Kai-lan's Playhouse [TV][REVIEW]

(How can someone so cute be so violent?)

Kai-lan's Playhouse is the second episode in a week of premieres for Ni hao, Kai-lan. When I first heard about this episode, I was in a state of shock. Never had I expected the day a preschool program have a moment of physical violence in it. Sure, it's MINOR, but that's practically shock value! It made me anticipate it more to see how Kai-lan handles it. So, how does this episode hold up?

Our adventure starts with Kai-lan inviting us to her new playhouse. Yeye, and the Ants are working hard to make her a special playhouse. Inside, it's VERY colorful, has a dinosaur slide, lanterns, and a pole to slide down! Kai-lan's friends show up and they each get to decorate a special wall. Tolee points out there are no crafts, but after Kai-lan flips a switch, they pop out of the second floor. How convenient! There's a lot of stuff, and everything starts going okay. Kai-lan is painting a forest with dinosaurs, and our target word is... Kong long. (Dinosaur) We have to find dinosaurs by looking through a sticker book, and each sticker takes up a page. The ladybugs get the dinosaurs on the mountains, by calling out the color dinosaur, Lan se de kong long and Cheng se de kong long.

Hoho finally reveals that he wants to devote his wall to his favorite thing in the world. No, not his turntables, Bananas! Hoho goes looking for yellow paint, but can't find it, and now he's mad! Hoho's so cute when he's mad. However, this time it's more obvious that he's mad. I'm starting to think back to Kai-lan's Big Play. So, in anger, Hoho paints a black banana. He goes looking for a banana picture, and he seems happy. The picture then falls into the black paint, and Hoho goes back to stomping around! Hoho's really mad, and he goes looking for some banana stickers. He looks through the sticker bin, and sees Rintoo using the banana stickers, and now he's really mad. Finally having had enough, he takes his anger out on Rintoo by punching his leg!! WOW, that was out of character. It surprises everybody that Hoho would do something like that. I'm shocked too, because I would have expected Rintoo to hit somebody first.

Yeye points out that hitting is bad, and Yeye disciplines him by sending him to time out until he calms down. He's using a relatively sharp tone with Hoho too, but Yeye manages to stay calm the whole time. It's snack time, and everybody gets an animal plate, and Tolee wants the Panda plate. Lulu takes the Panda plate Tolee wants, but he gets mad at Lulu and sort of yells at her, telling her he wanted the Panda plate. Yeye points out how smart Tolee was, because nobody knew he wanted it until he said something. So Yeye gives Tolee a Panda plate so Lulu and Tolee can have Panda plates. This IS like Kai-lan's Big Play because Hoho needs to say what's making him mad so he'll feel better. This gives us our song "Even when you're mad, hitting's always bad. Use your words." Hoho feels calm, and apologizes to him. Hoho then expresses what was wrong. When Hoho points out the banana sticker issue, Rintoo fixes the problem by giving him some banana stickers. Suddenly, Hoho paints a purple Banana over his black Banana.

San San has a surprise for Kai-lan, outside the playhouse. Dinosaur rockers! The ants take a break and Fufu wants an Apple, but Bubu takes it, and Fufu threatens to hit Bubu!! Hoho immediately jumps in and stops Fufu from hitting Bubu by telling her to use words to help fix the problem. Bubu fixes the problem by splitting the apple slice with Fufu. Some more of Kai-lan's friends show up to see the walls. Lulu made a teapot out of balloons, Rintoo made a jungle with a big tiger, and Tolee made a Giraffe friend for Pandy. We then go outside to see everybody playing on the Dinosaur rockers, and Kai-lan closes out the episode for us by recapping today's events. There are vibes from Kai-lan's Big Play, primarily Hoho being mad that nothing's going his way, and Rintoo just happening to be there at the wrong time. However, this episode has a much better script, because Kai-lan is actually aware of how Hoho is feeling the whole episode.

Kai-lan's world has always been very colorful, and this episode is definitely no exception. The expressions of Hoho's face when he's angry come off as "cute when angry" until he hits him. It's also worth mentioning that this is one of those extremely rare occasions where Yeye's clothes are different from usual. There are plenty of moments where the voice acting shines, I'm impressed with Clem Cheung the most, simply because of the disciplinary tone he was using. Proper parenting at its finest? Most likely. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Khamani Griffin is really starting to feel more comfortable with Tolee. It's less forced, and more natural. The song for the lesson itself however, comes off as feeling rather... weird.

This was actually a fun episode. Was I shocked to see Hoho act like that? Yes I was. Did I expect him to really get away with that? No. What I didn't expect the most was Yeye's disciplinary tone, and sending Hoho to a time out to calm down. Just about everything here worked, there wasn't anything extremely silly, but the song itself is the only flaw I can see so far. Would I put this episode in a top 10? Absolutely.