YMMV / Shima Shima Tora no Shimajirō

• Americans Hate Tingle: Despite being popular in Japan, Taiwan and China, this anime has little mention in the west. Kodomomuke shows that target kids younger than grade schoolers are typically a hard sell in the west due to there being plenty of competing children's programming, with the only exception being to flog The Merch ^note And Shimajiro merch would be a hard sell in the west due to Benesse’s esoteric "encyclopedia salesman"-like sales model, which requires an interested parent to enroll their child in one of their education programs before they can buy the toys, and franchise the series is based on that have already been established (for example, it's based on a popular video game). However as of 2020 WildBrain is attempting to push the series in the west, roping in Funimation as a partner for their dubbing expertise.
• Archive Panic: As of 2022, the franchise has over 1,350 total episodes across three retools and nine movies, and new episodes of the latest incarnation of the show still being released weekly, and that's excluding the Kodomo Challenge direct-to-video/direct-to-DVD shorts.
• Designated Villain: Zouta and Boota, and to a lesser extent, Kirinta and Monta (Kanta is portrayed as part of Zouta's gang but is only comic relief when that role is invoked). They're often the bully when the story calls for conflict, but when it doesn't, they're all pally with Shimajiro and Co. Compare Binky Barnes and the Tough Customers from Arthur.
• Fridge Logic: Shimajiro never did return Mimirin's extra clothes and ribbon if the second cross-dressing episode is any indication. Did Mimirin's mom ever wondered where one of her daughter's extra dress went? Did Shimajiro's mom ever question why Shimajiro's wardrobe suddenly has a dress- one belonging to Mimirin no less- in it?
• Genius Bonus: Why Shimajiro and friends live on an island. An island in Japanese is Jima, but is also pronounced Shima in certain Japanese dialects, which of course also means striped. It's all basically Japanese wordplay.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • The Chinese are in love with this show, despite the tensions between Japan and China.
  • The series is also a mega hit in Taiwan, whose relationship with Japan is on the borderline of obsession. Taiwan is also actually the first country to import the show from Japan and is the first country outside Japan to get a localized version of the Kodomo Challenge programs.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In one episode of the anime, Torippi was turned into a kappa when he misused one of Professor Gaogao's inventions and got sucked into a book about a kappa. Frank Todaro, Torippi's English voice actor, was eventually signed up as Mugman for The Cuphead Show!. Guess what a kappa and a mug have in common.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • If You Can Use the Toilet, You'll Become a Pants-Man!, which resulted in a Gag Sub of "Any Toilet Can Be a Piece of Cake!" being put up on YouTube before the meme died.
  • And there's the remake of the first segment, which also garnered up a lot of attention. Apparently it's normal in Japan but everywhere else...not so much.
  • Averted for the stand alone squat toilet and pee bucket episodes that were produced in 2012, since it was very hard to find footage of them as Bennese started their own YouTube channel at the time and took down unauthorized Shimajiro uploads.
• Moe: The characters on the show is as cute and cuddly as they come, but every one of the girl characters hits this trope especially. Yes, even the adults!
• Narm: The episode that introduces Richard. The Chinese version in particular takes the cake as they got a native Chinese speaker to speak in English (with a stilted French accent, whether intentional or not) and is not allowed speak Chinese for almost the whole episode. The actor does a commendable job, but still end up sounding strange for someone who speaks English as his native language. It will be interesting to see how the English dub handles this, if it does.
• Never Live It Down: Averted. Due to the first videos of the show uploaded to the Internet being the infamous potty-training episode, the show initially became known for that—not helping is that the next Shimajiro video to be uploaded to the Internet was yet another potty training episode. However, once Benesse started uploading episodes officially, it became clear that this is a very deep and enjoyable Slice of Life show. The meme is dead now and looked back on fondly by OG Shimajiro fans, especially with the show now being officially available in English.
• Spiritual Successor: Shimajiro can be considered one to Mapletown. The Kodomo Challenge videos premiered exactly one year after Maple Town ended and the show bears some similarities to Maple Town- firstly, it targets the same preschooler demographics of Maple Town. Secondly, there are some notable art style similarities between the character designs used in both anime. Thirdly, there are also extreme similarities in the general world the stories are set in - like how the father of the protagonists are postal workers and their teacher of the protagonist at school are deers. Then there's the fact that several Maple Town VAs were part of the original cast (though they were all switched out when the show spun off and became a TV series of it's own). Lastly, Ban-Dai was also originally licensed to produce some of the toys (and still does so on and off- mostly as gacha toys).
• Soundtrack Dissonance: To capitalize on the new Youtube shorts trend, Benesse started uploading TikTok-style short videos with their costumed Shimajiro onto their Japanese channel. Their song choices... are interesting. Simple Plan's "I'm Just A Kid" is one thing. The expletive-laden and adult-themed "Stay" by The Kid LAROI and featuring Justin Bieber, on the other hand...
• Tear Jerker: Has its own page here.
• Values Dissonance:
  • In the rare episode that Shimajiro's mom gets mad at him, she chases him around the house with the implication that he's going to get spanked if caught. In Japan (and a large chunk of Asia for that matter), spanking your own children to discipline them is still acceptable practice. If they had lived in North America, Europe or the Pacific, it would end badly for the Shimano family (as spanking used to be a common punishment and is still used in some territories, but the punishment has been increasingly associated with child abuse). Tellingly, the episode "Dad Is Embarassing" had the scene where she almost slaps Shimajiro edited out in later revisions of the episode due to feedback from western Moral Guardians.
  • Some episodes reveals that the kids are occasionally asked by their parents for a body massage for extra pocket money or some other favors. In the west, this amounts to child labor. In the east, familial piety means the kids are obliged to help soothe dad's aching muscles or mom's headache.
  • Same applies for the fact that Shimajiro and Co. being Free-Range Children and even sometimes helping out with their parents' business (as with Mimirin's and Marurin's case). In Asia, kids are instilled the sense of independence and responsibility at a rather young age, something that isn't normal in modern western society.
  • And then there's the several potty training episodes. Now, potty training episodes are by no means rare in the west^note Little Princess, Sesame Street, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood and Bear in the Big Blue House had one, and then there’s the legendary It's Potty Time! video. But due to the fact that the show took some strange directions that western potty training videos averts ^note for example, anthropomorphic toilets and use of scatological humor, combined with the fact that potty training videos tend to end up as cheap humor fodder among teens and young adults, and that the first two Shimajiro videos uploaded to the Internet were potty training episodes, the franchise pretty much gained notoriety for that back in the turn of the Millennium when videos on the internet was still a new thing.
  • One CGI episode encourages children to help strangers, throwing the Too Smart for Strangers trope straight out the window. Apparently this is a wholly Japanese thing because the Japanese value close-knit communities and encourages everyone to look out for each other. This is unlikely to end well for the kid outside of Japan.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Tamasaburo is a boy, but with his long hair and eyelashes, he could easily be mistaken for a girl. Not helping matters is the fact that his clothes are gender neutral looking and that he's voiced by a female voice actor in the original Japanese version.
• Watch It for the Meme: Best remembered in the West for the bizarre potty training episodes, although the meme was long dead by the time the English dub started.
• The Woobie: Any character can be a woobie in the show. If a character takes the spotlight in an episode, you can bet they're going to be it, and it's not just limited to the kids- Adults are also fair game in this anime.

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