My Life Me is a Canadian/French animated series from the Quebec-based studio CarpeDiem Film & TV inc. that was created by JC Little, Cindy Filipenko and Svetlana Chmakova.
The show follows the exploits of junior high students Birch Small, her cousin Liam Coll, Sandra Le Blanc, and Raffi Rodriguez. The show is perhaps best known for how it employs many Japanese Visual Arts Tropes, with the main character Birch being an aspiring manga artist.
The series originally aired on the French version of Teletoon in 2010, and later came to the English version in 2011, which quickly aired the show's single season of 26 episodes over the course of September before taking it off their airwaves that December without further word. It did make a brief return to Teletoon in 2017 for reruns, but it was only aired in an early-morning graveyard slot for a few months before vanishing once more.
The series is currently owned by Classic Media (now DreamWorks Classics), which acquired the show's rights after its previous owners, the European studio TV-Loonland, went bankrupt in 2010. They have made the series available in its entirety for free on the Peacock streaming service, following many years of belief that most of the series' episodes had been lost.
My Life Me provides examples of:
- All Love Is Unrequited: Birch for Raffi, and, seemingly, Liam for Sandra.
- Ambiguously Brown:
- Raffi, though he has a Hispanic surname.
- Animesque: So much, it's basically a wannabe anime in Toon Boom.
- As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Birch's manga idol, Miyazaki Lee. That's two surnames in different languages.
- Blush Sticker: Everyone in this series is blushing all the time. All the time.
- Canis Latinicus: "Agnosco" is Latin for "I understand", not "Do you understand?".
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: If someone from the main cast has a love interest outside of their group, that person usually is mentioned only in that one episode, and then never again. Made odder by both that they usually get the love interest and that the interest remains an extra.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Birch's color palette is mostly violet; Liam's is green; Sandra's, orange; Raffi's, blue.
- Creator Cameo: The three fangirls who are following Raffi all the time? They are apparently modeled after the creators of the show.
- A Dog Named "Perro": Birch Small, the protagonist of the show, has a cat named Neko (the Japanese word for cat)
- Game Show Appearance: In episode 1, the main characters participate in a fictitious game show.
- Good Angel, Bad Angel: Birch has a pair of angels over her arguing over whether she should cheat on Liam's test.
- Gratuitous Japanese:
- For some reason, Birch's necklace has the "watashi" kanji on it. She also has a cat named Neko.
- Also, Sandra has a stuffed rabbit named Kimiko.
- And they keep using manga as a catch-all term for... anything Birch and Liam are into. At one point, a Manga Poetry Slam happens, which can be summed up as just the characters saying "manga" a lot. "Manga" is even used in situations that words like "comics" would fit better.
- It's All About Me: Birch certainly seems to think that everything is about her. Even when some of the episodes focus on the other people in the pod, either Birch gets heavily involved with the episode or a Birch-centric subplot is squeezed in.
- Large Ham: It's very obvious that Mr. Towes' voice actor is just having oodles of fun.
- Limited Wardrobe: Nobody changes their clothes in this school, for some reason.
- Occidental Otaku: Birch Small especially. The rest of the cast, to a slightly lesser extent.
- Only Six Faces: All characters' faces are based on the same design template.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: The plot of The Pom-Pom Girl kicks off when Sandra insults the cheerleaders by saying cheerleading isn't a real sport. Amelia insults her back, resulting in Sandra plotting to join the cheer squad to destroy them from the inside in revenge. Never mind the fact that Sandra started the whole thing in the first place.
- Remix Comic: Incredibly simple and diabolically fun, thanks to the manga maker.
- Ship Tease: Birch has a crush on Raffi and often fantasizes about him, if not the two of them together. Whether Raffi reciprocates Birch's feelings is more ambiguous, as he's willing to take her out for food and deliberately sets her up with a fake date in one episode to lure her away from another boy (among other things), but he never explicitly states he's in love with her.
- Short-Runners: Only ran for 52 Two Shorts episodes. Then again, unless it's a major Canadian-American co-production like Johnny Test or Total Drama, Teletoon
does this a lot, mainly to keep the short-lived in-house shows alive as mid-day filler to fulfill Canadian content regulations when they're not running Cartoon Network shows.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Birch, oh so very much. When she shows off her own "manga art" to her manga idol Miyazaki Lee, he says it's good and that she has potential, but then insults a different 'local' comic that he had seen, not knowing that Birch had drawn it. This prompts her to overreact and yell at him, insulting some of the very work of his she was praising earlier.
- Sprouting Ears: Birch has a habit of sprouting a fox's tail and ears whenever she's being sly.
- True Art Is Incomprehensible: In-Universe, the reason that Birch lost an art competition to Raffi was that rather than turning up something along the lines of this trope, she simply drew a picture of Raffi (evidently, she wasn't listening to Mr. Towes' directions) while Raffi simply painted a canvas orange.
- Urban Legends: Liam told one about a janitor that went crazy from having to clean a whole cafeteria covered in barf.
- Word Salad Title: According to this interview
, it was originally a Working Title meant to show the characters' self-absorbed nature; the broadcaster and producers liked it, however, and it became the final title.
