Cult-favorite cartoon Bee and Puppycat finds a home at Netflix for season 2

The second season of beloved web series Bee and Puppycat will debut on Netflix in 2022, after a nearly five year break. Titled Bee and Puppycat: Lazy in Space, the new season picks back up the cheerful 22-year old Bee and intergalactic space warrior Puppycat for a new set of adventures.

Michael Hirsh, CEO of Frederator Studios, the studio behind Bee and Puppycat, says that Netflix was the perfect home for the series.

“Netflix has really shown several things: first, the most interest in diverse animation styles and second, the most interest in reaching diverse audiences and different audience age demographics,” Hirsh tells Polygon. “They’re really building an audience base for older age animation.”

While Bee and Puppycat doesn’t contain the mature content of Frederator’s other Netflix title Castlevania, Hirsh says that the target age group of the show is adults ages 18 to 30.

“It really will appeal to everybody,” Hirsh says. “But it’s got an edge to it. But it’s an edge that I think is acceptable because of the beauty.”

Image: Frederator Studios

Bee and Puppycat fills a niche that’s been relatively unexplored, not just on Netflix, but in Western animation as a whole. The animation style makes Bee and Puppycat accessible to younger crowds, but unlike She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, and other all-ages animation, the characters are older and face a different set of challenges, like looking for jobs and finding direction in early adulthood. Season 1 kicked off when Bee, after being fired for sleeping on the job, comes across the mysterious Puppycat and the two embark on temp jobs across dimensions, helping various beings and creatures.

Bee and Puppycat premiered in 2013 as a short, two-part episode on Frederator Studios’ YouTube Channel Cartoon Hangover, created by former Adventure Time character designer Natasha Allegri. Gaining online popularity, Cartoon Hangover started a Kickstarter campaign to fund production for the show. At the time, it was the most successful Kickstarter campaign for an animated show.

Image: Frederator Studios

The first half of the first season of Bee and Puppycat aired on YouTube in 2014; the remaining episodes were supposed to follow suit on YouTube, but wound up on the digital aggregation platform VRV two years later. Currently, the full first season is all available on the Cartoon Hangover YouTube channel.

Federator announced a second season of Bee and Puppycat in 2017, but the first episode only premiered at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 2019. Though the series was accidentally uploaded on Vimeo earlier this year, there has been no official word about where the second season of Bee and Puppycat would premiere until the Netflix announcement.

Hirsh says that throughout the past three years, Frederator has been hard at work perfecting Bee and Puppycat. He calls it a “crown jewel” of the studio and emphasizes that fans won’t be disappointed with the wait, because Allegri and the rest of the team have created not just beautiful animation, but beautiful art.

“This is really the most unusual cartoon series out there,” he says. “It’s like Miyazaki for TV. It’s a beautiful work of art.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the release date of Bee and Puppycat: Lost in Space as 2021. It has been corrected to be 2022.