So two months ago I said I would write something about Chuggington.  The thing is, Chuggington is an above average pre-school CGI cartoon about talking trains.  But it’s neither especially innovative nor is it astonishingly good.  What it is, really, is the polished modern incarnation of one of the classic tropes.  It’s most interesting as a point of comparison.

Chuggington is about the adventures of a group of talking trains in a city conveniently built entirely around trains.  The show follows a group of young trains – “trainees”, naturally – as they learn to, well, be trains.  And work together and be good friends and, you know, all that sort of thing.

Now, trains are very popular with the very young.  But they’re also a cornered market.  If you’re doing a pre-school series about trains then you are going head to head with one of the big guns – Thomas the Tank Engine.

Thomas the Tank Engine has been around forever, and is still going strong.  The TV show Thomas and Friends is still in production, though it switched to CGI animation a few years ago.  Season 20 is due out this year.  But the franchise runs back to the Reverend W Awdry’s Railway Series, which started in 1945.  Not only is that far enough back for steam engines to be contemporary technology, it’s before the nationalisation of the railways.

The Railway Series books continued to appear until 2011 – the later ones were written by Awbry’s son – and instead of just continuing to set stories in the past, they opted to treat the Island of Sodor as a last holdout against the march of diesel and electrification.  Thomas the Tank Engine continuity turns out to be more complicated than you’d think.  The Fat Controller is a legacy character – we’re now officially onto the third.  In the 1980s, Awdry even published The Island of Sodor: Its People, History and Railways, which establishes a ludicrously detailed history for the setting.  The point being, Awdry started out writing contemporary stories about contemporary trains.  By rights, the march of time should have killed the franchise long ago, but it survived by gently reinventing itself as something a bit more magical and hidden-worldy.  The appeal obviously can’t be nostalgia – the target audience are too young to be nostalgic for steam, and by this stage, so are their parents.

We have a box set of the “Story Library” Thomas books, which are cut-down, heavily summarised versions of TV episodes for the edification of the very young.  They make interesting reading.  Some have been compressed to a truly demented degree – one, adapting a full length DVD special, blithely opens with the news that one day, Thomas was out exploring when he discovered an lost and abandoned city.  This is quite some achievement when you’re on (a) an island, and (b) rails.  But more generally, from an adult standpoint, there’s something vaguely unnerving about about the Railway Stories.  They’re big on work ethic.  All the trains are obsessed with being Really Useful Engines.  A typical plot involves an engine being vaguely uppity and the Fat Controller sticking him in a shed on his own until he learns his lesson, something which is presented as a paradigm of excellent management.  Sometimes recalcitrant machines are threatened with dismantling, which, by the internal logic of the series, is presumably equivalent to execution.  The story about Bulstrode the Barge runs like this: Bulstrode is a grumpy barge.  An accident happens which is manifestly not his fault and he is especially grumpy about it.  This sort of attitude is not good enough, so he is dumped on a beach to rot.  The end.  Don’t be like Bulstrode.

If you take literally the idea that the trains are alive, this is a bit creepy.  Of course, that’s not what Awdry was doing.  He was playing with the idea that people treat real steam engines (and ships and so on) as if they had personalities, and taking it literally.  That’s why his trains still have human crews.

Chuggington takes a different approach, though one that has “don’t ask awkward questions” issues of its own.  There are no crews in Chuggington – the trains are simply alive, they have giant faces, and they drive themselves.  Humans exist, but mainly as passengers and engineers.  The practical question of how trains hold objects is cheerfully worked around by deciding that they can simply control any equipment that happens to be plugged into them, so if you need them to have grabbing arms for an episode, grabbing arms they shall have.  For fairly obvious reasons, the show doesn’t want to get drawn into the question of whether these are robots or living things or what, but it’s strongly suggested in a few episodes that the trains literally grow bigger as they get older.

And, of course, no character ever expresses the desire to get off the rails and stop hauling carriages about.  That would be bleak.  But such is the train-driven nature of the world of Chuggington that the non-conformist train can aspire to be a postman, a mining engineer, a safari park attendant or an action movie star, all while remaining defiantly rail-bound.

As with a lot of children’s animation, it’s dubbed with local accents for the British and American markets, and no doubt looks plausibly home grown on both networks.  In fact, the creators are English, and the animation is mostly done in Shanghai.  The series started in 2008, roughly two years after Cars came out, and the influence is abundantly obvious.  Mind you, getting train carriages with no limbs to emote can’t be easy no matter how much they’re allowed to bounce around, and considering it’s a TV budget, the animators deal with that very well.  At any rate, while Thomas‘s starting point is to anthropomorphise real trains, Chuggington is more about a bunch of kids who inexplicably happen to be trains.  Some stories are of the “character X messes something up but learns his lesson and redeems himself by saving the day” variety, but the show also has a regular line in standard school plots adapted for trains (“who will win on sports day”, “everyone decides to form gangs and they end up falling out”, “I hope I get picked to be captain of the Whatever Squad”, and so on), plus a sideline in “this episode the trains are going to do something deeply implausible like put on a catwalk show”.

The design feature which Chuggington nails, though, is that the city is a giant toy.  Since they’re going to wind up reusing a lot of those locations (no point designing a whole quarry just for one episode), they certainly put some effort into making them look cool.  Tracks are everywhere in Chuggington, turntables whizz round, bridges run round the side of buildings.  The closing shot of the opening credits screams “buy the playset”.  CBeebies doesn’t do shows designed to advertise toys, but it’s decidedly more relaxed about shows with the potential to spawn loads of toys.

Still, there’s a difference between a show which has fairly obvious toy-line potential (like Octonauts, which gets away with it because it’s a good show and heavy on the marine biology education)  and one that feels like it’s designed to look like a giant toy in the first place (like Chuggington or, for that matter, Everything’s Rosie, a throwback trad girls’ cartoon which really does seem to be set in a playset).  As a design choice, it makes a lot of sense.  If Thomas the Tank Engine started off as actual trains come to life, with a foot kept squarely in the actual railways, Chuggington is a toy set acting out endless implausible variations on what living trains can do this week.  The stories are rooted firmly in the “well, we’ve all learned an important lesson there” tradition, but the show avoids preachiness by making sure not to lose sight of its core, central idea: living trains are cool, therefore stories about primary school kids are cooler when they’re acted out by living trains.

Next time: remakes, with Teletubbies, Clangers and Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service.