Sady845

I know, a 9/10 might be a bit to much for this show, it's probably worth a 7,5/10, but by golly first of all this show is my childhood and second of all, as I've seen for a lot of children shows that doesn't specifically target an adult audience, the overall rating of the show is way too low.

For a background, The Little Spirou is the adaptation of the comic book series by the same name from Tome and Janry, which started in 1987 and is still getting released today, compared to the show that lasted one season released in 2012, with 78 5-minutes episodes.

One thing that is noteworthy though is that the comic book is leaning way more towards the "all-audience" than the show, which is mainly educational for 7-12 years old, since the comic book tackles mature subject like sexuality, puberty etc, a path the TV show didn't choose to follow.

Instead each episode centers around a problem met by the main character, Little Spirou, and his friends Vert, Cassius and Masseur during their everyday life as primary schoolers. Each episode (most of the time) ends up having a morale: if Spirou tries to solve his problem doing something bad, he's gonna get punished, but if he gather up courage, kindness and/or honesty to solve them, he's getting rewarded, wether by his mom, teachers, or his girlfriend Suzette giving him a kiss on the cheek.

It was one of the show I watched the most growing up, definitely taught me a lot of stuff, and I re-watched the whole series as an 18-years old, and enjoyed it a lot! Because despite it being, once again, a show leaning towards the educational category, the characters are very well-written and enjoyable to follow. This would give anyone a feeling of nostalgia seeing these kids imagine that their school is invaded by aliens or that if they grow a hair they're gonna be laughed at by everyone.

Because yes, it's part of this shows charm: a lot of it is scenarios imagined by Little Spirou if he did on thing or the other to solve his problem. Just like his adult counterpart, he's all and all quite intelligent, and a very good friend overall (for many reasons, but let's just say he's never letting a friend down, which is not always the case the other way around).

Overall, it's not a flawless show, and I understand if adults don't want to spend their time watching 78 episodes of an educational show (there's only 20 episodes or a bit more in English anyway), but if you want to show your kid, it's available on YouTube for free, in French and English, so you have no reason to at least not take a look! I promise it's worth it.

(PS: I just find the fact he's wearing a full-as groom costume all the time and cares more about his hat than anything else super cute)

This series is beautifully animated, very charmful, surprisingly good for everyone to watch (doesn't take the viewer for an idiot like Dora 4 exemple), has a lot of funny and creative visual gags, and most importantly has insanely loveable characters (including the main three, the literal entirety of the first year class, most of the teachers, and even the heroes rivals are very entertaining when onscreen). I watched it as a kid, re-watched it recently (available for free on YouTube) and I love it even more than in the past. It's a shame that it only got one season and that I can't find the movie, I would have watched 10 more seasons of this stuff. One of Xilam's best work in my humble opinion. Give it a watch, it's great.

First off: WATCH. THE. DUB. I'm serious. The subbed versus dubbed versions is probably the biggest difference from the two I've ever seen from any piece of fiction ever made. It changes the characters personality, the plot, and even the whole genre, but we'll get to that.

Let's start off with the subbed version. Uuuuh. How do I put it? Boring, generic, cliché, barely bearable characters, uninspired plot... For me, it would be a low 5/10 tends to 4. It's made to be ooooooo scary, but it's barely spoopy. It also has some creatures literally ported from other movies and horror stories (I recall seeing something similar to the ring), and yeah. I think you get the idea. If it doesn't get a one, it's solely because it didn't "hurt" watching this, or it wasn't really obnoxious, dreadful, terrible. Just awfully unpleasant.

Now let's get to why my rating is so high from what I've said so far. The dubbed version. This is the most hilarious tv animated series I've ever seen. Hands down. For some reasons the Japanese studio behind the og anime didn't really care about it anymore so the english dubbing studio could basically do whatever they want. They went ballistic. Incredibly, crazily ballistic. We went from Horror/Action anime to a ridiculously funny one. The jokes' timing is perfect, the references are on point, the 4th wall breaking is constant and hilarious, and the characters went from hateable to hateable because of how funny they are (if that makes sense).

This dub is, to my knowledge, considered as the founder of the "abridged" concept, when basically voice actors actually says funny things over the images even tho the original voice acting is serious, so it could be considered as a parody. But we reach genius level with Ghost Stories, cuz this dub is very much not a parody, and moreso very much official. Sure, you reeeeally have to be someone that has a free mind and that isn't easily offended, because dark humor is the main type of humor in Ghost Stories, and the cursing is also very much present, so definitely not kid-friendly humor, but that's my favourite kind of humor so that's probably why it hit the spot for me.

Overall, I rate this a 8/10, because, as much as I want to rate it a 10/10, we can't really forget that the original anime also count in the notation, and that it's only fair that this fact alone drags the score down a bit, but yeah, really really funny, very entertaining, this dub is the best/funniest dub from an anime ever.