycat returns home to find Bee in front of her dad box…which is repairing her arms. She solemnly states that there’s a lot she and him don’t know about each other. So, Puppycat decides to fix that, asking about her favorite color, animal, food, and what she wants to be when she grows up. “I don’t know…everything? Is that an answer? Everything…”

So…there’s a LOT to unpack here. It’s pretty clear this is four episodes stitched together, but they are most definitely part of the same story. It brings back many of the elements and plot points from the past episodes, as a season finale should do, but also throws in tons of new factors and plot points that are mysterious as they are worrying. The story has an even more pronounced sense of wistful nostalgia along with anime-influenced animation techniques, which is a much-loved part of the “Adventure Time/Steven Universe” bloodline of animators.

I hesitate to call this much of a fault, but the plot is…pretty all over the place. The Toast and Egoraptor Dog stuff were pretty funny and charming but didn’t add much of anything. Moving past that to the Deckard/Bee development is really the crown jewel, though. The connection between their bond and the baker giant guy is kinda loose, but it’s just a great story to watch play out.

This show has really gone all out for the remainder of its crowdfunded content, but what does the move to the new app VRV mean for its future? Time will tell, but I think Bee & Puppycat has earned its place among cult cartoon legends.