Teen French Heroes Ladybug & Cat Noir Arrive On Nickelodeon This Sunday

Miraculous Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir, an anime-influenced CGI series about two teen heroes in Paris, premieres on Nickelodeon on Sunday December 6, at 12pm. The show was originally a French/Japanese/Korean coproduction, and has been translated and adapted for American audiences.

Interestingly, the show's original title was Miraculous Ladybug, marking the female character as the real star, with Cat Noir as her fellow costumed hero and possible love interest. But a lot of people still labor under the false belief that superheroes are for boys, so it's unsurprising that someone along the line decided Cat Noir needed to be promoted as an equal co-star of the show. Check out a preview clip:

The clip also focuses on Ladybug, who we meet in her civilian identity as Marinette Dupain-Cheng, a multiracial Parisian teen. The influence of the Magical Girl genre is inescapable; when Marinette's mother is captured in a bubble and carried off into the sky, apparently along with every adult in Paris, Marinette transforms into Ladybug in a series of twirls and poses, just as Sailor Moon and other magical girls always do. She even has the guidance of some kind of talking ladybug creature, fulfilling another Magical Girl trope.

There seems to be no doubt about who's responsible, with this show apparently following the anime tradition of having a single villain (glimpsed briefly in the video) who sends out monsters, rather than a full rogues gallery like American super-heroes tend to have.

We don't know as much about Cat Noir yet, except that his name is Adrien, and I'm interested to see if he has a Magical Girl transformation too. In the promotional art, we see that he has a little floating cat-creature to match Ladybug's floating ladybug-creature. He also has a costume that makes him look like Selina Kyle's boy sidekick, which is a plus in my book.