Pucca

Heidi and I have a new guilty pleasure: Pucca. We started looking for some fun, goofy cartoon on Saturday morning (y'know, sit on the couch, eat junky cereal, watch cartoons), and this was the best one out there (good cartoons are harder to come by these days). Heidi likes it because Pucca reminds her of herself as a little girl, and we both like how fun, innocent, and freakin' hysterically funny it is. We decided to regularly record it, and just watch it when we have nothing else going on.

It's based off of some wildly successful web animations, and has marketing galore all over Asia and Europe (less so here, but I'm sure it's going to pick up soon). It's a pretty simple premise: Pucca, a ten-year-old noodle delivery girl and master martial artist, has an insane crush on Garu, a ninja-in-training. Garu doesn't reciprocate, as he appears to be in his girl-cooties phase of life. There's a fair amount of comic action, as almost all the characters are the super-powerful ninja-esque characters common in Anime, but they're cute little kids, and it's just as much about the action as it is about little kids and their various crushes. Some of the humor is really witty, and other times it can be really slapstick. The flash animations were created with no dialogue, so as to enchance the international appeal, and this tradition is carried over to Pucca and Garu, as neither of them speak in intelligible words (although the rest of the cast speaks).

It's a guilty pleasure, but it's so charming and fun (and requires almost no commitment) that it has become a bit of a staple in the Fisher household.