Nijntje (Miffy): the calmest thing we carry
Dick Bruna drew Nijntje in 1955 in a handful of lines and a few flat colours, and the animated version keeps that restraint. It is the calmest thing on KidsTube and our largest collection of any single show.
What it is
Very short episodes in which very little goes wrong. Nijntje paints her room, goes camping, plays hide and seek, enters a tennis match, spends a day as a farmer. Nothing lunges out of the screen, nobody shouts, the palette stays flat and quiet, and each episode ends.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A great deal of children's video is built never to finish. This is built to.
What is on KidsTube
A hundred videos, in Dutch, including a set of longer compilations — forty-five minutes and an hour — for when you want something that will keep going without anyone choosing again. There are gentler learning episodes on colours, numbers and shapes, and a strand called groot en klein for the youngest end of the audience.
What to know
It is Dutch, and for a one- to four-year-old that is close to irrelevant here: the pace is slow, the pictures do the explaining, and the vocabulary is small. Known as Miffy in English, if you go looking elsewhere.
This is the one to reach for at the end of the day rather than the start of it.