Caillou is a Canadian educational children's television series that was first shown on Télétoon and Teletoon, with its first episode airing on the former channel on September 15, 1997; the show later moved to Treehouse TV, with its final episode being shown on that channel on October 3, 2010. The series, based on the books by Hélène Desputeaux, centers on a 4-year-old boy named Caillou who is fascinated by the world around him.
The show can often teach good messages for children, such as sharing and not saying rude words to anybody.
Caillou and Rosie are cute little kids, even though they're loud and obnoxious.
The show started to slightly improve in later seasons, especially seasons 3-5.
The theme song is pretty catchy, even though it is still annoying.
Top-notch acting, even though Caillou can be annoying, his actors put a lot of effort into their role as him, his parents' and friends' actors are also good.
Great animation in the last three seasons.
Okay development for Caillou, he starts out as a whiny, screaming toddler, but improves into a more down-to earth, mature everyday explorer, even though he becomes a Gary Stu.
Some likable characters.
Gilbert is a great and adorable cat who is also shown to be smart and mature in the puppet segments.
Andy and Alan are interesting characters who have a great representation of children on the autism spectrum and Down Syndrome.
Sarah is quite likable and charismatic as she serves as an older sister-like figure to Caillou, being wiser and more mature than him.
Julie is a likable babysitter of Caillou who treats the latter with respect. Unfortunately, she disappeared after Season 3.
While Rosie can be annoying just like Caillou, she can also be treated with some sympathy due to how mean Caillou is to her, especially in Big Brother Caillou, and her crying is actually justified because she is only 2.
Caillou can be likable (or tolerable) at times when he's not mean-spirited or throwing his tantrums. He also improved a little bit starting in Season 4 (or Season 3, despite being a bland Gary-Stu) and can be admittedly cute at times. Sometimes, he does get his comeuppance (although it's very rare)
Caillou's design with his yellow shirt starting in Season 2 making his design less bland compared to the beige/gray shirt version in Season 1.
The theme song, while annoying and overbearing, can actually be quite catchy. There is even a fan-made remix of it (one with instrumental and one with lyrics) that sounds better than the actual song.
It does (at least) stay true to the original source material, as it is based on the books written by Christine L'Heureux.
Bad Qualities
Seasons 1-2 and some episodes of Season 3 had a few cruel moments, such as Rosie getting tortured by Caillou and their parents never scolded him or Caillou himself getting tortured when it's not his fault.
Starting with Season 4, the puppet segments were dropped.
Julie, Caillou's former babysitter, disappeared without explanation, even though Caillou's grandparents take over as supplemental caregivers to Caillou, but it looks like Julie is retconned out the show and series as if she never even existed in the first place.
Despite the theme song being catchy, it can get on people's nerves at times.
Despite the fourth and fifth season being slight improvements, they still have their flaws, with Caillou becoming a Gary-Stu yet still retaining his annoying voice, morals being shoved down your throat, and the animation switching to Adobe Flash and becoming horrendous.
Pretty bland background music and soundtrack that has no variation or style in them at all. Sometimes you can barely even hear the background music because of this.
Despite the show being highly infamous due to reasons stated above, it still got a reboot titled Caillou's New Adventures, which has even worse-looking animation, with the voice acting being just as bad (if not worse) than the voice acting in this show. And much like Teen Titans Go!, the colors are so unnecessarily bright as an attempt to appeal to its young kid audience. And what doesn't help is that it got yet another reboot in CGI animation, which also looks terrible.
Trivia
The word "Caillou" actually means "pebble/little rock" in French.
Jaclyn Linetsky, Caillou's second voice actor, died on September 8, 2003 in a car crash at the age of 17.
Caillou was extremely popular in Turkey and Portugal and in the African-American community despite the title character himself being white.
After its cancellation in 2010, reruns still aired on PBS Kids until December 27, 2020 with it being on PBS for over 20 years. Despite this however, reruns continued to air on Cartoon Network's preschool block Cartoonito when it launched. The show was phased out on the said preschool block by May 2022.
WildBrain and Peacock developed a new animated series and five original CGI-animated Caillou specials in 2023.
