Images of Punch, a baby Japanese macaque rejected by his mother, clinging to, sleeping on, and carrying the plush orangutan toy 'Oran-mama', with his tiny fingers has gone viral on social media.
The viral clingy macaque with a stuffed orangutan, the internet’s latest animal obsession, gets his name from a chain-smoking manga artist who turned cartoon crime into a pop
If you trawl the internet a lot, you must have seen the penguin having what looked suspiciously like an existential crisis. The clip that went viral in January this year was from Encounters at the End of the World, the contemplative documentary by Werner Herzog, one of the finest filmmakers, and the pioneer of the New German Cinema movement. In the clip, an Adélie penguin breaks formation and waddles away from its colony toward the vast, snowy mountains. I re-watched the documentary about a clutch of eccentric scientists and researchers in the sublime climate of Antarctica — the Earth’s southernmost and fifth-largest continent, considered to be the coldest, driest, windiest and most desolate place on the planet — and fell in love with Herzog’s storytelling all over again.
Recently, another animal received the internet’s collective emotional projection: a baby Japanese macaque named Punch. Punch was born in July 2025 at Ichikawa City Zoo. Within hours, his mother rejected him, a rare but documented behaviour in primates, often linked to stress, inexperience, or medical complications. Zookeepers intervened and gave him a surrogate: a plush IKEA orangutan toy named “Oran-mama” to provide maternal comfort. Images of Punch clinging to, sleeping on, and carrying the toy, with his tiny fingers gripping faux fur like it’s the last warm thing on Earth, went viral on social media, and led to a massive spike in global demand. The plush orangutan has sold out globally after fans began ordering identical comfort toys.
The manga legend behind the name
Punch’s name, however, has a cultural context. He is named after a manga artist, Monkey Punch, who was born Kazuhiko Katō in 1937. Katō was the son of fishermen in Hokkaido. He doodled through junior high, moved into professional manga in 1965, and in 1967 created what would become a pop-cultural phenomenon: Lupin III. “Monkey Punch” was originally a pen name suggested by an editor who thought it sounded amusingly Western. Katō reportedly didn’t like it much, but the name stuck anyway. Lupin III was a riff on the French gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. Katō’s version added a dash of slapstick with its chase scenes reminiscent of Tom and Jerry. It was playful but adult, irreverent but stylish.
By the 1970s, Lupin III had become an anime franchise, making it to films, TV series, specials, video games, et al. In short, it created a merchandising empire. Directors, including Hayao Miyazaki, whose Studio Ghibli became a rage in 2024, worked on early adaptations, most famously 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro. And that’s how a cheeky comic strip became one of Japan’s longest-running entertainment properties. Monkey Punch died in 2019 at age 81, but by then, Lupin III had spanned five decades. His art style — elongated limbs and sly grins — helped define postwar Japanese pop, which came to have a touch of irreverence. Since Lupin was a thief, he was not a hero, but he was charismatic in his own way. In a strange loop, the name Monkey Punch now circles back to a real monkey named Punch.
The cast of Lupin III, as drawn by Monkey Punch. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Baby macaques have disproportionately large eyes relative to their skulls. That triggers what ethologist Konrad Lorenz called the “Kindchenschema” or baby schema response: round faces, big eyes, small noses. It activates caretaking instincts across species. However, Punch’s story resonates for reasons that go beyond pop culture. In the 1950s, American psychologist Harry Harlow (1905-1981) conducted a series of now-controversial experiments with rhesus monkeys. Infant monkeys were given two surrogate “mothers”: one made of wire that provided milk, and one covered in soft cloth that did not. The babies overwhelmingly chose the cloth mother. They clung to comfort over nutrition. The studies were ethically troubling, but the findings reshaped understanding of attachment: mammals need contact and warmth really matters to them.
Perhaps the appeal of these stories — the wandering penguin and the orphaned macaque clinging to a toy — lies in how easily we read ourselves into them. Humans have long turned animals into mirrors for private anxieties. In Franz Kafka’s short story, ‘A Report to an Academy’, an ape narrates his reluctant assimilation into human society. And the philosophical animals of Aesop’s fables carry the burden of our allegories. If you leave aside the adorableness of the macaque and the sentimentality behind people fawning over it, you will notice a familiar instinct: the urge to interpret behaviour (as we most often do in the case of dogs and cats) in emotional terms we recognise.
Seeing ourselves in animals
Herzog himself has often been wary of that instinct. In his films, animals are rarely symbols of innocence or wisdom; they simply exist in their own opaque worlds. The stray penguin in Encounters at the End of the World is not shown as tragic so much as enigmatic. Herzog’s voiceover keeps the moment spare, without supplying the emotional connotation viewers might want to project on the scene. This refusal, to me, is reminiscent of the tone of writers like J.M. Coetzee, particularly in The Lives of Animals, in which the distance between human consciousness and animal life remains unresolved. We want animals to reveal something about ourselves, but their inner worlds remain largely inaccessible.
Punch’s attachment to the plush orangutan rests on well-documented science: primates deprived of maternal contact will cling to whatever offers warmth, texture, and the illusion of presence. But the sight of the infant macaque wrapped around a mass-produced toy carries an oddly literary charge. A living animal reaches for comfort in an object assembled in a factory; the creature does not even know what it is, but recognises what it offers.
You will find objects like this (small, mute carriers of feeling) recur throughout modern literature. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction, memory often gathers around modest things: a cassette tape, a forgotten gift, the fragile debris of childhood that becomes heavier with time. Haruki Murakami’s novels, too, are populated by objects that absorb loneliness and longing: a record, a well, a room left untouched for years, items that seem to hold emotional remains long after their practical purpose has faded.
Punch’s plush orangutan belongs to that strange category: an object whose meaning grows from the intimacy projected onto it. In this case, the intimacy is literal. The toy steadies a newborn primate whose first experience of the world is absence. It becomes a makeshift solution to a biological problem. Between Herzog’s Antarctic wanderer and the macaque named Punch runs a thin thread connecting science, art, and the internet’s appetite for viral content. We are still doing what storytellers have always done: watching animals closely and, in their movements, trying to understand something about ourselves.
