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Paper Port

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Paper Port (Western Animation)
"Hello! I'm Matilda, and I'm gonna spend the summer with my grandfather, his pet fish, and all my brand new friends! But I have one really big problem: Everyday I wake up with a new magical power I can't choose or control! Welcome to Paper Port!"
— Matilda, telling the plot in the intro.

Paper Port is a Chilean Stop Motion animated series made by Zumbastico Studios. This show is notable for using papercraft for the animation.

The show is about Matilda, a girl who goes on vacation to stay with Captain Curlybeard, her grandfather, at the titular Paper Port. In it, she finds inside a piano a magic coconut that he once found during his pirate days. She accidentally breaks it and absorbs its powers. As a result, she now has a different power every day, and they mostly tend to be very absurd, such as stopping time by burping or changing the weather by sneezing.


This show provides examples of:

  • Accidentally Broke the MacGuffin: Matilda gets her random powers by breaking the magic coconut.
  • Alliterative Title: In addition to the show itself, there’s also the episodes “Patent Pending” and “Secrets & Skateboards”.
  • Animate Inanimate Object:
    • A living megaphone briefly appears during Chief Adams’ Imagine Spot in “I, Chief Adams”.
    • During “The Paperlight Zone”, Felicia dreams that she can bring objects to (old-timey cartoon-styled) life by touching them.
  • Art-ernate Universe: Two of these are shown in "Until The End Of The Paper"- the dimension of the Crystal Artichoke is filled with angular crystals, and, while there, Captain Corrugato, Bubolino, and Norman are 2-D animated in completely angular forms without any curved lines; meanwhile, everything in the domain of the Smoking Cob is made of wood, and Charlie becomes a wooden figure upon entering it.
  • A Birthday, Not a Break: Matilda's powers tend to be pretty useless in the first place, but she got the most useless of powers... right on her birthday, out of all days, when her arm turns into a tree branch (yes, that was her power for the day).
  • Bland-Name Product: It's common to see Converse-like shoes in cartoons, but few come as close to Converse as Charlie's shoes do - they even have the blue star on the ankle patch. The only difference between them and real Converse is that the text is missing from the ankle patches and that they're square to fit the show's art style.
  • Blessed with Suck: Matilda's daily powers tend to be very stupid and mostly useless. Even Mortimer tries to make it very clear to Matilda when she just absorbed the coconut's energy, that they're not super powers, just powers.
  • Butt-Monkey: While most of the characters end up this at some point, Charlie is the most frequent victim. Whether he's being eaten by sharks, shocked by lightning, falling flat on his face, getting humiliated or blamed for something, or even being the landing spot for someone falling, Charlie has been through the ringer in this series.
  • Captain Colorbeard: Curlybeard, despite referring to its texture, not color.
  • Dub Name Change: In the English dub:
    • Matilde > Matilda
    • Carlos > Charlie
    • Capitán Barbacrespa > Captain Curlybeard
    • Ferni > Felicia
    • Boldo > Bob
  • Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Lollipop Kid, called like that for always carrying around a lollipop.
  • Fictional Holiday: One episode features “National Cheese Day”. Unluckily, Matilda’s power that day was to cause something nearby to bust into flame whenever she said the word “cheese”.
  • "Freaky Friday" Flip: In "A Paper Change", Matilda and Curlybeard swap bodies.
  • "Groundhog Day" Loop: In the episode "Run, Matilda, Run!", the day restarts whenever Charlie gets eaten by a shark.
  • Multi-Part Episode: The show has had three of these: “The End Of Summer” (the Season 1 finale), “Back To Paper Port” (a flashback to Captain Curlybeard’s youth), and “Until The End Of The Paper” (the Season 2 finale).
  • Objectshifting:
    • As an example of the kind of crazy things that Matilda’s powers can cause, the intro shows Felicia being transformed into a balloon.
    • In “Life On A Skate”, Matilda’s power of the day transforms her into a skateboard.
  • Off to See the Wizard: One episode has Lollipop Kid transported to a parody of Oz.
  • Phonýmon: One episode has Matilda and Charlie watching a parody called "Papemon" only for them to get zapped into the TV and into an episode of it.
  • Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: There are loads of these- for a full list, there’s “Laughs, Lies, And Videotape” (sex, lies, and videotape), “The Young And The Paperless” (The Young and the Restless), “A (Pre)Teen Wolf Girl” (Teen Wolf), “The Paperlight Zone” (The Twilight Zone), “Singin’ In the Paper” (Singin' in the Rain), “Paper Night Fever” (Saturday Night Fever), “Where The Wild Papers Are” (Where the Wild Things Are), “The Paper Years” (The Wonder Years), “The Paper Bang Theory” (The Big Bang Theory), “Popular Mechanics” (the magazine of the same name), and “Until The End Of The Paper” (Until the End of the World).
  • The Prankster: Matilda and Charlie love causing trouble around town whenever the former's powers allow them to.
  • Really Seven Hundred Years Old: Captain Curlybeard is able to live healthily and full of energy at 120 years old thanks to the coconut.
  • Secret-Keeper: Since Charlie was there when the coconut broke, he has to keep the secret of the coconut and Matilda's powers.
  • Sentient Vehicle: In "Popular Mechanics", Matilda's power of the day brings Chief Astudillo's police car (which he had already named Elizabeth) to life.
  • Sequel Episode: “Another Potato Story”, to “A Potato Story”.
  • Superpower Silly Putty: Due to breaking the magic coconut and absorbing its power, every day Matilda wakes up with a new and different power.
  • Talking Animal: Curlybeard's pet fish Mortimer, also thanks to the coconut.
  • Time Stands Still: In “Time Burps”, Matilda gets the power to stop time whenever she burps.
  • Time Travel Episode: "The Paper Years" has Matilda going back and meeting her grandmother as a young woman.
  • Weather Manipulation: In “Climate Allergy”, Matilda’s power of the day allows her to change the weather whenever she sneezes.

 
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Just after Charlie declared his love for Matilda, she falls asleep. Poor Charlie. (English subtitles provided from Kapwing.com)

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5 (4 votes)

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