The world is about to explode, but that does not seem to worry the panda bears, nor us when we get hooked on the TikTok videos that show this until recently endangered animal doing funny things, chubby and clumsy, with the label “I wonder how they survived in the wild.” We won’t save the planet, but those stuffed animals are enough for us.
Kung Fu Panda 4 comes to theaters because 1, 2 and 3 triumphed before, and don’t blame the children. Pandas are cute, they are cute, they are cute, as they say in English, kittens too. They are part of a globalized and omnipresent cultural phenomenon, an ocean of tenderness that seems false because it is so intense, a universe of beautiful things that have become artistic creations and internet filters.
But the cute thing is more than that, according to behavioral theories it is the consequence of a biological mechanism that we are only now aware of. Why can’t we escape from it? Konrad Lorenz, a student of animal behavior and Nobel Prize in Medicine, established in 1943 what he called the “infantile schema”, a set of physical characteristics that we find adorable, such as large heads, protuberant foreheads, eyes like saucers, round bodies. , clumsy gait.
Does it sound like a panda to you? Yes, but also a human baby. In reality, it is an evolutionary response to push us to care for and protect babies, pure survival of the species. But Lorenz also established that these same visual cues can prompt us to more intense care when we find them in an exaggerated form in animals, such as kittens and puppies, and even more so in fictional models, dolls and stuffed animals. To make matters worse, even babies prefer to see “cute” faces of other babies, according to a recent study from the University of Oxford.
Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of WWW, probably did not think of Oxford when he was asked in 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the Internet, a use that he had not foreseen for the network: “kitties,” he responded. Joshua Paul Dale, author of one of the texts in the Cute exhibition, currently in London and the most ambitious carried out to analyze this so-called cute colonization of culture, believes that yes, the predisposition towards cuteness is in our DNA, But it has been technologies that have triggered its global and commercial potential: “there is no doubt that the Internet is the engine of coolness.” Do we have to blame Berners-Lee for customizing our Instagram profiles with mustaches and little ears?
Asked about this supplement, Simon May, author of the essential essay The Power of Cuqui, believes on the contrary that without the Internet this phenomenon would have also occurred. “Everything exploded after 1945, but it spread especially after the 1980s.” In 1945, the world had just gone through a world war, the Second, and a Holocaust of inconceivable dimensions.
According to May, what is biological conditioning cooked up in years of culture and upbringing became a mental refuge, “in response to the need to escape from a threatening world full of war, intolerance and hatred towards a garden of innocence in which brings forth childlike qualities and delightfully protective feelings.”
This conception of “refuge” seems especially linked to the case of Japan, the world center of Kawaii or cute: it is not just about animal drawings, characters or cosplay, dressing up as girls, “we find it on traffic signs, in the welcome signs on the banks or the warnings from the police and the government,” concludes May, who points out another refuge function of the cuqui in that country: escaping from a very hierarchical society.
“Simon May supports Lorenz’s anthropological thesis about the monkey. If we think about the international success of this trend, the beauty could be seen as the common aspect, or the intercultural bridge, that connects the two main industries of children’s entertainment: North American and Japanese,” according to Fernández Porta.
Eloy Fernández Porta, doctor in Humanities and essayist (his latest work Los rotos negra, Anagrama), has a different vision of the cuqui invasion, which emphasizes their socialized condition: “the Instagram pandas and Hello Kitty are two cases of the same phenomenon, to the extent that having grown up surrounded by stuffed animals makes us perceive panda bears as if they were stuffed animals that have come to life,” he explains to Cultura/s.
The cuteness exploded in 1945, but there were already signs before: the Victorians went crazy in the 19th century with greeting cards of humanized kittens, viral before the Internet, or Mickey Mouse, officially born in 1928, but who was subjected to a process of facelift to round out her early features, which included a sharp facial oval and nose. Fernández Porta also goes back to these characters to explain that “cuqui differed from cute when Walt Disney decided to abandon his first designs, where the animals appeared more sexualized, and for commercial reasons he opted for a friendlier personification of the animals.” ”. And, agreeing with May, he thinks that the cute thing would exist without the Internet, there is Hello Kitty with her fifty-year-old self.
The truth is that the creator of the cute Hello Kitty was the entertainment company Sanrio, Disney’s Japanese rivals. Christine R. Yano, a researcher of Japanese culture, created the concept of Pink Globalization years ago to refer to the penetration, starting with Hello Kitty, of cute, kawaii products and characters throughout the world, connected to the expansion of Japanese companies in foreign markets in those same decades.
But there is more than just a commercial issue, that too. “Cuteness has little by little taken over our world,” said Claire Catterall, curator of the Cute exhibition, at its presentation. “Now it is accepted as one of our languages.” And although we would have to ask him to define “tenderness”, again the truth is that all languages ??communicate something.
“What if cuqui speaks to us about some of the most pressing needs and sensitivities of our contemporary world?” Simon May asks in his book. For example, the cult of the child, “which is replacing romantic love in the West as the essential love.” Another thing is that this devotion entails an infantilization of society, something we might think seeing how we have replaced the description of our moods with some very cute emoticons.
At the entrance to the MOCO Museum in Barcelona, ??where a good number of works of art that play with the cute are exhibited, a gigantic statue, Companion (1999), by the North American Kaws, welcomes the visitor. Companion, companion, is clearly inspired by Mickey Mouse in a new twist to the character, who now moves between attraction and threat: the ears have acquired a protuberant appearance, the eyes have been replaced by two large mouth has disappeared, as in the case of Hello Kitty. Let’s see if it’s true that they are telling us something even though they can’t speak.
Exhibition
Cute Somerset House London www.somersethouse.org.uk Until April 14
Books
Simon May The power of cute Alpha Decay
Joshua Paul Dale Irresistible. How cuteness wired our brains and conquered the world Profile Books