Cartoon Night in Canada

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie are torn between their hastily programmed Pride theme month and the desire to program with new releases with the release of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Returning to the beloved Canadian CGI series Beast Wars: Transformers, they found a way to kill two birds with one stone through a quick Google search to find "The Gayest Episode of Beast Wars...

HAPPY PRIDE TO ALL OUR LISTENERS!! To celebrate, we here at Cartoon Night in Canada our programming a whole month of (somewhat) LGBT-centric shows produced here in Canada. And we are starting off with a thematically confused message and a mouthful of a title. It's Rick and Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World! An in-your-face, stop-motion satire of the queer community that so proudl...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris are back in the vast archives of the NFB for a pairing of two shorts that could not be more different. An adaptation of a beloved children's novelty song about an absurdist struggle between man and animal, and a confessional anthology of women discussing their first same-sex attraction with charm and vulnerability. While we somewhat failed at findin...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris tackle another big hitter of the Canadian cartoon canon - a cult favourite from the minds of a now beloved directing duo that many might not even realize is TECHNICALLY Canadian (the best kind). It's the greatest animated teen sitcom to ever exist, it's Clone High! A wacky, zany, and maybe even silly teen show parody for the irony poisoned teena...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie head to the Mossflower Woods to witness the divine struggles of war between mice, rats, otters, and other woodland critters in Brian Jacques' Redwall. While hesitant to cover an apparently beloved series like this, we get into the beautiful aesthetic inspired by Gary Chalk's illustration work, how the show adapts the more mature/intense themes o...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie take a trip down to the stop-motion community of Wapos Bay to really emphasize the importance of Indigenous stories and media, produced by Indigenous creators, for Indigenous audiences. A charming children's program and meticulously crafted animation that's only real glaring issue is it speaks to a very young audience about the realities of thei...

On this week's episode, the CNIC Detour takes Chris and Sylvie to where no socially-awkward horny nerd has gone before with Tripping the Rift. A misogynistic cavalcade of jokes that were poorly aged in the mid-2000s when they were first made. Under the revealing light of 2023 the only thing more past its prime than the try-hard offensive humour and deeply ingrained sexism is the early CG animation...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie get into one of the early turning points for anime fandom in the West with the Canadian produced dub for Rumiko Takahashi's groundbreaking gender swap comedy Ranma 1/2. Our old Vancouver buds The Ocean Group whipped together a bold yet faithful reworking of the original release which really highlights the sharp comedy and surprisingly progressive ap...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris do some intentional programming for once and celebrate the release of the (apparently mediocre) Super Mario Bros. movie with another video game adaptation from the Mario franchise that most definitely DID NOT have the same amount of care, money, or consideration of fan opinion underlying its production. It's another artifact of early CGI animation d...

Happy April Fools' Day! This week, Sylvie and Chris played a prank on themselves by wading back into shows produced for toddlers with the ill-fated Nelvana adaptation of a beloved children's book author lesser known book. It's Seven Little Monsters, a series that takes all the charm of Maurice Sendak's aesthetic and darker outlook on children's storytelling and smothers it to m...

On this week's CNIC Detour, Sylvie and Chris ponder what exactly a "producer" actually does and the sorry state of daytime television as they get into the needlessly zany workplace comedy Producing Parker. While admiring the sharp direction and stunning aesthetic of this forgotten TvTropolis (remember that??) series, we suffer through the two-thousand and late sense of humour which f...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie bumble their way through a multi-layered mystery of strange landscapes and stranger creatures in the Netflix-produced teen adventure show The Hollow. While acknowledging we were in no way the target audience for this, we broke down why this recent show lacks the staying power to invest you in its multi-arc narrative and why it can never shake the "...

