This is a legacy blog post, originally from my previous website, Mouse House Blog. To see more MHB posts, check out the MHB tag here on my blog.
I recently watched through the French/Quebecois Teletoon cartoon Fred’s Head for the first time. I remember being a kid watching Teletoon and seeing ads for it when it was first translated from the French, but I never watched it at the time. Recently a friend of mine on Tumblr who goes through a lot of nostalgic-cartoon-reblogging-binges reblogged a handful of gifs from it (not for the first time) and it just caught my eye enough to watch. At 26 episodes it made good light entertainment for a week. It was far from perfect but had a lot of qualities I enjoyed and was a great distraction from stress for a few days.
For starters, I loved it aesthetically. This is obviously a pretty subjective point but I really enjoyed the art style and got a kick out of the character designs. Fred, in particular, happened to have a design that hit a whole bunch of my favourite points – I’m a sucker for the poofy hair and the bushy eyebrows, and I love a pale, dark-haired character with dark circles around the eyes because, let’s face it, that’s exactly what I am. I also appreciated the variation in character body types, though it was limited among female characters in the main cast – the more interesting female bodies were relegated to background characters. More or less the same goes for racial diversity; it’s there but not prominent in the main cast. The gender balance is fairly decent as well, though the central cast of three friends is two boys and a girl because of course, because it always is.
One thing I really loved was the social landscape of the cartoon. While a lot of shows about teens or high school represent a very cliquey social hierarchy, Fred’s Head showed overlapping social circles and friendships that branched out from characters’ main circles. Fred, being a fairly average kid at least as far as popularity goes, has friendships from a variety of places and times in his life. He’s shown to have been good friends for most of his life with Benji, a popular guy with hottest-guy-in-school status; his friendship with Fabienne is implied to go back several years at least, and GG is his best friend despite the fact that they only met sometime early in high school. This kind of interaction is seen amongst most of the teens in the show – social boundaries or hierarchies are almost nonexistent, with only one (generally rather nasty) character ever seen trying to maintain them. In my experience at least, this is a lot closer to what high school is really like! People were friendly with all kinds of other people, and even if you have one main group of friends, mixing isn’t that unusual. The friendships in this show also made me happy because so many of them were so healthy and well-written, with great chemistry and dynamics unique to each relationship. You could see that Fred’s friendship with Benji operated entirely differently than his relationship with Fab or GG. As a huge fan of good character dynamics, I absolutely loved all of this, and the way that so many different relationships were effectively explored and communicated without being the sole focus of the show.
On the note of relationships, I want to take a moment to look specifically at Fred’s family. For the most part I thought they were really great! Though he didn’t always feature prominently in the show, I had a particular soft spot for Fred’s dad, who was level-headed and likable without straying into any stock dad-character types. Fred’s relationship with his young brother Boon Mee was also nice – again, not prominent, but clearly fairly positive. Fred is seen holding or helping with Boon Mee fairly regularly, and while, like any older sibling, he wasn’t always thrilled when asked for help, he didn’t hold any of this against his brother. As an eldest sibling myself, I love seeing healthy and positive sibling relationships on TV – I feel like sibling rivalry is a pretty tired convention at this point. The most prominent of Fred’s family members, by far, is his mother Carol, about whom I have some mixed feelings. She is a very loving and dedicated parent, which is great, but she also tends to overdo it, becoming invasive and exhausting for Fred. I understand where they were coming from a writing standpoint, creating a point for friction and conflict without making her a total nightmare. And it’s true that a doting parent can often feel overbearing to teens! But I feel like she often enters the territory of stereotypical Helicopter Mom, making her a bit too extreme not to be a stock character. It’s a pretty tired and sexist stereotype of a woman who can’t keep her emotions in check and wants too much to control other people’s lives. There are also certain storylines – the one that springs to mind is one in which she becomes convinced that Fred is doing drugs at the skate park, so she tries to get the park shut down by lurking around it in the bushes and taking pictures of kids getting injured, instead of talking to Fred about her concerns – that clearly display an unhealthy approach to her relationship with her son. In some episodes she seems to ‘learn a lesson’ and accept that Fred needs more space and trust, but this never sticks in the long run. That lack of lasting character development definitely doesn’t help the stock character feeling about her.
