Site Index | Blog What's New? Review List Stuff Review Outline Why Hate Anime? Wheat RoD: The TV Haibane Renmei Teen Titans Chaff Akira Legend of the Overfiend Black Heaven Cartoons (and therefore anime) have a benefit over live action works that people sometimes overlook. In live action, a great deal of time and energy must be spent just to make sure everything looks right. That's why lighting, makeup, and special effects are such a huge part of any given movie's budget. With animation, however, the artists can draw everything from the ideals. Things can be abstracted to look as good as they need to right from the start. "Hi Kana! Like my new hat?" "Yeah Laura! Great hat!" "You like it? It's new!" "Yeah, it looks good on you!" Etc... etc... This is why Hamtaro is a cartoon about cute, adorable critters and not about real hamsters, which are dirty, nasty, smelly, and ill-tempered. Also, they eat their own young and sleep in beds soaked with their own filth. Hamsters make horrible pets outside a carefully-scripted cartoon environment. Hamtaro is a kid's show that's been playing on Cartoon Network twice a day pretty consistantly for a while now. It's also good clean fun for people (like me) who enjoy silly cartoons where adorable critters are always having hilarious misadventures. It's a guilty pleasure, but hey, I'll take pleasure any way I can get it. Characters: In a lot of ways Hamtaro is a throwback to the days of the Smurfs. Each of the twenty or so hamhams have one or two overwhelming personality traits, and then they're mixed and matched as needed. Hamtaro, the title character, is your generic all-around nice guy. His buddy Oxnard is the one who is always hungry. Boss is the tough guy, Howdy is the one with the bad jokes, Sandy is the valley girl. So on and so forth. Hams of the round table. If the show were only about these lovable hamsters, this category would easily be a six. Unfortunately, Hamtaro also deals with the boring endevours of each hamster's owner, most notably a pair of dull preteen girls named Laura and Kana. While the hamhams are off getting lost on nature hikes or running from chickens or building a solar-powered recycling plant, Laura and Kana (and any other humans that end up on the show) are having boring conversations about pictures they drew. Yawn. Story: A typical episode of Hamtaro consists of one of two types of storylines: either Hamtaro and the other hamhams mimic something they saw their humans do, or they rally together to solve one of their humans' problems. "Geez Boss, lay off the sunflower seeds for a while, would ya?" The former usually produces more interesting results. When Laura has to write an article for her school paper, the hamhams are inspired to print their own Hamham Times. When the girls take a trip to the amusement park, the hamham carpenter Panda builds them a roller coaster. And with hilarious results! The "save the humans" brand of episode typically starts with Laura or some other hapless youth screwing something up and the hamhams bungling around trying to fix it. Like when Laura loses a computer disk belonging to her father, leaving Hamtaro and Oxnard to search for it with the help of the poet-hamham Jingle. These episodes tend to leave the humans mystefied and the viewer bored. In any case, Hamtaro stories are usually fun enough to hold your interest for their duration, but then instantly forgettable. It is worthwhile to mention, though, that the series does have it's own continuity. Things from earlier episodes will influence events in later ones, which is nice because in the dull existence of grown-ups who still watch cartoons it's a minor victory when you pick up on a show's own references. Hey baby, wanna come back to my place and run on the wheel? Maybe pop open a water bottle or two? Animation: Hamtaro has a bright, colorful, cuddly atmosphere that makes you want to run around and hug everything in sight. I don't really know what else I can say about it. The only way this show could look happier is if the sun sported one of those insane lobotomy-patient grins like in cereal commercials, or maybe if the flowers and trees had big puppy-dog eyes like in Mario games. There's a lot of the crazy overblown facial experessions that drive me up the wall, but since most of the time they're on hamsters and not humans, that makes it okay in some crazy mixed-up way. I guess having one layer of suspension of belief (that being "cartoon") isn't enough to sat me, but having two ("cartoon" plus "animal") is fine. But hey, it's my website, so 4/6 hamhams it is. Culture Shock: Hamtaro is set in Japan, so that's worth two hamhams right there. Add another one for the falling cherry blossoms during the intro. Actually, it would have been five except the Haruna family (Laura's last name is Haruna... did I mention that?) is probably the most Americanized Japanese family ever. 540 BS Railslide - 4300 points! The dialogue in Hamtaro is localized well enough that it rarely sounds awkward, except when Howdy tries to tell a joke. The "regional" hamhams sound charming rather than irritating, which is a definate plus. Bijou's French accent easily straddles the fence between sinfully obnoxious and super-cute, but thankfully never teeters over. Still, the show is undeniably Japanish, sometimes even head-scratchingly so. It's just that in most anime that can be confusing or distracting, while in Hamtaro it's merely endearing. Links Official Site Hamhams' Clubhouse Animenation Listing IMDB Listing Hamtaro is wheat, but just barely. Most of the episodes I catch are only in my peripheral vision as I'm doing something else; it makes great background noise. Or, it's on TV when I first wake up in the morning, and it's nice to be greeted by an army of dancing, singing hamsters. Trying to concentrate on an episode, though, can be tricky business, since in the back of my head I keep hearing "Jesus, Brick. You're a big boy. Grow up and watch History Channel or something." But let's not kid anyone. If anyone knows where I can get a Bijou beanie baby, e-mail me and tell me where! Overall Rating:

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