Caillou: Caillou's Family Favorites DVD Review

Last week was a surprisingly enjoyable review week for me in regards to children’s programs. After all, I got to review The Smurfs, which is an undeniably enjoyable piece of animated nostalgia, as well as Jakers!, which proved to be an incredibly well-made children’s program, entertaining for children and adults alike. So perhaps it is due to an unfair comparison that Caillou: Caillou’s Family Favorites, my children’s review for this week, proves to be so unimpressive.

I’ve said before that one should approach a review of a children’s program with some degree of charity. After all, a children’s show or movie is made for children, and shouldn’t necessarily be judged by the same system as adult forms of entertainment are. I still stand by this statement to some degree, but last week Jakers! proved to me that a children’s show can be perfect for kids and still be well-made and interesting to adults at the same time. As such, the bar will forever be raised in my mind.

Caillou: Caillou’s Family Favorites is a collection of four episodes of the PBS Kids show called Caillou. It bundles the episodes together into one feature length viewing experience. The show is about a boy named Caillou and as it explores the entertaining adventures that can be had and the educational lessons that can be learned during everyday life.

The best summation I can make of the show is that everything about Caillou just seems so…safe. That may seem like a strange description for an animated children’s program, but it’s the best word I can think of, as it illustrates the pros and cons of the show. After all, Caillou proves to be a perfectly reasonable show for children to enjoy because it is indeed safe. There’s no questionable content, Caillou is a well-behaved kid for children to emulate, and a soothing narrator lays out the lessons of each episode just to make sure children don’t miss it. Nothing wrong with that right?

On the one hand, these are admirable qualities to look for in a children’s show; however, the “safeness” of the show also tends to lead to mediocrity. After all, playing it safe leaves no room for exploration. The show I mentioned previously called Jakers! is such an excellent children’s show because it doesn’t play it safe. In fact, the majority of the show is ABOUT exploration. The characters in it are three-dimensional kids who test boundaries and learn lessons organically, like real kids do. I kept wishing for a bit more of that reality and a little bit less of the expected naivety as I watched Caillou.

The animation style is just as safe as the show itself. It’s serviceable, but it certainly doesn’t do anything to stir the imagination, often looking like it could’ve been drawn by the children who watch it. The character designs are extremely simple and have no unique qualities to give them that extra flair that one looks for in a cartoon character. Even the backgrounds are shortchanged, as oftentimes they’re only half-drawn. I don’t know if this was done as a creative decision or a way to save money, but there are numerous shots in which the background environments only take up the center part of the screen and the fade into white along the borders. This often results in a surreal feeling of the characters inhabiting some sort of purgatory or floating limbo. A strange decision indeed, and one that distracts the viewer’s attention more than it should.

The Caillou DVD comes with the usual assortment of children’s extras: interactive games, character bios, parents’ information, and the like. Much like the show itself, the extras are what you’d expect, but there’s nothing about them that really stands out.

Maybe I’m being too hard on Caillou. After all, it is a perfectly serviceable children’s show, and parents should have no trouble with their children watching it. However, it’s also about as average as you can get. It’s everything that you’d expect out of a children’s program and nothing more. It works, but there’s definitely better stuff out there that’s more stimulating for the kids and more entertaining for the parents.