The true story of the terrifying giant stuffed rabbit

Stuffed animals are usually adorable. Companions of children and adults, animal designs tend to be the most popular. However, there is a giant stuffed animal that has a terrifying reality and lives a sad end.

If we were in a Pixar film, the scene arguably couldn’t be sadder. Luckily we are not, even if the image remains horrible: a giant stuffed rabbit abandoned and rotten crowning a beautiful Italian mountain. You can’t defeat entropy.

Of an already dull pink color, the doll is 60 meters long and is found in a deplorable state at 1600 meters above sea level, on Mount Colletto Fava, in the Piedmont region. It is a work by a group of Viennese artists called Gelatin.

Called Hase (hare in German), the structure was built that year, 2005, by four friends in their thirties who had met in 1978 in a summer camp. The group’s idea was that visitors could feel like Gulliver and slide into him.

Hase is made of a pink fabric lining filled with straw. “We have made molds of other stuffed animals: bears, smurfs, penguins. But the rabbit was better the way he was lying on the ground. “Flat ears are a good place to walk on easily,” said Ali Janka, one of Gelatin’s artists.

The sculpture was soft, like a real stuffed animal, but deliberately terrifying. through the seams his heart, liver and intestines were leaking, a preview of what would happen to him after a few years in the open air. Although the biodegradable sculpture was expected to last until 2025 (twenty years in total), by 2016 the rabbit had already almost completely decomposed.

You can still visit, but the truth is that he has lost almost all of his huggable stuffed animal appearance, as some of his fabric is torn and discolored and his “guts” are hanging out, looking more like a car accident than anything else. “It rots and its intestines come out, but it’s really sweet,” Janka adds.

Even today it is said that the gigantic pink rabbit of Monte Colletto Fava was created by a group of grandmothers who spent five years weaving, but it is a urban myth that the artists themselves spread once their work is finished.