Say Hi to Pencil! ("Xin Chào Bút Chì!") is a 2011 Vietnamese short film that was later adapted into a television show.
The original short was produced by the company SleepingCatFilm and is about the pens Blue, Yellow, and Red living in peace and harmony within a girl's bedroom until she brings along a pencil, who gets used more often than them and leads them to jealousy over how much attention he's getting.
The TV show premiered in 2012, has the company Hi Pencil Studio as its main producer, and airs on HTV7. It's about Pencil and his pen friends going about their daily lives. Certain versions of the show are hosted by a pair of human girls (who are also claymation), Ping and Pa, who talk about the situations they've run into in their life that usually foreshadow the premise of the episode. After the episode ends, the pair tells how the story can be compared to the behavior of an animal of sorts.
Hi Pencil Studio
has uploaded the series to YouTube for free viewing in both Vietnamese and English. The original Vietnamese-dubbed episodes have English subtitles.
Say Hi to Pencil! provides examples of:
- All Just a Dream: "The Giant Red" primarily takes place inside Red's dream, ending with him waking up and realizing his mistake.
- Animate Inanimate Object: Sentient pencils and pens, specifically.
- Art Shift: The art shifts from claymation to 2D imagery when Ping and/or Pa tells a short story about how a randomly-chosen animal's behavior can be compared to the lesson of the day.
- Big Ball of Violence: In "Radish Picking", Red accidentally gets dirt all over Blue when he tries to dig the giant radish out of the ground. Blue throws some of this dirt back at him, prompting the two to attack each other. The outburst of violence produces a cloud of smoke that obscures the characters from sight.
- Big Budget Beef-Up: The TV show has much slicker animation than the short film that spawned it.
- Birthday Episode: One episode has Yellow help Red bake a cake for Pink's birthday. The episode is cleverly titled "Pink's Birthday" and everything.
- Blind Without 'Em:
- Pa needs to wear glasses to see clearly.
- Blue ends up needing to wear glasses in the episode "Blue Cannot See Clearly", and can't see clearly without them as the title implies.
- Book Ends: The Ping and Pa segments appear at both the beginning and the end of any episodes they appear in.
- Burning with Anger: In "Angry Red", Red bursts into purple flames during his anger scene. A god of destruction had given him the power of anger earlier on in the episode, hence their being purple flames.
- Colorful Theme Naming: Doesn't get any more blatant than the characters literally being named Red, Blue, and Yellow.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: "Pink's Birthday".
- Fishing Episode: "Fishing Day", which features Pencil attempting to catch one particular fish in the ocean but constantly being outsmarted by it.
- Flowers of Romance: A variant. In "The Giant Red", Red gives his giant girlfriend a tree as a gift, in place of a flower.
- Group Picture Ending: The original short ends with Pencil, Blue, Yellow, and Red all taking a picture with each other.
- Hypno Pendulum: Pencil buys one in "Hypnotism", which has him fall under the spell of his own hypno-stone (or at least, it looks like a stone based on color) when Red inquires what it is. This causes Pencil to be used by the pens for their own personal gain.
- Never Trust a Title: The episode "Sueing Mr. God" does not have Pencil actually suing God or otherwise getting angry at him for not stopping it from raining so that his plant can grow.
- Non-Mammalian Hair: The pens have full heads of hair.
- Speaking Simlish: In the original short, the pencil and pens speak in incoherent gibberish rather than any comprehensible words, with subtitles accompanying them so that we can understand what they're saying. They speak normally in the TV show.
- Super-Deformed: Official artwork depicts the characters in a simplified 2D art style with shorter bodies and sparkly eyes, anime style.
- Technicolor Fire: In "Angry Red", a god of anger gives Red the power of anger. Red's resulting Burning with Anger creates purple flames rather than the more traditional red/orange.
- Token Human: Ping and Pa are the only human characters in the show.
- Tooth Fairy: The first episode, "Tooth Fairy", has Red dressing up (at Yellow's suggestion, which he clearly doesn't enjoy) as the Tooth Fairy to tell Blue that he'll get a gift if he puts his cavitied tooth under his pillow after getting it removed at the dentist. Blue doesn't realize it's Red and thinks he looks pretty.
- Verbing Nouny: The episode "Sueing Mr. God".
- X-Ray Sparks: In "Sueing Mr. God", Blue is struck by lightning as the Pen family is climbing a ladder to the sky. His skeketon becomes visible for a split second when this happens.
