Gashicon’s charming smile and soft voice disarm. The stronger the impact of the stories she tells.
This almost shy Japanese designer from Iwate Prefecture, who studied graphic design at VANTAN DESIGN INSTITUTE in Tokyo, has created a world where cute and creepy intersect and mix in such a masterful way that you feel entranced, delighted and horrified all at the same time.
“Hangry looks really cool,” explains Goshicon, as she shows a character with a spiffy red mohawk, “but he is very weak and is always being bullied by Angry.” She picks up a character with a black hood and a prominent scar on the right cheek.
“Angry looks really cute,” she continues to explain, “but he is incredibly strong and scary. He always bullies Hangry.”
Goshicon decide to create Hangry and Angry because she got upset with today’s disposable mentality. “People want to have all kinds of things, and collect them. They collect different things like characters and stuffed animals. But as soon as they don’t like them anymore, they throw them away.”
The designer finds it difficult to understand that you can throw away something for which you have cared so much. “I think it’s really cruel.”
So she created a back story about a mad scientist who couldn’t bear to watch all these abandoned stuffed animals. He took them and remodeled them into weapons of mass destruction to revenge the abandoned toys.
Hangry became a ticking time bomb. “Angry bullies Hangry,” explains Goshicon, “and when Hangry’s bullied, he saves up more and more negative energy.”
When that energy exceeds a certain limit, Hangry explodes like a nuclear bomb and destroys the world. Boom. The ultimate revenge.
“I believe that we should really take better care of our things,” says Goshicon, “and because I want people to take better care of things, I made these characters”
What makes the Hangry and Angry characters especially entertaining and attractive are the many sub plots. There is for example the Hospital of Darkness.
“It is a very shady hospital and really a dangerous place,” says Goshicon with a charming smile. “Hangry and Angry were hospitalized here, but they became violent and turned themselves into doctors.”
Actually, it looks like Angry does most of the doctoring. His patients all turn up dead. “You can’t get out alive,” says the designer with a nod of the head to show how much she enjoys her feast of horror.
“I really like horror movies,” she explains with the smile now taking over her whole face. “Like splatter movies. I watch these a lot.”
She likes the thrill, excitement, and lack of reality, she reveals. “When I see such movies, I mix what I see with what I feel, and that’s what I expressed in this character.”
Goshicon entered S.INC because she was a great fan of h.Naoto. “He was doing graphic design at the time, and I was really attracted to that. So I decided that I wanted to do that kind of work, too.”
As part of the h.Naoto line there was a brand called Channel h, which featured “monster-like clothes.” Using h.Naoto’s image of Goth Lolli and Punk, Goshicon created her charming, yet violent, characters.
Interestingly, from this line of stuffed animals eventually a band was born, hANGRY & ANGRY which this Summer tours the US.
Just shows, you need to keep on dreaming. You never know where it leads you.
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