The end is sight. Here comes the top ten.
Based on a popular biographical comic book by Sakura Momoko, “Chibi Maruko chan†has achieved a TV audience rating of 39.9%. Chibi Maruko chan is the nickname of a sweetly obnoxious 9-year-old girl. She tricks her grandfather, ponders for hours over how to spend her allowance, and hates sitting next to ugly boys. She talks, feels and lives just as real kids do.
That sums it about as well as I could by cobbling together stuff from the few English language sites there are for this show. While massively popular in Japan and the rest of Asia, as well as being translated into Arabic, the show is little seen in the west.
Indeed all I’ve seen is clips on Youtube, as the first series featured early work from Masaaki Yuasa (yes, him again). There is a Chibi Maruko-Chan film available fansubbed, but I think that’s your lot. An interesting thing to note is that Sakura Momoko herself has apparantly scripted the bulk of the anime series, as well as creating the surreal anime Coji-Coji. So my complaint about a lack of creators who can create works in both media, is slightly less founded now.
A Masaaki Yuasa MAD featuring his most acclaimed sequence from Chibi Maruko Chan (amongst other awesome things):