Labubu: this is not a toy
“All mythical figures correspond to inner psychic experiences.”
— Carl G. Jung
Disarming charm with a wink of danger… A new figure is moving through the collective and taking the world by storm. With their wide eyes and mischievous grin, the Labubu dolls are not quite innocent. They elicit a curious blend of delight and discomfort, inviting affection and tension.
Once cloaked in animal skins, mythic tales, or jester’s garb, now reimagined in plush, Labubu is a contemporary manifestation of the Trickster — a primordial archetypal force that lives in the depths of our collective unconscious, quietly inhabiting our myths and dreams for millennia.
Jung described the Trickster as a being who is God, man, and animal all at once—a figure that makes us feel “very queerly indeed,” because it mirrors a psyche that has hardly left the animal level.
Labubu lives in that paradox.
They disobey — but with charm. They’re small — but powerful. They’re lovable — but dangerous. They’re innocent — but they know what they’re doing. They mock authority without becoming villains, they express rage without ugliness, they undo the world with a giggle.
Their very design hints at a psyche both unconscious and mythic, as if they remember a time before civilization fully tamed the wildness of spirit. More beast than bunny, more grotesque than pretty, they look soft yet bring explosive chaos. Adorable and disturbing, soft and cunning, primitive and strangely divine. There is something pre-verbal, pre-rational about them—something of pre-adolescent children: unruly and delightful, monstrous and magical.
They are dangerously alive — what we’d be if we peeled back the social scripts and let chaos frolic.
From Loki to Kuromi, the Trickster has worn many forms and is now grinning from the collector’s shelf.
