Bluey Is Drawn on Paper First

The Brisbane studio Ludo, with creator Joe Brumm and director Richard Jeffery, makes Bluey episodes on a schedule most animated shows would consider suicidal. Each episode is roughly seven minutes, and the full pipeline — script, storyboard, animatic, voice record, animation, comp — takes about ten months. By comparison, Paw Patrol episodes are produced in a fraction of that window.

The difference is in the boards. Brumm storyboards every episode by hand on paper, often working alone at his kitchen table, with roughly 600 panels per short. The boards aren't loose notes for the animators; they are almost shot-for-shot the final film. Ludo's animation team works in Adobe Animate, using rigged puppets built by a small in-house rigging crew. Lip sync is painstaking: they tongue-track each vowel rather than using automated phoneme matching.

What makes Bluey watchable for parents, according to multiple interviews in The Guardian and The Age, is that the scripts are written to simulate actual family dialogue — interruption, half-thoughts, kids being rude, parents being tired. Brumm records his own children and uses the rhythm in dialogue. The show's voice cast is mostly children under ten, recorded in short sessions to stay fresh.

The ABC (Australia) commissioned the show in 2017. As of 2024 it is one of the most-streamed shows on Disney+ globally, and the Bluey IP — merch, a cinematic movie in development — is worth an estimated $2 billion. Joe Brumm stepped back from daily showrunning in 2024. The pipeline he built, 600 paper panels at a time, is now a factory, but the episodes still start the way the first ones did.