#13 – Crayon Shin-chan

The adventures of the five year old terror known as Shinnosuke Nohara.

The humour of the original scripts doesn't sit well with US TV sensibilities, and judging from the cuts made when it aired in the UK, the same goes for here too. The mix of near untranslatable puns and bodily humour must be a hard sell to childrens TV schedulers.

But as is often noted, the show was not without criticism in Japan, where it was held up as a bad influence on children. One wonders had it not been such a massively popular show it could have withstood that criticism. But it was, and still is, with the Shin-chan anime having been on the air since 1992.

The opening above is the 5th opening, animated by Masaaki Yuasa (Mind Game, Kemonozume), that I found out about in an interesting article on AniPages Daily about the evolution of the art style of Shin-Chan.

Shin-Chan may have now found a home on Adult Swim in the US. Funimation have acquired the license and last year the show was given a trial run that seemed to go positively, with a return to the station expected this year. The scripts had been made more adult to fit in with the general type of comedy show the strand has and also to avoid cuts had the show been aired on basic Cartoon Network. Sarah Dyer and Evan Dorkin provide script polish, and on the whole it seems to work quite well.

Interestingly they have opted to show the later, more angularly designed episodes. The fact is, despite the seemingly crude character designs, a lot interesting and impressive animation has been done with them. Particularly in the films they've released. Here's an awesomely kinetic Masaaki Yuasa animated sequence from the Crayon Shin-chan: Henderland no Daibouken movie:that parodies the Cagliostro clock tower sequence (which iirc is itself a callback to one of the Puss N'Boots films Toei did):