The twirlywoos

So I have an interest in childrens tv animation and i enjoy watching these shows with my nieces...as research obviously ;) At christmas I asked their mum what they wanted for christmas and she said that the youngest (1 year old) loves the twirlywoos on cebeebies. I had not seen this one before so I was curious why she liked it so much... so I watched it. Well i just couldn't get over how awful it was. The story like is so repetitive and boring, almost all visual and they have stupid names. 

However, my niece likes it right? so why is this?

Well i did some research. Well for starters the characters are bright primary colours which is appealing to young children. They are also very soft looking which is very important for children that young as they find it comforting whereas they find things like plasterscine almost scary like its something they don't want to touch therefore they don't like it. 

So what about the rubbish storyline? well Anne Wood, the creator of Twirlywoos says that young children recognise movement like up, down, in, out, or empty and full like this example very early on in their development. So not only does it have appealing characters but they are doing things that the children understand or are beginning to understand, and the repetitiveness in this really helps to cement this understanding. 

This has made me feel a lot better about this animation and I now understand why young children like it. My nearly 4 year old niece says she thinks its okay but her little sister really likes it. 

This has made me realise that the thought that goes into these animations is actually quite a lot and when they are young the difference in interest is actually quite big. They're ability to follow a story isn't there at 1 but they can understand the basic things that they have learnt so far. This is probably why a lot of animations for this age range have barely any talking in them because they haven't established full language understanding.