Beyond Fred’s family, we have characters like their next-door neighbour and almost-honorary-family-member Madam Butterfly, an elderly and very forgetful Japanese lady. While she is in certain ways a rather delightful character who has interesting wisdom to share and can be very helpful, I’m concerned that she represents a lot of East Asian stereotypes both in her design and her characterization. I don’t know enough about this topic personally to assess how bad the depiction is, but I can tell that she is at least a little bit cringey. That’s not the only spot the show is a little weird with race – Fred’s main love interest (and Fab’s best friend), Anette, is supposed to be Indian, but her skin is so pale that I was completely confused about the implications regarding her race until I skimmed Wikipedia and saw something about her being the daughter of an ambassador and an ex-Bollywood star. So maybe she’s half-Indian? Even so, there’s no reason for her to be so light-skinned. Madam Butterfly’s skin tone is also rather lighter than might be strictly accurate, as is Boon Mee’s – again, I only know Boon Mee’s origins thanks to Wikipedia, which states that he was adopted from Thailand. I don’t whether the show never stated this, or it did and I missed it, or that information was just lost in the translation. Either way, all three of these fairly central characters are much lighter-skinned than strictly makes sense. On the other hand, you have more explicitly black characters like Benji, or other dark-skinned individuals like Tamara (a friend and love interest of Fred’s) and Panook (a classmate of indeterminate gender). So the whitewashing isn’t across the board, it’s just in some places. I do really wonder about Anette’s complexion though – it makes no sense given her background.
Another odd detail regarding character diversity: Fabienne is gay. It’s never explicitly stated, but it’s alluded to so much and so obviously that you’d have to be both really dense and really stubbornly opposed to lesbian characters to argue otherwise. At first I thought that the reason it wasn’t said outright was probably just a matter of censorship – until there was a whole episode in which a reality TV show about teenagers makes Fred out to be gay, and in love with his best friend GG. Everyone around him (except Fab), including his own family, comes to believe this. And it’s explicitly stated through the whole episode. They don’t dance around the topic at all, it’s right there. So if they’re willing to talk about Fred (not) being gay, why won’t they call Fab gay? I don’t know if it’s lesbophobia on the part of the showrunners or on the part of the network, where it actually is censorship out of the bizarre idea that lesbianism is somehow innately more sexual and explicit than straightness, or if there’s something else behind it. It’s unfortunate though, since lesbian characters are hard to come by, and Fabienne is a great one.
Ableism is also an issue that comes up in a few places throughout the show. The first example that jumped out at me was of Balthazar Fairchild, the armless science teacher at St. Jude’s High School. He has a monkey as a service animal, serving as his arms. While Fairchild is sometimes an unlikable character, I don’t think he’s a strictly negative depiction of a disabled character… More of just a weird one, with no actual ties to the reality of disability. He came across like someone was trying to imagine what it might be like for a person with no arms, in the context of a world where this didn’t really happen and so there existed no reality to base the character on. There’s also Fred’s classmate Nino, who seems to be allergic to literally everything (a bit of a stock type, but that’s okay for a tertiary character). His allergies cause him to be estranged from his peers and as a result he’s rather socially maladapted, which results in him sometimes being creepy, overbearing, invasive, or otherwise disrespectful. On one occasion he is seen to have an obsessive crush on Fab and completely disregard her rejections. This is a pretty unpleasant and negative representation of a kid with a lot of allergies or health concerns, and isn’t doing anyone any good. On the mental health side, we have school psychologist Anemone Worrynaut, who obsesses over Fred’s blasé attitude and is determined to prove that he (and many other students, it seems) is deeply depressed or otherwise psychologically unwell. The irony of her character is that she constantly comes across as a bit “psycho” – obsessing over the normal behaviours of teens, constantly misinterpreting other people, and responding inappropriately to nearly every situation. The problem is that this stock “psycho” character type does nothing but reflect badly on the mentally ill, since it simply misrepresents mental illness as a cluster of negative and/or dangerous personality traits unlike any real illnesses. The other “psycho” character is Fred’s first girlfriend, Fanny Cotton. When her jealousy and obsessive nature push him to break up with her, she becomes crazed and begins to stalk him, sabotaging his relationships with other people. She shows up twice more in the series, each time with a more sinister plot to get him back – the last of which involves infecting him with a terrible obscure disease so that no one else will love him. Again, this level of “crazy” does nothing but badly misrepresent mental illness, creating a weird and dangerous image that does not accurately reflect anything that exists in reality, instead contributing to negatives ideas about what mental illness really is.
Other small notes about diversity in the show – Panook’s uncertain gender is played for laughs, being a point of interest and argument amongst the more central cast, who debate constantly about Panook’s gender markers (or lack thereof) and whether they’re a boy or a girl. Panook (above left) seems to be aware that others are uncertain about them, but never reveals a direct answer because no one ever directly asks. (Personally, I’m in the camp of ‘neither’ – it’s my official policy to take any character of uncertain gender and assume that they are neither male nor female. I’m a strong proponent for agender Panook.) I’m not really fond of this uncertainty being a running joke, though, since it reinforces gender roles/stereotypes and the idea that people must both be and appear distinctly either male or female.
