There was a trend during 1980s that television broadcasting situated in media industry went about targeting audience (Catherine, 2005). Since 1992, as a work kept popular for 27 years, Crayon Shin-chan began airing on Asahi TV channel in Japan, which was succeeding in animation creating and exporting.
This blog would briefly explore which group was the niche market for Crayon Shin-chan and how did it target them.
Normally, most cartoons were created for children or teenagers, however, Crayon Shin-chan faced to family audiences (Williams, 2000), which means not only children, but adults as well. In addition, massive sexual implications were interwoven in the context only apt for people beyond 18 years old. For example, Shin-chan and his father craze for beautiful female, showing the bra and underwear of Shin-chan’s mother or nude body.
Like these two picture above, hints of sex in Crayon Shin-chan seemed was employed intentionally in attracting adult viewers. It’s worth to mention that the author bring humor elements into plots designing which enabled to offer more fun and reduce shame from certain kind of scenes. For instance, Shin-chan had a classical elephant dance that he took off clothes and showed his buttocks and ‘elephant’. It was a shame to watch a character naked on the screen, but here the naughty five-year-old boy with song and dance made that acceptable to audiences.
In addition to naked body and women’s personal clothing, there were also some implications about adult’s sexual life. Children might not understand the true meanings of that sorts of plots which adults could make sense of. In episode 555, Shin-chan’s mother was pregnant that they were going to have a second children and the family discussed about this. Here Shin-chan said that he known the process of having a baby and the following dialog between he and his parents contained some sexual hints. Specifically, below were the screen shot and the translation of that plot.
Now I could understand that what Shin-chan sad was different from what his parents meant. However, when I watch this cartoon for the first time in 2000s, I did not mentioned this implication. Moreover, instead of directly sexual description, this category of hint attracted adult viewers; meanwhile to some extends protected children and avoided embarrassment if the whole family watch Crayon Shin-chan together.
Furthermore, Crayon Shin-chan was different from Chinese animation which focused on children with an intention full of didactic like educating children how to behave, communicate, study and so on. This cartoon revealed reality (such as foible and pretension) for adults rather than boring and simplex purpose of teaching.
In the screenshot above, two young vain female teachers compared and discussed about the size of bust in the bath. Like this manner, issues and affairs were exaggerated to construct humor aiming at letting adult viewers naturally laughed at themselves.
Reference
Catherine, J. (2005) ‘Quality/Cult Television: The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in US Television of the 1990s’, Telefantasy, Chapter 4 (pp. 95-123). http://moodle.nottingham.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/3150667/mod_resource/content/0/Johnson%20Telefantasy%20Chapter%204.pdf
Williams, M. W. M. (2000), Japanese Comics and Religion: Osa Tezuka’s Story of the Buddha, in JAPAN POP! Inside the world of Japanese Popular Culture, edited by Craig, Timothy J, Chapter 6, (pp. 93-114). Published by Routledge.
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