Doggy Poo

Netflix has a feature in which you can watch on demand programming, as many hours a month as you're paying in dollars. We're right now on the $4.99 plan, for other reasons which I'll get into later.

Anyway, it's Friday night after a long difficult week for both of us, and we wanted to do a whole lot of nothing tonight. My plan was to eat Chinese food and watch anime, a great thing to do on a whim. I was looking through the list for Akira (wonderful dinnertime viewing), and happened upon something very very different: Doggy Poo.

It's a story of a Doggy Poo trying to find its purpose in life. It is laid unceremoniously by the side of a road, and shunned for being the most worthless kind of poo. It discusses its lot in life with a clump of dirt and a leaf, until finally finding purpose in fertilizing a dandelion.

Sounds bizarre enough? But wait, there's more! It's very slow paced, as if it's aimed at kids in their very early years (like before five years old). Kids who like poo. Kids who might not understand the concepts that are being spouted, were it not for the fact that the characters are fun little pieces of the environment. Such is the parable nature of the show.

That's right, it just wasn't bizarre enough! It's a children's animation about poo that's actually a Christian parable. It reminds me a bit of Davey and Goliath in the animation style, the pace and the ultimate message (it's not so overt as Davey and Goliath were, but they also were never about excrement). The poo is born feeling worthless and dirty, abandoned by the dog who shat it. Nobody wants the poo, evidenced by the birds who refuse to eat it. The clump of dirt has sinned egregiously in his past, and all he wants to do is go back and make it right (which is called "works based salvation," and is not part of the evangelistic tradition). The leaf is blown wherever the wind sends her, and is not grounded like the poo (meaning in some metaphorical sense that she cannot be of one opinion about anything). The poo only finds its purpose in giving its entire self to the beautiful flower. I'm sure it makes a lot more sense in a Sunday School classroom, when the teacher (the teacher who shows her kids scatological movies) tells her kids what it all means.

So there ya have it: A children's Christian parable animation about a dog turd. Certainly wasn't planning on THAT for our dinner viewing.