‘CoComelon’ turns to UCLA to show its movies aren’t addictive

Beneath azure skies and fluffy white clouds, three guffawing toddlers and their moms arrive at a candy-colored water park within the city of CoComelon.

It’s the opening of “Fast Little Fishy Splash Water Park Adventure,” a three-minute episode of “CoComelon,” the favored youngsters’s cartoon collection that’s maybe as controversial as it’s interesting to younger youngsters.

Moonbug Entertainment, the studio behind “CoComelon,” says the episode, which debuted on YouTube in May, is the results of a years-long collaboration with a UCLA assume tank.

In an unconventional transfer for a privately held leisure firm, the studio launched its little one improvement pointers on its web site Tuesday. Moonbug’s head of communications Bao Nguyen mentioned the corporate started to include findings from the analysis into its inventive course of in late 2025.

“It’s a great example of what we’ve been trying to do,” mentioned Rich Hickey, Moonbug’s chief inventive officer, referring to the episode. “Inclusive storytelling and learning through play — they’re all evident within that episode.”

Nina and Cody, ecstatic about visiting their neighborhood splash pad, run by way of fountains and hop in kiddie swimming pools, however protagonist JJ is a little more skeptical.

With help from his associates and his mom, who presents him goggles and a pair of orange arm floaties, JJ decides to face his fears. He joins his associates beneath a tipping bucket, and — spoiler alert — realizes that he truly enjoys taking part in in water. (“I just love to swim, swim, swim,” he sings.)

The guidelines, known as the “Moonbug Learning Principles Framework,” are knowledgeable by educational analysis and advise that Moonbug reveals ought to assist younger viewers navigate “real life moments” and “model positive relationships among children and their friends and caregivers.”

Other priorities embody creating reveals that encourage children to be taught by way of play, as this helps them develop their creativeness and creativity, and that includes characters from various backgrounds (“CoComelon’s” Nina is Mexican American, Cece is Korean American and Cody is Black) — and giving mentioned characters depth — throughout all Moonbug reveals.

“We’re a digital-first company and we realized that there may be some … hesitation to sharing online content with children,” Hickey mentioned. “This is really to keep building on the trust we think we’ve built.”

“CoComelon” is Moonbug’s flagship preschool present, and the collection’ origins date again to 2006 when business director Jay Jeon shared a YouTube video of an alphabet cartoon set to music. The movies started to revolve round toddler JJ in 2017.

By 2020, “CoComelon” was the most-watched YouTube channel on the planet, averaging 3.5 billion month-to-month views. That yr, the present made its streaming debut on Netflix — the place it broke ratings records — and was purchased by London-based leisure firm Moonbug.

Moonbug was then acquired by Candle Media, a agency led by ex-Disney execs Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs, for a reported $3 billion. Disney+ has since obtained the unique streaming rights to “CoCoMelon.”

“CoComelon‘s” image woes aren’t new. The collection has developed a repute for maintaining youngsters glued to the display screen, as seen in movies which have gone viral on social media of infants bolting to the tv upon listening to the marimba theme track.

In 2020, a Guardian columnist wrote that “CoComelon” was “like crack” for a preschool little one. A New York Times report in 2022 gave the general public extra perception into Moonbug’s viewers improvement course of, which included testing “CoComelon” movies on younger youngsters to make its reveals as attention-grabbing as potential.

The program has been a sizzling matter on parenting forums. The alternate sometimes goes one thing like this: Someone asks if “CoComelon” is “bad” and a gaggle of fogeys weigh in. “Very overstimulating,” mentioned a person in a single Reddit thread. “It moves too fast for kids’ brains to process, which can cause a speech delay,” wrote one other.

Asked to answer the criticism, Hickey mentioned he believes Moonbug makes “age-appropriate content” and produces a spread of movies to cater to totally different moments all through a toddler’s day, from gradual bedtime movies to faster-paced ones meant to encourage motion, Hickey mentioned.

In 2023, Moonbug recruited the Center for Scholars and Storytellers, a assume tank at UCLA that bridges leisure media and psychology analysis, to “create the best possible product” for its viewers, Hickey mentioned.

The middle was tasked with analyzing Moonbug’s content material and crafting the training rules to information the studio’s future preschool programming, which additionally contains the “Blippi” and “Little Angel” franchises.

Moonbug additionally requested the middle to find out if there was analysis exhibiting that audiovisual content material may very well be addicting for preschoolers, mentioned Yalda T. Uhls, an assistant adjunct professor of psychology at UCLA and government director of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers. Uhls mentioned the middle’s evaluate of current peer-reviewed analysis discovered that there was no such proof.

And regardless of oft-repeated claims that long-form content material is healthier for teenagers than short-form content material, “there isn’t really actually any evidence for that,” Uhls mentioned. “It’s very inconclusive.”

The middle discovered that preschool youngsters battle to be taught as a lot from content material with frequent cuts, although consuming it doesn’t affect their consideration span negatively, Uhls mentioned.

As such, the principles the middle crafted suggest Moonbug “minimize distractions and tangential songs or storylines” when characters are navigating real-life conditions to ensure it doesn’t intrude with preschool youngsters’s ability to learn classes.

The middle interviewed members of Moonbug’s inventive groups and fashioned an advisory council of educational consultants in little one improvement to judge a choice of Moonbug’s episodes, assess the standard of socio-emotional studying and discover areas for enchancment, Uhls mentioned.

“The content certainly had a lot of places where it could improve, but it wasn’t horrible,” Uhls mentioned. “There was some learning within the episodes. … It wasn’t all good, it wasn’t all bad.”

Uhls mentioned she recalled a number of cases of episodes modeling unsafe conduct, however declined to share specifics.

The middle plans to proceed to work with Moonbug to combine little one improvement analysis a lot earlier within the studio’s inventive course of and help with the mixing of the training rules into its content material slate, Uhls mentioned.