Loituma Girl

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"Loituma Girl" twirling her leek.

Loituma Girl (also known as Leekspin) is a flash cartoon set to a section of the traditional Finnish folk song "Ievan Polkka" sung by the Finnish quartet Loituma, taken from their 1995 debut album Things of Beauty.^[1] It appeared on the Internet in late April of 2006 and quickly became popular, drawing over a million viewers.^[2]

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. Like many other such cartoons, the animation loops continuously.

Patrick Macias comments:

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. It's possible to read deeper meanings into it, but it sort of defeats the purpose because in the end it's just this hypnotic clip of animation.^[2]

1 Content
2 Popularity
3 Commercialization
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Content

In the anime, Orihime is spinning the leek in a frequently used running joke, in which she explains to another character that she wants to cook something (usually something very unusual and/or obviously inedible). 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). These stanzas are therefore not generally listed on lyrics pages, causing confusion for people looking for lyrics that match the cartoon. (See Ievan Polkka.)

[edit] Popularity

The origin of the cartoon is unclear.^[2] 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.^[3]

Band member Timo Väänänen describes his initial reaction to the video:

I first found out there was something going on when I looked at the statistics of my own web page and then I realized that something weird is happening because there is so huge traffic there. And most of the traffic came from Russia and then I started to track down what is happening and then I found this video. And well, I have no idea what this video is about, and what this girl is about.^[2]

As of mid-2006, there are multiple videos and remixes of the song that were inspired by the flash cartoon.

[edit] Commercialization

In August 2006, German ringtone provider Jamba! began selling a collection of media based on the animation. The video shows an anthropomorphic donkey (called Holly Dolly) dancing to the animation which is displayed (flipped horizontally) in the background.^[4] The song/animation is marketed as the "Dolly Song", and the music is played faster than the original Loituma version. It was also given an additional drum part which was not present in the original version. Additionally, a Dutch mobile phone media provider similar to Jamba features a remade version of the animation, with the girl in Western style art.