Review: Victor and Valentino “Guillermo’s Girlfriend”

OVERVIEW

Victor and Valentino attempt to cheer up creepy kid Guillermo, who is going through a tough break up with his girlfriend, who is apparently a sculpture.

OUR TAKE

This is one of those episodes that focuses on the supporting cast of the show, this time being Guillermo, the creepy goth kid character. Voiced by Tom Kenny, a prolific voice actor who needs no introduction, this character is much more macabre about his style of behavior. He’s definitely a well meaning kid of course, it’s just that the humor comes from how weird he can say the thing he means, which naturally makes for good comedy. Though while his name is obviously a reference to Mexican film director Guillermo Del Toro, he is apparently based physically on H.R. Geiger instead. We do get to see his parents in this episode, however, and his father does in fact share the resemblance with Del Toro. They end up making a sort of Addams Family sort of wholesome with the family being creepy as hell but still managing to make a functional and loving family as a result of that wholesomeness, which is really all you can hope for at the end of the day.

As for the episode itself, as I said, it takes the spotlight away from the main duo and has them act as supporters to Guillermo’s story, which is him trying to win back his girlfriend. The twist being that said girlfriend is, again, an inanimate object and thus doesn’t need winning back, but that’s just the cute weirdness that this character is there for. To show that one can find love in even the strangest of things, which plays into what I mentioned about the wholesomeness of his character. While Guillermo is often just adding a creepy quip to a general situation involving the rest of the cast, giving him the focus for once does seem to add up to a rather interesting and funny episode, which acts as a good end point for this first week of new Victor and Valentino episodes. Each episode this week has showed a strength to this series that has helped to show why it has made such a mark on the animation landscape as the stories of other non-euro-centric cultures are becoming more prominent. With three more weeks to come on this deluge of new Victor and Valentino content, it’s becoming easier and easier to see how this show is becoming such a major hit across multiple cultures. Now to wait for the other three weeks and see where it lands us.