Following up on Hello Kitty: Stump Village - Time to Dig In!, Geneon has released Volume 5 in the claymation Hello Kitty: Stump Village series, entitled It's Showtime! This volume contains four, eleven minute episodes of little Kitty and her friends as they finally build their cool little theatre out of a charred tree stump, along with their minor squabbles and triumphs in the quaint little Stump Village. Still charming, adorable, with even more ramped-up weirdness, Hello Kitty: Stump Village - It's Showtime! kept me wanting more in this funny series

Created in 1974 by the Sanrio Company of Tokyo, Japan, Hello Kitty has become a merchandizing phenomenon, with the sweet little white-faced kitty plastered on every product known to man. So it's not surprising that Hello Kitty would show up in a variety of filmed media, including, finally, claymation. When I watched the fourth volume in the series for the first time, I wasn't really sure what to expect. I had no Hello Kitty background, so I just assumed that Hello Kitty: Stump Village - Time to Dig In! would be an innocuous series of animated adventures, aimed at preschoolers.

And for the most part, it was, as were the adventures in Hello Kitty: Stump Village - It's Showtime! (although each little short can stand alone, there are occasional crossover plots, like the last episode from Volume 4, and the first one from this volume). Plots are kept rigidly simple (the better to translate to a maximum number of countries and cultures), revolving around Kitty and her friends Pompompurin, Cinnamoroll, My Melody, and Bad Badtz-Maru as they entertain themselves in their little hideaway village. What first struck me about these adventures were how work-oriented and industrious the little characters are; no one just lays around in Stump Village. Someone is always planning an event, building sets or costumes for a play, or baking bread for a planned party. With the aid of a narrator (Wendee Lee for this English-language version), we follow the various threads of each short little story. The narrator is necessary, because all of the characters speak in baby cooing sounds, used for emphasis that even the smallest child can comprehend (again, this technique also allows endless dubbing possibilities).

With the roly-poly, chubby little characters inhabiting Stump Village, it's not difficult to get children's attention, who seem immediately drawn to their funny little claymation movements and their baby cooing sounds (my kids were right up on that widescreen). For such simple characters, they possess quite a bit of charm and interest, filling certain broad stock characteristics to hang the stories on: Bad Badtz-Maru is naturally the little naughty one; Cinnamoroll is the nurturing one (always baking bread); Pompompurin is the strong builder; My Melody is the sweet, shy, scared one; and Kitty is the stable anchor. And it's hard to deny that they're cute and cuddly, and that the simple stories are perfect for the smallest children's attention spans.

But just as in Volume 4, there are certainly elements in Hello Kitty: Stump Village - It's Showtime! - some decidedly weird elements - that add a slightly bizarre feel to the episodes, that I still found hilarious. If anything, things are even weirder now in Stump Village, much to my delight. As with Volume 4, the level of slapstick runs fairly high for a supposedly sweet-natured show. Characters are constantly getting thrown around or they fall, with their little eyes spinning like pinwheels as they try to shake their heads to clear them. Funny sound effects also elevate the comedy, with a repeated gag of having the characters use a tool or utensil, only to nonchalantly throw it over their shoulders with a funny whoosh sound.

Topping the weirdo moments in Volume 4, Hello Kitty: Stump Village - It's Showtime! goes further, getting more laughs out of me than the previous disc. The dancing clay puppets who come to life when soap bubbles pop open on them is certainly strange, as is the mean old buzzard that terrorizes Kitty and her friends. I also like it when they show Bad, bored out of his mind, whipping around a ball in his room until he keels over on his head out of sheer apathy. But surely the highlight of the disc has to be Puppet Show, where the gang play a friendly board game - with some decidedly evil obstacles built in. What starts off as a simple scene - the kids rolling the dice and moving their playing pieces - becomes increasingly bizarre and funny as the players land on the dreaded "Penalty Spaces." It's bad enough that one such space requires a player to be humiliated by wearing funny glasses and a fake nose (which everybody laughs at), but the "Rubber Hammer" space takes the cake. Landing on that requires the player to take a blow to the head with a large, hard rubber mallet. Kitty is the first one to receive her punishment - the narrator gleefully intones, "Oh dear, here it comes!" - with a knot immediately rising on her forehead (the director is kind enough to go in real close to Kitty when she gets her noggin whacked). As my kid looked on in absolute wonder, the film expertly cuts away, only to come back for the joke topper, which shows all of the players with sour expressions on their faces, along with bandages where they've been repeated pummeled. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. If all of the Hello Kitty: Stump Village DVDs contain such surrealistically hilarious moments like that, I'm ordering the whole set.

Stump Theater
Bad's not dead from the lightning strike, although he is covered in a pile of ashes. The lightning hollows out the candy tree, giving the gang a place to build their theater.

Circus
Bad finds a book on circuses, and decides that he wants that to be the first production in the Stump Theater.

Puppet Show
The board game from hell. As well, puppets come to life in the Stump Theater.

Scarecrow
The mean old buzzard is terrorizing the gang, and eating their wheat. But they'll stop him with dough scarecrows.

The DVD:

The Video:
The full frame video image for Hello Kitty: Stump Village - It's Showtime! is wonderfully bright and colorful, with no compression issues.

The Audio:
The English 2.0 stereo soundtrack is perfectly fine for this presentation. English subtitles are available, too.

The Extras:
There are no extras for Hello Kitty: Stump Village - Time to Dig In!.

Final Thoughts:
Even more twisted than Hello Kitty: Stump Village - Time to Dig In!, Hello Kitty: Stump Village - It's Showtime! contains one of the strangest scenes I've ever watched in a video produced exclusively for small children: the Rubber Hammer Penalty Space from the Board Game of Death. That alone is worth the price of Hello Kitty: Stump Village - It's Showtime! But don't worry; your kids won't be any more damaged than all the kids that grew up on Tom & Jerry and The Three Stooges. Charming, fun, silly and cuddly, Hello Kitty and her gang are a delight. I highly recommend Hello Kitty: Stump Village - It's Showtime!