FORTITUDE VALLEY, November 12, 2026 — Ludo Studio’s first live-action feature film, Allen, debuts globally on Netflix today. The release marks the Brisbane-based company’s most significant departure yet from the animated preschool fare that made it a household name.
The Idea That Predated the Studio
The concept for Allen did not emerge from the success of Bluey. It predates Ludo Studio itself. Daley Pearson, who co-founded the company with Charlie Aspinwall in 2012, has carried the kernel of the story for over a decade. “Allen existed before we started Ludo, so that was like 11 years ago or whatever,” Pearson said. The film follows Petey, a Queensland man whose childhood best friend was a bug-eyed alien named Allen. When Allen vanishes and returns twenty years later, Petey — played as an adult by TJ Power — is forced to confront an adulthood defined by arrested development.
Pearson grew up in Coolum Beach on the Sunshine Coast, and the film’s coastal Queensland setting mirrors that childhood. The production leaned heavily into the specificity of place and era. The opening sequence tracks across a bedroom filled with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys, VHS tapes, and packets of Cheezels. Pearson described the 1990s pop culture landscape as an “onslaught” that hooked children like “drug addicts.” The film uses that nostalgia to tell a story about the dangers of nostalgia, a contradiction Pearson acknowledges readily.
From Short-Form Experiments to Global Trust
Ludo Studio began with small, experimental projects on modest budgets. The company won International Emmy Awards for the digital series #7DaysLater in 2013 and Doodles in 2017. Those early wins built the credibility that eventually secured the Bluey partnership with Joe Brumm. The ABC and BBC commissioned an initial 52-episode run; the series now airs in 60 countries.
Bluey’s success did not, in Pearson’s view, guarantee a blank cheque for a live-action feature. “It really feels like this was probably the first time in 10, 11 years where it felt like we had the trust to make something like this, but also we had the decks cleared, for me personally, to concentrate on something for a little while,” he said. The studio’s intermediate steps — Robbie Hood with Dylan River, Thou Shalt Not Steal with Sophie Miller — served as a proving ground for longer-form live-action storytelling.
Collaborative Leadership by Design
Pearson co-directed Allen with Jeffrey Walker, whose credits include Apple Cider Vinegar and The Artful Dodger, and co-wrote the screenplay with Sophie Miller, creator of Thou Shalt Not Steal. Pearson frames the collaboration not as a necessity but as a preference. “I just like it! I like those people and I like working with them,” he said. “I feel I could do it by myself. I don’t know if it would be as good.”
He cited a deliberate shift away from the auteur model he once favoured. “I’ve been arrogant like that in the past, and it’s got me into trouble,” Pearson said. The creative team extended to editor Jeff Lamb, who cut Talk to Me, the 2022 horror hit Pearson co-wrote with Danny and Michael Philippou. Pearson is quick to deflect credit for that film: “It’s their film, it’s absolutely their film.”
Queensland Roots, Global Platform
Allen was filmed across Queensland with production support from Screen Queensland. The film’s sensory details — Bubble O’ Bills, Tazos, the Nightmare board game — are hyper-specific to an Australian childhood of the 1990s. Pearson argues that specificity is the point. “All the things I love that people overseas might not understand… they’ve got pulp. They are things that are hyper-specific and feel authored,” he said. He compares the impulse to filmmakers like Peter Jackson or John Hughes, who “didn’t have a choice” but to work from their own cultural coordinates.
Netflix positions Allen as its first Australian film. The streaming release bypasses the traditional theatrical window, delivering a Queensland coastal coming-of-age story — complete with a floating Cheezel on the poster — to a global audience on day one. The alien, Allen, took four years to design and build. Pearson describes the result as a “riff on the films Pearson grew up on,” notably ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Alf. The salient point: the studio traded talking dogs for a bug-eyed extraterrestrial, and bet that the grammar of a Queensland childhood translates in any language.
Sources
- 'Allen' Creator Daley Pearson on Ludo Studio's Leap From 'Bluey' to Live-Action and How The Film Evolved From A Series
- Ludo Studio
- Bluey’s Daley Pearson on how losing his brother inspired his new film: ‘He was the best thing ever to me’
- The team behind Bluey release their first film
- From Bluey to Allen: Daley Pearson on his first feature film and sharing Queensland with the world | ScreenHub: Film, TV, Streaming and Games
- Interview: Daley Pearson talks Netflix’s first Australian film Allen
Photo: Eva Rinaldi (CC BY-SA 2.0)
