In Builder Cove it’s the first day of school, but when the little students arrive in front of the building they realize that the institute doesn’t actually exist. The mayor promised to inaugurate it, but forgot to have it built. Instead of resigning and apologizing to her voters, the first citizen decides to entertain children at an intersection while some puppy dogs, aboard highly sophisticated vehicles, pull up the building in time for the bell to ring.
It is the bizarre universe of Paw Patrol: a cartoon where recklessness and irresponsibility become a narrative device, where the acceptance of others at all costs leads to smiling at behaviors halfway between the grotesque and self-harm. But the adventures of the puppy team are also a small lesson in what we could call “new cartoon geopolitics”. For decades the global children’s imagination has had two capitals: the United States and Japan. The former shaped their products on the hero’s path and on a value system that is contested today. The latter insisted on the idea of man overcoming his limits in the fight to save humanity.
Today, however, the landscape is much more crowded. Cartoons have stopped being simple animated stories. They have become intellectual property to be exported, tools of cultural policy and, in some cases, propaganda vehicles to attack the most malleable minds. The main players have also changed: Canada, South Korea and China have started to play an increasingly important role. The United States and Japan remain unreachable, but the three countries have risen to fifth, sixth and seventh place in the ranking of animated titles commissioned between 2020 and 2024. And they are also the ones that have recorded the greatest increase: +383% for Beijing, +308% for South Korea and +150% for Canada.
Behind the cardboard industry of the various countries there are very different strategies. The most complex program is the Chinese one. Already in 2006, the Council of State defined animation as fundamental for the “moral and ideological construction of minors”. First, the television space for foreign cartoons was reduced, banned between 5pm and 10pm. Then came the law on patriotic education: article 36 encourages the production of cartoons, comics and audiovisual content aimed at children and inspired by Xi Jinping’s thought and the “Chinese dream”. Even cartoons have been used to make Marx or Xi himself “pop”. Ultimately, Beijing treats children’s imagery as a strategic infrastructure: it protects the national market, inserts patriotism and political values into stories, then exports myths, brands and diplomatic friendships along China’s trade routes.
The Canadian case moves in the opposite direction. Here the goal is not to create a single message, but to defend one’s cultural sovereignty from US hegemony, protecting bilingualism and multiculturalism. Ottawa’s strength lies in its technical skills: processing, post-production, special effects, co-productions. And this is where the paradox comes. Paw Patrol is a product born in Toronto, but without Canada: no recognizable geography, no mention of the history of the places, no marked identity. It is an industrial property for export. On Netflix it recorded 156.32 million hours viewed. While puppy gadgets and toys have generated sales of 15 billion dollars. A stateless commercial success, which exports the supply chain and not the flag.
South Korea’s strategy is even different: the goal is to control the entire character supply chain. The government aims to increase the turnover of the animation sector from approximately 622 million euros in 2023 to 1.08 billion in 2030, with a growth in exports from 105 to 149 million and in employment from 6,417 to 9 thousand. The true Korean animated empire, however, lives above all on YouTube: Pinkfong, Baby Shark, Bebefinn and a galaxy of content designed to be translated, repeated, sung and consumed everywhere. Simple animations, thumping music, characters exportable to all countries, thanks also to cheap and imprecise dubbing.
The point, then, is not just about who produces the cartoons, but what idea of the world is produced together with them. Not only puppets, songs and licenses travel within these global intellectual properties, but also educational models. The rhetoric of the hero has dissipated, the conflicts have been quashed. The other must be accepted regardless, even if he adopts behaviors that are absurd or contrary to the social pact.
The Paw Patrol become paradigmatic because they transpose onto the small screen what in economics is called “moral hazard”, i.e. a person’s tendency to take greater risks because they are convinced that someone else will bear the consequences. And in Adventure Bay, children and adults don’t seem to think too much about the effects of their actions.
In one episode, for example, a zoologist with artistic ambitions decides to walk on a wire that connects two buildings, without ever having done so before. In the certainty that if something goes wrong, the puppies will take care of intervening.
«A cartoon that teaches solidarity is fine» comments to Panorama the pedagogist Nora Russo, owner of the very popular social account Pedagogiaintasca, «but everything else is missing: no one ever really makes a mistake, or rather, they make a mistake but they don’t realize it, they don’t think about it, they don’t learn anything. Many parents tell me that their children, after seeing certain episodes, become convinced that “someone always comes to fix things or the disasters they make”. But this risks sending the message that risk has no price.”
This is where the other great theme comes from: does accepting others uncritically, beyond their behaviour, risk creating a situation in which working on oneself becomes superfluous? «Acceptance of the person is confused with acceptance of any behavior» continues the educator. «A child needs to know that he is loved for who he is, yes, always, but also that there are behaviors that are harmful, to him or to others, and he must work on those. When a cartoon shows total and unnuanced acceptance, without ever a moment in which anyone reflects on what they have done, the message conveyed is a dangerous one: it is others who have to adapt to me, not me who has to change something. And it’s the exact opposite of growing up.”
Then there is another aspect that cannot be overlooked when talking about content for the little ones: the extreme speeding up of the cartoons. In the 1950s, visual rhythms were slow, with shots lasting between six and twelve seconds. This left the children time to follow emotions, connect causes with effects, and understand reality. Now the average duration of a plan is between 1.8 and 2.2 seconds. It means more sounds, more stimuli, more visual flashes.
«A study from the University of Virginia published in Pediatrics compared four-year-old children exposed for nine minutes to a fast-paced cartoon like SpongeBob and children exposed to a slow cartoon like Caillou» explains Russo. «Result: those who had watched the fast-paced cartoon obtained significantly worse results in tests of attention, memory and self-control immediately after viewing. This continuous bombardment takes away the boredom from the children. And boredom for them is the moment in which the brain learns to sit still, to imagine, to invent something to do.”
In the end, perhaps, the problem isn’t that the Paw Patrol builds a school in a few minutes. The problem is that no one asks themselves why that school wasn’t there, who should have built it, what happens to those who forget about it. In the new imagination of children everything runs, everything is fixed, everything is saved. But growing up, sometimes, means just the opposite: discovering that a frenetic team of puppies doesn’t always arrive to fix things.
