A Twitter user spent hours folding, cutting and painstakingly arranging strips of an Alfort chocolate biscuit box to create a stunning, seaworthy-seeming sculpture.

Japan is a veritable utopia of delicious sweet treats, cookies and snacks. One of the best sights for any weary traveler is the well-stocked aisles of a Japanese convenience store, gleaming with bright and colorful packages that attest to the sweet food stuffs hidden inside. And those packages themselves are quite the draw! Would Pocky have become the global sensation it is today without the aid of its distinctive goemetric box?

One stand-out in the aisles is the classy, royal blue box of Alfort. These small, rectangular cookies are topped with a generous square of chocolate, and every one is stamped with its own tiny cameo of a sailing ship. As with many Japanese snacks, they’re released in a variety of flavors throughout the season – but the classic blue box denotes the regular milk chocolate flavor, and it’s popular enough to also be sold in a large form to sate bigger appetites.

▼ The large version comes with an even bigger ship, of course

https://twitter.com/remonehas/status/1046388112585191424

One Twitter user, @02ESyRaez4VhR2l, took inspiration from the nautical packaging in a big way. In fact, you might even say he transcended the limits of the form.

▼ “I constructed this out of empty Alfort boxes!”

From the four empty boxes emerges an unimaginably beautiful ship. The royal blue cardboard forms a skeletal frame for the ship and its sails, while the bow is picked out in the flawless, uninterrupted gold only found at the box’s borders. The lurid, high-definition camera shots of the chocolate inside are chosen to represent the propeller, and the red banner declaring “An exquisite taste” flies like a real flag from the top of the mast.

“Amazing! How long did this take you to make?” enquired one awe-struck commenter. @02ESyRaez4VhR2l (also known by the moniker ‘Harukiru’) replied “About 15 hours.”

The intricate detail necessitates a steady hand and lots of patience, and all of that effort was rewarded with a steady stream of likes and retweets. Users flocked from all over the Internet to praise Harukiru’s handicraft:

“This is such high-quality I’d expect the makers to decorate their office with it, if you were to send it to them. Great work.”
“Alfort turned into a real ship! There’s really no end to the miracles that sprout forth from Harukiru’s hands…”
“Truly Alfor-midable!”
“The Alfort turned into an Airfort.”
“It looks like the ship from Granblue Fantasy…”

Even more impressively, when asked what his inspiration was for the sculpture, Harukiru admitted that the idea came from the print on the chocolate itself. However he didn’t use any existing plans: all of that meticulous papercraft work came from his own imagination.

Looking through the rest of his Twitter, it’s easy to see why. Harukiru is clearly a deft hand at folding and snipping paper into wonderful shapes, and has even used chocolate packaging before this.

▼ The thick, gorgeous cardboard wrapping from Meiji’s THE chocolate produces this fearsome figure.

https://twitter.com/02ESyRaez4VhR2l/status/878935026167013376

▼ This cute little car is made from Meiji and Dars chocolate wrappers.

https://twitter.com/02ESyRaez4VhR2l/status/938060386368069633

But of course, Harukiru is as weak to a good bit of fanart as the rest of us.

▼ A sculpture of the magnificent Blue Eyes White Dragon from Yu-Gi-Oh!

https://twitter.com/02ESyRaez4VhR2l/status/1023371969331249152

With all those curlicues and perfect, stable structures, we can’t help what wonder what short work Harukiru would make of a commercial papercraft kit, such as the ones based on Ghibli movies. Maybe some day in the future we’ll see him tackle a Totoro made from Toppo boxes!

Source: JIN, Twitter/@02ESyRaez4VhR2
Featured image: Twitter/@02ESyRaez4VhR2