Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty and many, many more characters that embody the Japanese concept of cuteness known as kawaii, has just released their newest Netflix show. The latest member of the Sanrio roster to get its own showcase is Gudetama, a listless, adorably unmotivated egg yolk.
The character has long been a fixture on stickers and keychains, lending its simple and expressive face to an endless stream of merchandise. Now, thanks to Netflix, Gudetama has his own series — Gudetama: An Eggcellent Adventure.
What Is the Plot of Gudetama on Netflix?
Netflix
The series is short, with only 10 episodes, each less than 15 minutes long. This was a wise decision, allowing Gudetama and his supporting cast to show up, be cute and quirky and lovable, and then depart before they’ve overstayed their welcome.
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The show follows Gudetama and a baby chick, who’ve both somehow hatched inside a carton of eggs in a restaurant’s industrial refrigerator. This chick becomes the engine that drives the plot of the show, relentlessly searching for the chicken it believes to be their mother. Gudetama, meanwhile, just kind of goes with the flow. This odd couple pairing is a classic TV sitcom set-up and works well in Gudetama, allowing the slothful yolk to maintain its exhausted charm without stagnating the show itself.
This passive role works for Gudetama because, beyond the chick kicking off the action of the show, it’s also filled with a large cast of silly and creative side characters, both animated and live action. Some of these include a TV producer who recognizes Gudetama’s charm and is eager to get him a platform, and a politician who finds inspiration in Gudetama’s world-weary outlook (when asked about his dreams, Gudetama replies: “the future is bleak”).
Who Is Gudetama For?
This slightly surrealistic bent also gives Gudetama a more off-beat sense of humor than you might find in most kids’ shows. It’s not exactly Adult Swim, but the show’s distinctive vibes and aesthetic are likely to appeal to an audience beyond children. Crucial to that appeal are the relentless, pun-heavy food jokes for which the rest of the show can sometimes seem merely a vehicle. As the series progresses past all the delicious food, the audience is drawn deeper and deeper into a vaguely conspiratorial culinary universe centered on… eggs.
As Gudetama and the chick go about their adventures looking for their mother, they encounter wise and wizened sushi rolls eager to impart their wisdom to the newborn chick and to Gudetama, who is quick to point out that it hasn’t technically even been born at all. Later they meet hard-boiled eggs who, true to their name, are like characters from hard-boiled fiction. They meet century eggs who, after spending so long in isolation have become light-averse recluses. They even meet a giant omelet who’s a major player in the food-based underworld.
All of these picaresque adventures and characters are held together very loosely, with the joy of the show coming from seeing Gudetama’s ennui thrust into various different scenarios. As it moves through everyday life, the sheer listless fatalism of this little egg yolk begins to take on the timbre of daily life in the modern world.
What Is Gudetama About?
It doesn’t take long before the relentless pessimism becomes something of a worldview for the show. Despite first impressions, Gudetama isn’t tired or lazy. Its energy isn’t that of someone exhausted at the end of the day, perhaps tuning in to a strange Japanese cartoon show to relax for a while. No, its nonchalance is a kind of existential despair. It’s as if Gudetama had wished never to be born, been granted that wish with all the flair of an ironically sadistic genie, and then still had to suffer existence anyway.
From getting lunch to running a country, all the action and bluster that Gudetama sees around it seems to amount to basically nothing. Gudetama has sloth not in the colloquial sense, but in the deadly sin sense: a kind of hopelessness rooted in the perceived pointlessness of life. Surrounded by meaninglessness, Gudetama opts to do nothing, not even resist the paces that the characters put it through.
At one point, for example, Gudetama is induced to run for Prime Minister, resulting in the platform, “eight days off a week,” exactly the kind of excessive inaction that begins to seem almost radical after a while. And while this might not be the perspective that many parents are looking to introduce their children to, for burnt out, overworked adults (and children!) there’s definitely a certain appeal.
Gudetama remains, essentially, a one-note joke stretched just short of its breaking point with an admirable precision, but that joke is one that might ring true for far too many people. All of which is to say, Gudetama might be miserable, but it makes good company.
