(This is a guest article by artist, animator, Brooklynite, and general miscreant, Sarah Miskoff. Sarah’s work has been featured here on Nerd-Base previously, including this cute Halloween piece here.)

If you enjoy Animation and you aren’t that in the loop then this story is for you.

This past summer, specifically July 11th 2013, a short animation was released on the Frederator Youtube channel, called Bee and Puppycat. Frederator is the animation studio that has provided us with great animations like Fairly Odd Parents and more recently Adventure Time. Bee and Puppycat is a two-part short that’s 10 minutes total in length, created by Natasha Allegri (http://natazilla.tumblr.com/), where a young, recently unemployed woman comes across a strange animal that she starts referring to as Puppycat.

I personally enjoyed this because I truly love the character of Bee. She’s kind of weird and awkward and I loves me a weird and awkward protagonist because I can relate. The girl can’t catch a break finding a job, she gets tongue-tied when talking to her cute neighbor, and just how she speaks is great too! She’s an average female character with a story arch that doesn’t revolve around relationships, shopping, going to a party, impressing anybody, or what have you. Plain and simple I find her an interesting character who I am rooting for, and Puppycat is just as interesting. He’s a mysterious creature with an unknown past, has a synthesized voice that is kind of hypnotic to listen to and his design is just adorably cute in a grumpy cat kind of way.

Speaking of character design I love the way all the character look as well as the backgrounds and the animation. It reminds me of Sailor Moon with the transformations, as well as the style and layout. There are definitely hints of anime throw backs that I think are done the right way as opposed to other shows trying to jump on the Otaku bandwagon.

Now this was only planned as a short animation and after those 2 episodes that was that. But the outcry for more episodes sparked the inspiration for a Kickstarter that opened on October 15th asking for $600,000. On the first day they made almost $200,000 witch was about 30% of their goal, not too shabby. It ended on November 14th with a whopping accumulation of $872,133, and they have enough to tag on 3 more episodes! In short the people asked for more episodes and now they are going to get them and then some!

I’m very excited for this series because I’m a Natasha Allegri fan. She hasn’t been in the business for long, maybe 5 or 6 years, but this girl is soaring! She’s only worked on Adventure Time as a character designer, but she has done mini-comics online for years. I don’t remember how, but I started following her art blog on Live Journal (back in ‘da day) when she was still at the University of Arizona. She used to draw these cool fat ladies and slice of life comics. I think that’s how she and Pendleton Ward (creator of Adventure Time) met, and he gave her a job developing charters on Adventure Time after seeing these awesome drawing on her journal. That’s how I found out about Adventure Time. She was like, “Hey guys this show is going to be amazing!”. I’m just really excited that talented artists are doing amazing things in the animation world.

Anyway enough about the cartoon, just watch it for yourself to bask in the awesomeness of it all.

Guest Author Bio: Sarah Miskoff was found in the wild and raised by nerds, a trekkie (mom) and an ABBA obsessed dancing queen (Dad). She became obsessed with animation, comics and she’s never looked back. A recent graduate from the School of Visual Arts, she is now a freelance animator forever obsessing over the fact that animation can be taken seriously as an artistic medium. An uphill battle, but a fun battle at that. Her art and animation work can be found on her tumblr. Follow her!