Miffy, Nijntje and Hello Kitty
From Classic Toddler Books to Modern Fashion Icon
The story of how a little bunny rabbit survives - and changes - in the global market.
- Who is Nijntje?
Dick Bruna, from Utrecht in Holland, started writing and illustrating children’s in 1953. Two years later he came up with “Nijntje” – short and diminutive for “konijn,” which means rabbit in Dutch. Nijntje was instantly popular in the Netherlands and Dutch-speaking Belgium, and soon she conquered the rest of the world.
By now, Bruna has produced almost 100 books, more than 80 million copies of which have been sold worldwide. Miffy features on more than 10,000 unique products, ranging from plush toys to apparel and eating utensils.
As Nijntje/Miffy gained on the international market, she also gained a more complex, some would say split identity. There is “Classic Nijntje,” and then there is “Modern Miffy”. The first derivative of Modern Miffy was the Japanese Hello Kitty.
- Classic Nijntje
From the beginning, Bruna used only six colors: blue, yellow, green, and red, and sometimes brown and grey, outlined in thick black, on predominantly white backgrounds. This was not dictated just by the printing industries color technology of the fifties, but also by Bruna’s extremely minimal approach to design. Another aspect of this minimalism is Nijntje’s sheer two-dimensionality, and the fact that the characters exclusively face the reader straight-on.
Nijntje at first appeared only in small and short story books. Her adventures are the typical goings on of a two to six-year-old girl: visits to the grandparents, playing with friends, making a snowman, learning to read and count, etc. These books feature typical Dutch elements: a flat landscape, windmills in the distance and wooden shoes. The pictures on one page are accompanied by simple and endearing verses.
Nijntje’s first cartoon series on television remained faithful to the books in simplicity as well as subject matter. The simply drawn characters moved in two dimensions in (or rather on) a wholly flat, white landscape.
- From Nijntje to Miffy and Hello Kitty in Japan
“Classic Nijntje” was targeted at the original, very young audience of 2 to 6-year old girls and boys. This slowly changed when she made her international breakthrough.
As she conquered the rest of the world, as Le Petit Lapin in French and Miffy in English, she also won the hearts of female pre-adolescents or tweens – preteens in between 8 and 12-year-olds. Miffy appeals to them because she is easily adapted to their budding interests in fashion, while still remaining age-appropriately cute.
In 1964, Nijntje appeared in Japan as Usako and later as Miffy (or Miffy-chan). She became so popular that Japanese marketers soon realized her commercial potential as a fashion icon. They knew that the Japanese tweens, teenagers and even twenty-somethings would love her simple design and cuteness (“kawaii” in Japanese).
In 1974, the Japanese company Sanrio adapted her to Japanese fascinations, which feature not bunnies, but kitties, and not the Dutch, but the British culture. Miffy, the Dutch bunny rabbit, became Hello Kitty, the English kitten.
In an interview, Dick Bruna said that Sanrio admitted to being inspired by Miffy. Sanrio has, however, never admitted this in public, and the copyright has never been worked out.
While Hello Kitty took off on her own, Miffy remained the subject of Japanese mania. In 2005, Miffy’s 50th birthday exhibition in Tokyo attracted nearly 200.000 visitors in just two weeks.
- A Modern Miffy?
In 2003, Miffy got a new television and DVD series. However, she was clearly a changed rabbit: she now three-dimensional, and a little more colorful. It was no surpise that, when this series appeared in Holland and Belgium, many Nijntje devotees deplored the dilution of her classic character.
Dick Bruna is still around to keep an eye on his creation’s transformations. Thanks to him, Miffy remains recognizable and relatively “pure”, even in her modern guise. But even a cultural icon like Nijntje/Miffy needs to adapt itself to a growing and increasingly complex and fragmented market. Whether the Classic Nijntje will survive remains to be seen.
If the American market is any indication, the audience has not yet made up its mind: read on.
- Read also: "Miffy (Nijntje) in America. Toddler's Bunny or Tween's Fashion Icon?"
