Why is she holding a leek?

October 13, 2006 9:23 AM

Does anyone have more information about this (1.6M swf, borderline NSFW)?

Is there a backstory to it? Who is the character? Who animated it, how, and (aside from the obvious) why? Does that song exist outside the flash, and if so what is it?

posted by Skorgu to media & arts (7 answers total)

Here?.
posted by Phred182 at 9:36 AM on October 13, 2006

Wow. I just saw this on stumbleupon last night, except the top came off. (digs frantically through history) And voila.
posted by matkline at 9:53 AM on October 13, 2006

The girl in your original version is Katsumi, a character from Dead or Alive, a fighting game. Here is a screenshot. So of course you can see why some hentai/video game nerd would have a 3D model of the character sitting around, available for syncing with the song. And yes, the song is seperately available, and can be found via the Wikipedia link provided by Phred182, I'm sure.

Here's another of those nerds' tribute to Katsumi: glamor shots of her action figure. Hott!
posted by dammitjim at 10:13 AM on October 13, 2006

The leek wasn't in the CGI animation originally; it's a flat object which was added in the flash file.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:16 AM on October 13, 2006

Is there some phallic association with leeks in Japanese culture? Is it like a cucumber thing?
posted by DenOfSizer at 11:43 AM on October 13, 2006

You can find more here. You know, if you're into that kind of thing...
posted by joedan at 1:15 PM on October 13, 2006

Phred182's Wiki link is pretty much the explanation.

Earlier this year, someone created the Loituma Girl flash animation. Why, or who, no one really knows. It quickly became an internet fad. It was no "numa numa guy" but it did spread around into many message boards, link sites, etc.

The girl was from some anime called "Bleach", in which she was often trying to cook some kind of food, sometimes using a leek.

The song comes from a Finnish Folk music band called Loituma. The part you hear is basically jibberish, kind of like scat music.

From there, people made tons of derivatives of it. I first saw it as the Loituma Clock. I'm sure the anime you and others have posted here are just people perpetuating the internet fad by replacing the original anime cartoon girl with someone else, retaining the quirky song and the leek, which was part of the original 'what the hell?' factor when people saw the original. (I was a bit perplexed myself.. while the clock was cool, I didn't understand why there was a leek walking across the screen.)

The internet sure is a wierd place. :-)
posted by MarkLark at 4:09 PM on October 13, 2006