How Sanrio makes anti-capitalism adorable, and profitable

NEW YORK — My new favourite cartoon character is a white-collar red panda with anger issues.

Her name is Aggretsuko, and she’s a young Japanese “office associate” who leaps, tail wagging, into her first job, only to suffer countless slights at the hands of her co-workers. In each online micro-episode — all are one minute long, perfect for Instagram snacking — her colleagues in the accounting department of a Tokyo trading company drop work on her desk at closing time, slurp noodles over her shoulder and inappropriately brag about their dating exploits.

As the indignities mount, Aggretsuko smiles courteously and types studiously. But inside her head, she slips into rage mode, where she chugs beers and performs death metal karaoke as flames spark around her face. Her inner monologue spills out in a guttural scream: “DON’T BELITTLE MEEEEEEEEEEEE!” and “BUZZ OOOOOOOOOOFF!” After following her travails for a few weeks, I downloaded Aggretsuko wallpaper to my phone so that I see her whenever I check my email. She is perched on a rolling chair, paws hovering over the keyboard, a coquettish smile on her face. The caption reads: “I HATE THIS.”

Aggretsuko’s experience surely resonates with many young women who have come up against the sexist, or just plain dehumanising, demands of corporate culture as they embark on careers. Her struggle is to project an image of sociability, compliance and quiet competence over her barely concealed seething indignation. In a cynical coda to each video, the death metal cuts off, our heroine clicks her heels together and purrs, “Tomorrow is a new day!”

As a concept, Aggretsuko isn’t exactly revolutionary — she’s basically a feminist Dilbert. More interesting is where she came from: She is the latest character from Sanrio, the Japanese consumer goods empire that plasters adorable images on lunchboxes and stationery sold around the world.

For decades, Sanrio’s central export has been Hello Kitty, an emblem of infantile feminine charm who wears an oversize bow on her head and doesn’t even have a mouth. She embodies the Japanese concept of kawaii, a cuteness ascribed to the small, vulnerable and helpless. She’s an Aggretsuko who never gets wasted or unleashes her wrath.

But recently, the company has been floating new characters, whose personalities are more in sync with the ambivalent humour of memes or the antihero characters of prestige television. And while Hello Kitty represents the height of consumer culture, these characters have an anti-capitalist sheen.

Sanrio characters are imbued with very basic “back stories” by the company — Hello Kitty, which debuted in 1974, is said to be a third-grade girl from the London suburbs who is “as tall as five apples and as heavy as three” — but it’s through the sale of branded stuff that the characters really “come to life,” Dave Marchi, Sanrio’s vice president for brand management and marketing, told me. “We create characters and put them on products or experiences or jet planes. Anything you can imagine.”

Hello Kitty’s catchphrase is “You can never have too many friends”, and her goal is total saturation of the global marketplace. In her book Pink Globalisation: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific, anthropologist Christine R Yano describes Sanrio as “a world in which a consumer might live in interaction with a corporation and its products”.

Sanrio characters are themselves model consumers. Pompompurin, a little boy golden retriever in a beret, prizes his shoe collection, and Bearobics, three fit teddy bears, “are sensitive to the world of fashion” and “are constantly chatting about the latest sportswear post-workout”, Sanrio marketing copy reads.

But Aggretsuko has a more ambivalent relationship with her own consumption habits. When she binge-drinks, she gets hung over: In one micro-episode, we find her lying in bed in her underwear, next to an overturned trash bin and a half-eaten bag of chips. In her narratives, she is the commodity, and the joy of the consumer has given way to the anxieties of the consumed.

That theme plays out quite literally with Gudetama, a Sanrio character who became the company’s breakout internet star after its introduction to the United States in 2015. Gudetama is a gender-ambiguous egg yolk with a butt crack and a baby voice. It’s usually found lazing languidly on a plate, projecting a kind of existential angst in the face of impending doom. In one short cartoon, Gudetama whines “Noo, I don’t wanna go”, as it’s pulled at by a pair of chopsticks. An online retailer of Gudetama candies markets the character as an “unwilling” participant in its own branding.

Sanrio characters are created by a team of in-house designers, and the company would make them available to me only on a first-name basis, over email.

“I was eating a raw egg on rice at home one morning and thought to myself that the egg was kind of cute, but entirely unmotivated and indifferent to me,” Amy, Gudetama’s designer, wrote.

“Eggs are phenomenal,” she added, but they’re “relegated to this fate of being eaten and seemed to me to despair in this”.

The character was introduced in Japan in 2013, when Sanrio issued a slate of new food characters and asked consumers to vote for a winner. Gudetama came in second place to Kirimichan, a grinning fish filet who longs to be eaten. “Hello. I’m Kirimichan, your faithful mealtime partner,” she says in Sanrio marketing materials. “Be sure to grill me up nicely!” But Gudetama’s malaise has since far eclipsed Kirimichan’s eager complicity, particularly on social media, where the lazy egg has emerged as the subject of a popular Twitter account and a natural star of reaction GIFs.

Gudetama and Aggretsuko represent an “evolution” of Sanrio’s character creation, Marchi said, one that unspools online as well as in stores. Aggretsuko joined Twitter last month, and Sanrio recently struck a deal with Snapchat to showcase its characters on the app. On the internet, where characters become avatars for our personalities and moods, passively pleasing trinkets don’t pack the same punch.

If Hello Kitty represents happy-go-lucky submission to globalisation, Sanrio’s newer characters respond to the market with soul-crushing resignation or seething rage. Aggretsuko “is a symbol and expression of the pent-up stress and irritation that is rife in the world today”, her designer, Yeti, wrote in an email. And Gudetama, Amy wrote, parallels “the people in modern society who despair amid economic hard times”.

Another new character, not yet officially rolled out in the United States, is a group of cartoon teeth called Hagurumanstyle that helps with “mental care” — a play on “dental care” — and jumps into action when people clench their teeth in frustration. Hagurumanstyle products are just starting to infiltrate the US market.

Sanrio may finally be exploring the fallout of global capitalism, but it is still processing class anxieties through products. Capitalism has a remarkable ability to absorb its own critiques, and it’s notable that Sanrio has turned to the tactic as Hello Kitty’s branding power has begun to wane. (In 2010 Sanrio executives told The New York Times that they were desperately seeking a new hit after Hello Kitty was eclipsed as Japan’s most popular character by a jelly-filled pastry named Anpanman). Now its adorably anxious cartoon cogs in the machine are being used to sell more cute stuff to despairing human beings. At pop-up cafes around the world, fans can literally consume Gudetama-printed eggs, and on Sanrio.com, frustrated office ladies can buy Aggretsuko office products to spruce up their cubicles.

In April, Sanrio posted on its Facebook page: “Don’t rage about your taxes, unleash your inner red panda with new items from Aggretsuko at Sanrio.com.” Tomorrow is a new day! THE NEW YORK TIMES