Michela Luci
True: Rainbow Rescue
“True: Rainbow Rescue (2020) follows characters pushed into a…”
2020
Cast
Reviews
4 min readA Small Kingdom of Big Feelings
I’ll admit it: I wasn’t expecting to be moved by a 22-minute preschool special about a girl named True and her cat Bartleby rescuing a lost explorer from the other side of a rainbow. But there I was, sitting on my couch at 11 p.m., rewinding the scene where True sings to a storm cloud until it dissolves into glittering raindrops. It’s the kind of moment that shouldn’t work—too simple, too sweet, too obvious—and yet, in the quiet of my living room, it did.
Maybe that’s the trick of True: Rainbow Rescue: it doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is, and in doing so, it becomes something rare—a story that trusts its audience, no matter how small, to feel deeply without needing to be told how.
The special exists in that strange limbo of children’s media: too short to be a movie, too polished to feel like a throwaway episode, and too earnest to be dismissed as mere content. It’s part of the True and the Rainbow Kingdom franchise, itself born from the whimsical, pastel-drenched artwork of the artist collective FriendsWithYou. That lineage is impossible to ignore.
The world of the Rainbow Kingdom is a place where logic bends to joy—trees grow upside down, clouds have faces, and the sky is a gradient of cotton-candy hues. It’s a visual language that speaks directly to the part of the brain that still believes in magic, the same part that lights up when you see a dandelion or catch a firefly in your hands. There’s no cynicism here, no winking irony to undercut the wonder.
Just pure, unapologetic delight.
What’s fascinating is how the special uses its brevity to its advantage. In 22 minutes, it doesn’t have time to meander or over-explain. The plot is a straight line: True and Bartleby must cross the Neverending Rainbow to save Dillydally, the Rainbow King’s best friend, who’s stranded on the other side.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsPharrell's preschool kingdom sent a 22-minute rescue across the rainbow.
By June 2020 the regular seasons of True and the Rainbow Kingdom were already over. Netflix still wanted more color in the kids row. Guru Studio answered with TRUE: Rainbow Rescue, a 22-minute special dated 2 June, in which eight-year-old True and her cat Bartleby walk the Neverending Rainbow to fetch Dillydally, latestnetflix.com argues, a brave explorer the Rainbow King calls a friend. 
The parent series is a strange Hollywood-Toronto hybrid. Home Plate Entertainment and Toronto's Guru Studio built it off artwork by Miami duo FriendsWithYou, Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III. Pharrell Williams is an executive producer through I Am Other. Netflix took it worldwide. CBC ran it in Canada. It started life in 2013 under the toy-line title Wish Come True.
Netflix locked the preschool slate in 2015, then launched the show on 11 August 2017. A Grove screening in Los Angeles that July put Pharrell in a room with Kelly Rowland, Christina Milian, and Tyga. That was the series, not this special. Rainbow Rescue is what you commission when the seasons are done and the merch is already on Amazon. Storybooks, activity books, costumes, Aurora World plush.
The 2020 calendar looks like a factory. Wuzzle Wegg Day at Easter. Terrific Tales, eight fairy-tale shorts, in May. Rainbow Rescue in June. Friendship Day on 1 September. Animation Magazine kept reprinting the same credits paragraph because the credits did not change. Guru Studio of PAW Patrol and The Breadwinner. FriendsWithYou art. Pharrell as EP.
Michela Luci voices True. Jamie Watson is Bartleby. Eric Peterson is the Rainbow King. TMDB files the special as a 2020 movie, which is how a one-off cartoon ends up in a film catalog. Netflix rates it TV-Y. The plot is a fetch quest with a ticking sun. If they miss sunset, the rainbow dies and they are stuck on Dillydally's island.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMoXkZGu8-s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ-Hi9X2Y90
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCQrZC0yJqQ
The YouTube machine did more work than the press notes. Netflix Jr clipped the rainbow crossing on 21 June 2020. That clip later passed 46 million views. The official trailer from the series channel is a minute of color and catchphrases. A later clip introduces Dillydally on the island at the end of the rainbow.
Guru's own press note is chipper even by preschool standards. "It's TRUE!" Then the Dillydally synopsis, then a reminder that Terrific Tales was already live. The Toy Book ran the same drop for the licensing crowd, because this franchise has always been a toy pitch that learned to talk.
Awards talk sat in the same press cycle. The series picked up a 2020 Daytime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Preschool Animated Program, plus Canadian Screen nods in the preschool lane. By August 2020 Animation Magazine was quoting 350 million YouTube views and two billion Giphy shares for the brand. Tiny Pop in the UK had already started linear runs that April.
None of that is a scandal. The gossip is industrial. A designer-toy aesthetic plus a pop-star executive producer plus a Toronto CGI house kept minting 22-minute specials after the series finale, and Netflix kept putting them on the kids homepage during a lockdown spring. Rainbow Rescue is the one where they finally walk the rainbow.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.