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Do not, repeat, do NOT click on this link if you actually have something even slightly, vaguely important to do today, or if you are at all worried about maintaining your sanity.
Okay, fine, click.
Loituma Girl is the most spellbinding thing I’ve ever seen, and the worst part is, I can’t explain why. At least Wikipedia can explain what:
Loituma Girl (also known as Leekspin) is a flash cartoon set to a gibberish section of the traditional Finnish folk song “Ievan Polkka” sung by the Finnish quartet Loituma, taken from their 1995 debut album Things of Beauty. … The cartoon consists of a 4-frame animation of the Bleach anime character Orihime Inoue twirling a leek (a type of green onion, called a negi in Japan) to a 27-second loop from the song. …
The cartoon uses the second half of the fifth stanza (four lines) and the complete sixth stanza (eight lines) from the song. Unlike the rest of the song, these two stanzas have no meaning, consisting mostly of phonetically-inspired gibberish that vary from performance to performance and are usually made up on the spot by the singer (compare scat singing in jazz).
The origin of the cartoon is unclear. Within a few days of its appearance, tens of thousands of pages either directed to the possible origin or had the file uploaded on their own server. On 10 July 2006, the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported that Loituma Girl had caused a resurgence in Loituma’s popularity, and the band had received thousands of fan letters from around the world.
BBC’s The World radio program even covered the animation in a segment, in which they noted the clip’s trance-inducing qualities: “This is basically a joke for someone who spends all of their time staring at a computer, made by people who spend all of their time staring at a computer.”
So many questions! Why the Japanese-Polish fusion? Why a leek? Is this the new Hampster Dance? Will I ever get this song out of my head?
Comments (11)
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There is something strangely hypnotic about Finnish music. The Finnish song Matalij Ja Mustii was used on the cartoon Arthur (usually it’s known as The Binky Song) and couldn’t get it out of my head. I wound up buying it and putting in my iPod.
You can search for it and find several sites where you can listen to a snippet of it.
posted by Christopher Palmer on 1-24-2007 at 11:16 am
the warning ought to have been more seriooous!
(twitching)
posted by magnus on 1-24-2007 at 11:29 am
From my pal Neal:
“The leek is an anime cliché, the words in Japanese for
leek and for sword are similar apparently so often in clownish moments
characters will feign being able to defend themselves with a leek.
It’s understood that Japanese viewers and dorks will get the joke.
She’s just said she’s going home and when asked if she will be safe,
she is yukking it up that she can defend herself.”
posted by Juligirl01 on 1-24-2007 at 1:49 pm
Sounds like Simlish to me! :-) I needed a bright spot in an otherwise dismal day, so thanks for the link!
posted by Pamala on 1-24-2007 at 7:08 pm
MAKE IT STOP!
posted by Abby on 1-25-2007 at 6:29 am
Japan has long been fertile ground for the Moomin phenomenon, also a product of Finnish imagination. If I recall correctly, one of the daily Finnair flights connecting Helsinki to a major Japanese city was painted to resemble a moomintroll.
If I had to venture a guess over cocktails, the reason for the Japan-Finn alliance is probably a psycholinguistic bond formed between two (admittedly highly divergent) members of the Ural-Altaic language family. Linguists have found a great number of historically inexplicable parallels between the structure of Japanese and Finnish languages, which neither share with their geographic neighbors but instead with other seemingly unrelated languages like Turkish and Hungarian.
You still only hear nonsense, but the rhythm and the pseudo-words are suggestive of something more.
posted by Aaron on 1-25-2007 at 7:06 am
This is from a cartoon called Bleach. Obviously it is an animated television show. They show it on adult swim on cartoon network if anyone is interested.
posted by Kira on 1-25-2007 at 12:30 pm
Whatcha wan bet some chubby, greasy perverts make a habit outta knockin a few out while watchin this drawn girl wave a leek around in her drawn fist? People are soooo predictable.
posted by Amanda on 1-25-2007 at 4:49 pm
It’s Finnish, not Polish. And the bit that gets played in the clip isn’t really Finnish but some impromptu scat.
posted by Tiara on 1-25-2007 at 7:53 pm
This is also a bit of a play on the internet shock site meatspin (for the love of God, don’t google it). I’ve fallen prey to the original site once or twice – this one makes me much happier.
posted by Chris on 1-25-2007 at 9:11 pm
and now I have that…rhythm stuck in my head…not better than the grease songs I had… :(
lol…people are weird.
posted by Ellen on 6-13-2007 at 9:56 pm