SCREEN GRAB

How CoComelon conquered children's television.

- JIA TOLENTINO

Two small children jump into a bubble bath with expressions of dazed, perpetual pleasure. The taller one has hair like molded chocolate, the other’s is like a yellow ice-cream swirl. Everything—the walls, the children’s skin— looks bouncy, as though it would squeak to the touch. The bubbles are white and opaque, like globs of shaving cream. Music plays, a mixture of giggles and xylophone, with a tune you remember and words you don’t. It keeps repeating. White bubble balls appear all over the hands of the children, on their feet, on their arms. The children, once clean, materialize outside the bathtub and do a happy dance.

This is “Bath Song,” a two-minute-and-fifty-two-second video produced by the children’s-animation juggernaut CoComelon. In the world of babies and toddlers who watch a lot of YouTube, “Bath Song” is “Star Wars,” the moon landing, the white Bronco hurtling across a California freeway. It was uploaded in 2018 and is now the fourth most viewed video on the entire platform. It has been watched nearly seven billion times.

Very young children are crazy for CoComelon—a supercharged, brightly colored, Plasticine utopia. The swirlyhaired baby is called JJ. He has two older siblings, smiling parents who are endlessly available to make rainbow Popsicles, and a diverse group of friends who attend Melon Patch Academy under the tutelage of the youthful Ms. Appleberry. The scenes are depicted from toddler height; shots typically change every one to three seconds. All shapes are rounded at the corners: by company dictum, there are no sharp edges anywhere, so that nothing in CoComelon can hurt.