Kaeloo
Kaeloo is a French CGI cartoon, made up of 52 episodes of 7 minutes each, broadcast originally on the French premium cable service Canal+ in 2010 and distributed internationally. It originated as a three-minute Short Film in 2007, entitled Red Light, Green Light, 1, 2, 3.
Its eponymous central character is Kaeloo, a sweet and imaginative but a dangerously emotionally unstable little frog who's always looking for games to play with her "buddies": Stumpy (a squirrel), Quack-Quack (a duck), and Mr. Cat (a cat). Unfortunately for these buddies, Kaeloo is prone to Hulking Out whenever angry or frustrated, or to get an advantage over the others in physical competitions, or simply to intimidate them.
Somehow it all turns out well.
Tropes used in Kaeloo include:
- Ambiguous Gender: Kaeloo. The show's official Facebook page hints strongly that Kaeloo is female only in the English dub.
- Animal Stereotypes: The squirrel is a hyperactive ditz and the cat is a Jerkass.
- Animals Not to Scale: Kaeloo, a frog, is larger than Stumpy and Mr. Cat, who are both properly-sized for their species according to Word of God. Even weirder, Quack-Quack -- who is a duckling -- is larger even than her.
- Bilingual Bonus: Kaeloo written in Japanese would become カエル (the word for frog).
- Cats Are Mean: Mr. Cat, of course, particularly to Quack-Quack.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Kaeloo's transformations involve changes that are characteristic of steroid abuse.
- Dumb Muscle: "Bad Kaeloo", Kaeloo's monstrous hulked-out form.
- Hulking Out: Kaeloo does this Once an Episode.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every episode name takes the form "Let's Play X", where X is a game of some sort.
- Jerkass: Mr. Cat, "Bad Kaeloo".
- No Sense of Personal Space: Kaeloo.
- Parody Name: Episode 11, "Let's Play Happy Rotter".
- Shrug of God: Kaeloo's actual gender, regardless of voice performer, is apparently an area of canon doubt and uncertainty.
- Species Surname: Mr. Cat.
- Speech-Impaired Animal: Quack-Quack.
- A Worldwide Punomenon: Episode 24, "Let's Play the Quest for the Wholly Gruel"; the "Wholly Gruel"/"Holy Grail" pun works in both English and French ("La Quête du Greul"/"La Quête du Graal").