Fools that we are, it’s long been assumed that cartoon characters meant to look like children are at least roughly child-sized. In order to hold onto a sense of reality, our brains automatically parse the Rugrats babies as being as small as real babies; Dora The Explorer as the height of a little girl.
With the deeply unwelcome news that Caillou, a stunningly aggravating four-year-old cartoon character, is nearly six-feet tall, we can no longer shelter ourselves this way. Cartoons and puppets, the internet now wants us to remember, are not exact representations of our world.
They’re something else entirely.
Not knowing that some information is better left uncovered, Natalie Ziesmer searched Caillou’s height on Google and found that the chrome-domed pre-schooler stands an upsetting 5'11'’. He also weighs 171 pounds. Again, he is only four-years-old.
When we consider how the relative size of his adult family, little sister, and pet dog factor into this, the scale at hand becomes even more difficult to reckon with. His terrier must be the size of a direwolf, his little sister a slobbering horror in diapers as big as a short person’s pants, and his parents towering monsters whose footsteps make the earth itself tremble.
Worse, even, is that Caillou appears to be growing with every search result.