Catalina la Catrina

About

Catarina la Catrina is a character made by Mexican company Canal 5 to celebrate the upcoming "Día de Los Muertos" (Day of the Dead in English). The character was intended to engage younger people with Día de Los Muertos. After Canal 5 ran a campaign to let Twitter artists submit redesigns of her for the 2020 holiday, the campaign was raided with NSFW artwork of the character.

Origin

In 2018, Canal 5 (a well-known, free-to-air television network located in Mexico) introduced "Llamale a Catalina la Catrina" to commemorate The Day of the Dead with younger audiences. In the initial iteration of the character, people could talk to her on a YouTube live stream and help her put together her ofrenda (an arrangement of offerings to the deceased that is always given the 1st-2nd of November).^[2]

Catarina: What am I going to do? My boss entrusted me to arrange the mega-ofrenda of the underworld and guess what? I forgot it! I completely forgot what it needs to have. Could you help me? I need you to call this October 29 & 30th so that we can decide together what can we put on it. Without your help we won't manage to do it! Remember that the Día de los Muertos is a very important date here in Mexico, so it's important to continue with this tradition. You can't possibly miss it, here on the Cinco (Five), kisses from the underworld!

Spread

Ahead of the 2020 stream, Mexican animator Richi Gaspar reanimated the character so that she had more fluid movement and full animation (shown below).^[3]

"Boys and girls, good afternoon.
Come here, come now because I'm here to tell you
a story, about a beautiful Catrina called Catalina."

After the reintroduction of the character, Canal 5 announced on Twitter that they were inviting children to draw the Catalina and share their work on the platform with the hashtag #CatalinaLaCatrina. Their intention was that the best drawings would appear during the character's 2020 stream.^[4]

Initially, various artists on Twitter joined the hashtag and published fan art of the character (examples shown below).^[5]

However, shortly after the hashtag began to spread, it was raided with a flood of erotic and lewd fan art, causing the contest to trend in the wider art community on Twitter. Seeing their contest being raided, Canal 5 deleted their tweet promoting the contest and cancelled it entirely. [6]

After the incident

The channel remained silent until October 27, where it embraced the "waifu" status of their character and kept publishing on their facebook page various articles[7] such as fanart appreciation posts[8], a recap of her story[2] and make-up tutorials.[9]

That same day Canal 5 released the full song of Catalina la Catrina on their youtube channel, showing more of her world and lore with more animations and sceneries, promoting her appearance on their channel the day October 30 at 1pm.

Various Examples

External References