Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Now on Netflix, The Claudia Kishi Club is a short documentary tied to now-also-on-Netflix series, the new revival of The Baby-Sitters Club. To the uninitiated, Claudia Kishi is the Japanese-American member of the BSC, a group of middle-schoolers whose teenage adventures were the focus of a gazillion-dollar multimedia franchise created by author Ann M. Martin. Claudia was also a rare example of Asian-American representation in 1980s and ’90s pop culture — so here’s an homage to this offbeat fictional teen via a handful of her greatest admirers.
THE CLAUDIA KISHI CLUB: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: The yellow Power Ranger, Michelle Kwan, um, that one character on Captain Planet — the half-dozen “members” of The Claudia Kishi Club bemoan, with sense of humor intact, how remarkably few Asian-American role models there were for kids of the aforementioned decades. But Claudia Kishi, VP of the Baby-Sitters Club? She was DA QUEEN. She broke the f—in’ mold. Her sense of fashion was gregarious. She obsessed over boys and junk food in equal measure. Art was her talent and passion. And like a grenade dropped in the drawers of Asian stereotypes, she got bad grades.
Yumi Sakagawa, Naia Cucukov, C.B. Lee, Sarah Kuhn, Phil Yu and Gale Galligan are all Asian-Americans, creative types who were, and surely still are, BSC superfans. They devoured dozens of novels, watched the TV series and feature film, played the CD-ROM games, collected the dolls and accessories and sleeping bags and tote bags — and most importantly, saw someone who looked like themselves on book covers and Nickelodeon.
And so these funny, enthusiastic people gush about C-Kish, read some of their favorite book passages and lament how the authors described her as having “almond-shaped eyes” (what the crap does that mean, really?). Claudia Kishi Club director Sue Ding breaks up the parade of talking heads with kitschy construction-paper-cutout animation. The film delivers a poignant, happy cheer for the power of representation, implying that, without Claudia Kishi, the six interviewees might not be the imaginative success stories they are today: Lee and Kuhn author YA novels, Galligan is a graphic novelist, Sakagawa is a comic artist, Yu is a renowned blogger who gave classic BSC book covers parody titles (Claudia and the Frustrating Lack of Media Representation reads one) and Cucukov executive-produced the new BSC series for Netflix!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Documentaries Miss Representation (also on Netflix) and Disclosure (yep, on Netflix) address the topics of female and transgender representation in pop culture, respectively — vital subject matter for sure, but they aren’t promotional fodder like Claudia Kishi Club is, at least in part.
Performance Worth Watching: Cucukov hauls out her vintage Baby-Sitters Club sleeping bag with tremendous dramatic flair.
Memorable Dialogue: “Have you ever had a bowl of Lucky Charms? You pour a whole bowl of cereal and get like three marshmallows. So that’s what it felt like to me — that there were three Asian-American marshmallows.” — C.B. Lee
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Let’s set aside the cynical assertion that this charming Netflix doc is a 17-minute commercial designed to hype people up for a Netflix series, and realize that it’s also hyping people up for increased visibility of Asian-Americans in media, which is absolutely a good thing to be hyped up for. Its commentators point out how C-Kish busted model-minority tropes and put a dent in, as Lee puts it, the “subconscious but pervasive” feeling that young Asian-Americans “perceive the world as one without you in it.” And many of us have no choice but to empathize with how terrible that must feel.
To be fair, the short is intently focused on its subject, and avoids showing clips from the new series. It’s light and quick on its feet and visually clever. And its interviewees are insightful, sharing funny, colorful anecdotes and engaging social insights. Seventeen minutes with them doesn’t seem like enough.
Our Call: STREAM IT for all the WARM FUZZIES! And the realization that a corny-ass decades-old moneymaker franchise like Baby-Sitters Club was actually culturally progressive, at least in one aspect.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