For Chris and Sylvie's continued exploration of the National Film Board archives, we decided to commemorate the 95th Academy Awards with a double-stuffed Oscar special! Three nominated or winning films from the NFB's extensive archives and the currently nominated short film The Flying Sailor. From a darkly comic midlife crisis, to an psychedelic appreciation of the abstract beauty of a walk cycle,...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie are getting into the uncharted territories of vanity animated projects and over- the-hill narcissistic rockstars with the Gene "That Guy from Kiss with the Tongue" Simmons produced show My Dad the Rockstar. A fairly solid coming of age show about the trials of having a flamboyant celebrity father that hits at the nefarious veracity of reality television in...

During our recording session this week, we decided to do a proper send-off to our beloved "animation station" Teletoon. On the airwaves since October of 1997, it was announced last month that it would be permanently rebranding under Cartoon Network as of March 27, 2023. We briefly get into the history and importance of the channel and what it meant for Canadian media and what happened that led us...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris show you their fangs and get way too invested in the fragile delineations between fantasy and reality with Mona the Vampire. While debating some favourite tropes featured in shows we covered (the HorrorKid, precocious girl with overactive imagination, monster of the week story structure, etc.), we once again get into the joys of horror made for kids and our...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie meet in the deathmatch arena to fight over a dark period in our celebrity obsessed culture with MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch. A partially Canadian series where the mid-2000s revival of this "beloved" MTV series was fully produced in Toronto, we catalog the many, many ways this series has aged poorly with its ugly attitude towards troubled stars and starlets....

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie wonder how you could make a Shōjo manga intended for young girls more incomprehensible with the wrong-headed intentions behind the Nelvana produced dub of Cardcaptor Sakura. Trying to parse the ambitious decision to de-Shōjo the Madhouse and Clamp series and make it appeal to young male anime fans, Chris and Sylvie try their best to breakdown the butchered...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie drift back into CG animation for some fun times with nondescript bugs fighting for survival under a gluttonous tyrant. It sounds a lot more entertaining than it was. For whatever reason, we really came out gunning for Erky Perky and had A LOT to say. Plus, the debut of a controversial recurring segment, Sylvie's brief attempt at getting on Ghost Trackers, a...

It's official, we have been doing this Cartoon Night in Canada thing for a year. A whole entire year of classic Canadian cartoons, hidden treasures of the NFB, anime for some reason, and some animated shows we could have just left stay in our memories.  To celebrate, we decided to cover one of the universally agreed upon great examples of Canadian animation (that some might not realize is act...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris are delving back into preschool entertainment with the first cross-cultural exposure of many young Canadians to any form of Chinese culture with Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat. While seeing whether or not this Amy Tan adaptation holds up (spoiler alert: we're not sure, but potentially maybe?), we dig into the efforts to portray its cultural context, the can...

Ayyyyyyyy its 2023 ova here!! And there is no better way to begin a new year than with some immature adult animation that thinks "Regina" is a joke in itself. It's Fugget About It, the show that mashes together the worst aspects of Family Guy and The Sopranos into a less than memorable package. Chris and Sylvie dissects its obvious inspirations, its bizarre production history on the "Teletoon Pilo...

Happy Holidays CNIC listeners! Sylvie and Chris TOTALLY ON PURPOSE planned a Christmas special that just happened to coincide with our recurring dive into the National Film Board of Canada's archives. This in no way was slapped together at the last minute after looking at a calendar... We picked two charming Holiday themed shorts produced by the NFB featuring some familiar directors and even more...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie head to the Moonlands to learn the way of the Magi and go one on one with all sorts of Dream Creatures with Magi-Nation. Taken from a bygone era when Yu-Gi-Oh was a prime target to be ripped off and western animation was overtly anime inspired, Magi-Nation is based on s defunct trading card game neither of us have heard of. To increase the challenge of pars...

On this week's podcast, Chris and Sylvie enroll in the surreal, towering institution that is Wayside elementary for a chat about the stealth pilot/television special Wayside: The Movie. While dissecting its absurd humour, connections to the beloved Louis Sachar novel, and its vibrant aesthetic, we wind up talking extensively about the careers of Michael Cera and Skye Sweetnam (while continuing our...