What is MOTHER no Katachi, The Shape of Mother?

MOTHER no Katachi, The Shape of Mother, was Hobonichi's exhibition at Shibuya PARCO in July 2025: all roughly 180 original paper-clay figures from Mother and EarthBound, displayed together for the first time. The figures had been made in the 1990s for the games' guidebooks, shown in part at 2024's Secret of MOTHER 2 exhibition, and kept in storage in the decades between.

The exhibition answered the preservation question with an object. Hobonichi 3D-scanned five of the originals, Ness, Paula, Jeff, Poo and Mr. Saturn, and sold a recreation figure set made from those scans at about $170, which later shipped worldwide. The recreations are copies in the honest sense: derived from the artifacts by measurement, not reinterpretations by a new sculptor.

For the Library's purposes the show matters as documentation. The complete figure census, about 180, and the figures' survival were fan knowledge until Hobonichi put the entire set under glass and counted in public.

The Shape of Mother is also the Hobonichi MOTHER Project in its purest form: not new merchandise of old characters, but the original physical archive, exhibited and then carefully multiplied.