Oh my god! Oh my GOD! OH MY GOD! These are the words that you, the person reading at home, will be screaming at the screen in just a few short seconds. Why? Because the story you’re about to read is so cringingly terrible it might make you never want to have kids. And if you have kids already, well, you may just want to lock them up until they’re 40 years old and know how to keep their grubby little mitts to themselves.
Okay, so no one died (except some amazing craftsmanship), but this story is still pretty terrible. It involves a man, a plan, and a whole bunch of LEGOS he turned from loose little bricks that hurt to step on into a beautiful giant sculpture of Nick from Zootopia. Unfortunately, Nick was no match for a small child who was so excited to see, feel, and touch the fox that he completely decimated it within seconds.
Before we continue, check out a picture of the finished product before it was destroyed. It’s a “nearly human-sized” replica of the adorable cartoon anti-hero, cost over $15,000 to make, and took the artist (a man named Zhao) three days and three nights to build. You can see it on display at a LEGO exhibit in Ningpo, China below.
Zhao actually posted his entire creation process on Weibo (a Chinese social media network) so that others could see exactly how much work went into it. Imagine how long just the bottom half of Nick’s body must have taken:
And look at how detailed the head is:
This thing could have been on exhibit forever! But it was not meant to be. Only moments after the exhibit opened, a kid drunkenly stumbled (that’s all kids do, right? Stumble around drunkenly) into Nick’s personal bubble and just destroyed the hell out of him. That, too, was documented by Zhao, and it is heartbreaking.
It’s actually kind of impressive, isn’t it? If you take away the fact that what you’re looking at is the destruction of hours and hours of hard work, you’ve got to hand it to the kid for being able to cause so much damage in such a short amount of time.
According to Mashable, the parents of the kid (who has so far been unnamed) apologized immediately and expressed great remorse. Zhao also declined money because he understood that the kid hadn’t meant to wreck his sculpture. Instead, he just posted the pictures online. He also probably cried a little, too, but he didn’t post pictures of that, so we will never know.
CCTV reports that many are calling for parents to either take responsibility or stop taking their kids to museums until they know better and outraged Weibo users are no longer satisfied with sincere apologies. This could be due to the fact that this is the second time (in less than three weeks) that art has been damaged by children.
A pair of wings of a glass angel named “Angel Is Waiting” were damaged by two visiting children while on display at Shanghai Museum of Glass on May 17. The Chinese artist Shelly Xue, who made the artwork for her newborn girl, decided to leave the wings in their damaged condition and renamed the piece “Broken.”
In that case, the parents actually encouraged the kids’ behavior, as can be seen in the video below:
Whatever the answer is, it probably isn’t intense punishment. A child who was left alone in the forest (for five minutes, his parents claim) as a punishment for misbehavior has now been missing for four days.
(Via Mashable)