Shugo Chara Review

Overall Rating 6.0 out of 10 - Children Friendly Show Concerned Parents Talk About

Watch if you want to know what a Children Friendly Show is

Evert so often you hear from certain parts of society that video games, movies or something else influences children in a bad way. Often such people call for ban on media they deem inappropriate.

Did you however ever wondered what kind of show such people would deem suitable for children? There is Disney, there is Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki and there is this show.

Labelled for kids, it's not actually what children themselves would enjoy. Rather it's all about what parents want their kids to be. 

Most episodes are about some kid who faces some setbacks in life and lose faith in their hobby or career. However, the protagonist, Amu, plays a role of cheerleader and restores their faith in their activity and returns them to "the right path". 

Such a simplistic world view that claims everything depends only on hard work and your own effort overlooks facts that there is a lot more to success in life. In real life luck, opportunities, connections and such often play a higher role in success than hard work. A lot of people are rich are simply because their parents were rich and left them with a lot to enjoy life.

However, this show is not for parents who give their children enough to enjoy life. Instead, it's for the kind of bad parents who want to burden their children as much as possible and then blame them when they fail. After all, "God forbid" (many such parents are religious in a bad way) you blame society or parents themselves for a failure.

This show panders to these bad parents' views and produce them a show about the kind of kids they want their own children to be. It further lulls their critical thinking by giving them simple easy to understand and wrong solutions to a problem when their kids fail or refuse to continue. Simply cheer them up and push them to continue like Amu does in the show. 

I have enough critical thinking to not claim shows like that produce bad parents. GTA does not makes people murderers after all.

Aside from being a circle jerk for concerned parents this show has some redeeming qualities. Amu herself has her own complex personality with her own problems. There is also an overreaching plot that connects individual episodes. Many recurring characters, connected to the whole process in some yet to be revealed way keeps you intrigued enough to learn more. However, show is very long and its unlikely the plot will unravel fast enough.

Overall, I will not recommend or not recommend this show. It has a specific purpose.