The other detail that bugged me a little was GG’s sometimes very weird behaviour, especially with reference to female characters. While at a glance he seems like a character who respects women – after all, he openly aspires to a happy marriage with a large family and a wholesome lifestyle – his behaviour towards women in actual fact is worrisome: he tends to idolize anyone he falls for, placing them on a high pedestal, while also making advances disproportionate to the situation. This pedestal, however, also holds women to a certain standard of ‘purity’ in GG’s eyes. When he falls for Fabienne’s cousin Fatima, they initially seem like a perfect couple. But when she suggests they go somewhere private, he is deeply offended that she would want to ‘consummate before marriage’ (in the English translation, at least, she only seems to want to kiss him – nothing more) and calls her a floozy. Yikes! Aside from his treatment of women, GG is a pretty good character, although sometimes jealousy gets the best of him in unhealthy ways. Usually, though, this is pretty well-handled within the context of the show.
The last major point I wanted to touch on is Fred’s love life. Throughout the show his main love interest is Anette, and it becomes clear that he’s had a crush on her for a long time. I have a few concerns about them though. For starters, Anette is sometimes more of a plot device than a character – she comes across as flat or inconsistent some of the time, which is odd in a show where most of the characters have such solid personalities. At other times she just seems a bit bland. Even when she’s better developed, she and Fred don’t have a lot of consistent chemistry as a pair, despite having feelings for one another. It’s completely unclear in every way why Fred has such a crush on her.
By contrast, there’s another, more secondary character named Tamara who is seen to have a crush on Fred throughout her intermittent appearances in the series. When Fred gets a job with Tamara, the two really hit it off and are a couple by the end of the episode. Their chemistry is a lot more present, and I actually really enjoyed their relationship. But after a while, the temporarily absent Anette returns to the scene and Fred finds himself with conflicting feelings. Predictably, Fred ends up breaking it off with Tamara so that he can pursue Anette. Unlike many cases of this trope, Fred actually does a great job of letting Tamara down easy and making sure she knows that she’s still great and it’s not about her; he knows he couldn’t be what she deserved. Nonetheless, I’m never a fan of this plotline, because it turns a second girl with a total right to be her own character into an obstacle on the male lead’s path to the Dream Girl. Tamara was a really sweet character and I loved the development she got as a more central character during the few episodes that she and Fred were dating, and unfortunately she fell completely to the wayside after the breakup. The first episode following the breakup showed her friends helping her cope, but after that she went back to being an occasional secondary character – in fact, I think she was even less present at that point. She was apparently only worth spending time on when she was Fred’s girlfriend. The fact that she had more development and better chemistry with Fred only made this worse! The thing that’s really significant about all this is that I’m an absolutely hopeless romantic and normally I take pretty much no convincing to get behind a ship if it’s canon. I love love! I like romance! But while I’m not against Fred and Anette (honestly, I’m a big softie who just wants these dumb fictional kids to be happy, so I’m never against it), I’m just not really convinced, either. That’s really rare, and it makes me even more convinced that their dynamic was really missing something in the show. They didn’t have enough onscreen interactions or anything to show the audience why they liked each other. They were just written to Like Each Other and we’re meant to accept that without any evidence.
Despite all my criticisms, though, I did really thoroughly enjoy the show. It’s fun to find media with characters who come across as actual teenagers rather than either kid-friendly teenagers made for kid-friendly TV, or adult interpretations of teenagers ranging from slightly to extremely out of touch with reality. It’s rare to find media that represents teens this accurately, especially without loads of swearing or excessive inappropriateness. But they did come across as really real to me, a person who was until fairly recently a teenager herself, and who has strong feelings about writing real teens. Beyond that, I also loved all of the different character relationships and the fun dynamics. Fred is exactly the kind of character that I love because I enjoy him onscreen and know that I’d have easily been friends with him in real life if he’d gone to my high school. I also love that there are queer characters (of both the explicit and the heavily implied variety) who are fairly well-done, as well as a lot of other kinds of diversity in the cast. The storylines were genuinely entertaining and the show had a great balance of humour, plot development, and appealing characters. For me, it hit an ideal sweet spot between ‘light entertainment for when I’m working on crafts’ and ‘enough fun to actually pay attention to instead of just using as background noise’. I can easily imagine myself rewatching the show in the future, which is always a measure of a good cartoon for me. All in all, Fred’s Head was flawed but thoroughly enjoyable.
I’ll leave you with this final thought: I’d die on a hill for agender Panook. I mean, this is the dialogue to go with the above image:
““Are you trying to find out if I’m a boy or a girl but don’t have the courage to come right out and ask me directly? Is that it?”
“Oh please! As if I couldn’t tell the difference!” (nervous laughter)
(Smiling) “Well if it’s so obvious, I don’t have to tell you then!” (Panook leaves)”
Honestly.
Image credits:
Both images of Panook are screenshots from this youtube video
All other images are screenshots taken from this youtube video of the full extended intro
Bonus: a little doodle of Fred from the scratch paper on my desk. I’m very proud of it.
