Vietnamese cartoons: where to start

The easiest place to start with Vietnamese cartoons is animated folk tales (truyện cổ tích), which are widely available on YouTube, followed by modern kids' series and short comedy cartoons made for social media. Searching in Vietnamese, with terms like phim hoạt hình Việt Nam, will show you far more than searching in English.

Vietnamese animation is a smaller industry than Japan's or America's, so it helps to know where to look. Here is a simple path in.

A little background

Vietnam has a state animation studio, Hãng phim Hoạt hình Việt Nam (Vietnam Animation Studio), based in Hanoi. It was founded in 1959, and its first film that year, Đáng đời thằng Cáo (roughly "Serves the Fox Right"), is often described as the first Vietnamese animated film. Over the decades, the studio made many short films, often based on fables and folk tales, using hand-drawn, puppet and cut-out techniques.

More recently, independent studios and creators have produced cartoons for TV, streaming and especially YouTube and TikTok, where short-form animation finds a big audience.

Long before animation, Vietnam had its own animated performance art: múa rối nước, water puppetry from the Red River Delta, where wooden puppets appear to move across the surface of a pool. It is worth seeing if you are curious about Vietnamese storytelling.

Start with folk tales

Animated folk tales are the friendliest entry point. The stories are short, the plots are well known in Vietnam, and many versions have simple narration. Good stories to look for:

• Tấm Cám: A Cinderella-like tale of a kind girl and her cruel stepmother and stepsister
• Thánh Gióng: A boy who grows into a giant to defend the country
• Sơn Tinh, Thủy Tinh: The mountain god and the water god, competing to marry a princess
• Sự tích trầu cau: The legend of betel and areca
• Sọ Dừa: The boy born in a coconut shell
• Cây tre trăm đốt: The hundred-knot bamboo

Search the title plus phim hoạt hình (cartoon) or truyện cổ tích (fairy tale), and you will find many versions, from older studio work to newer channel productions.

Then try modern series

Several Vietnamese-made series have found audiences online, some aimed at young children and others at teens and adults. Quality, style and age suitability vary widely, so preview before showing them to kids. Our guide to popular Vietnamese cartoons for kids has more specific ideas.

Short comedy cartoons

Short-form cartoon comedy is a lively corner of Vietnamese content. These clips are often under a minute, built around a single joke, a meme or a trend. They are great for learners, because each one uses a few short, natural lines.

This is also where my own project lives. Duma Meow is an original Vietnamese 2D cartoon comedy about four cats, made as vertical Shorts on the Voiceover with jimwest405 YouTube channel. Lines like "Ủa?" (Huh?) and "Haizz" (Sigh) do a lot of work in a few seconds.

Useful search terms

• phim hoạt hình Việt Nam: Vietnamese cartoons
• hoạt hình cổ tích: animated folk tales
• truyện cổ tích Việt Nam: Vietnamese fairy tales
• phim hoạt hình thiếu nhi: children's cartoons
• hoạt hình hài: comedy cartoons

Adding Việt Nam helps filter out dubbed foreign cartoons, which are very popular in Vietnam too.

What about dubbed cartoons?

Plenty of foreign cartoons are dubbed or subtitled in Vietnamese. Japanese favorites like Doraemon have long been popular there. Dubbed shows are useful listening practice, but they won't show you Vietnamese storytelling or humor. Mix them with homegrown cartoons for the full picture.

Tips for learners

• Turn on Vietnamese subtitles when available, so you can match sounds to spelling.
• Pick short episodes. A five-minute folk tale is easier to finish than a feature.
• Rewatch. The second viewing is where words start to stick.
• Note repeated phrases. Cartoons recycle exclamations like Trời ơi! and Ối! constantly.
• Notice the accent. Many productions use Northern voices, while others use Southern ones.

Where to go next

Once you've watched a few, read Vietnamese cartoon characters you should know to meet the faces that come up again and again in Vietnamese stories.

Start tonight with one animated version of Tấm Cám, since its story is easy to follow even if you understand only a few words.