The hairy creature inside the baby doll mask jerks oddly on its rocking horse, the hollow eyes the stuff of nightmares or Halloween horror films.
But on the street corners of Jakarta, attached to the face of a long-tailed macaque, the mask is just part of a long tradition of children's entertainment called ''topeng monyet''.
Now the masked monkey show is being stopped after a campaign by animal cruelty activists. The Jakarta government last week announced it would buy up all the creatures and send them to the zoo. The owners have been promised retraining.
It's been talked about for years, but the wildly popular governor Joko Widodo - whom many Indonesians affectionately call ''Jokowi'' and hope will run for president next year - has finally cracked down. His public order officers are busy removing monkey buskers and their charges from the streets.
Last call: Performing monkeys owned by Surmidi and chained at their home in Kampung Cipinang Besar.Credit: Michael Bachelard
Deep in the alleys of the slum-like Kampung Cipinang Besar, where most of them live, young buskers Malik and Pepen have no idea what they will do for a living without monkeys Dewi and Bella.
Bella earns Malik up to 50,000 rupiah ($A5) a day performing at traffic lights near a mall, enough to feed his wife and child. He was grabbed by a public order officer last week but managed to escape.
Before buying Bella, Malik was a street singer - a glorified beggar. Since the ban, he has been scavenging metal scraps for a living, which only pays about $2 to $3 a day. Is it enough to survive on?
''We have to accept that,'' he says, with very Indonesian resignation.
Show time: A trained monkey wearing a mask during a "topeng monyet" (masked monkey) show in east Jakarta.Credit: Reuters
The Jakarta government is offering about 1 million rupiah ($100) to buy the monkeys, and so far unspecified job training. It's unclear what uneducated young slum-dwellers such as Malik and Pepen will do with the compensation, nor what jobs they are suitable for.
Ibu Sarenah and her husband Surmidi live in a different part of Kampung Cipinang Besar, and keep six topeng monyet chained in a wooden cage. They met through monkeys - Sarenah's grandfather owned them and Surmidi, just 17 at the time, was his assistant, playing the music.
Now their music is electronic and the monkeys were, until last week, booked by phone and taken to perform at parties, and circumcision receptions.
''Now our source of living is gone, stopped. We cannot make a living any more so we are confused. I'm worried about the future of my family,'' Sarenah says. She denies it's cruel to keep monkeys.
''The monkeys are good, intelligent, so I treat them the way I treat myself.''
But activists from the Jakarta Animal Aid Network disagree. They say the tiny creatures are trained by hanging them for a half day at a time from a metal ring around their necks to teach them an upright posture.
Trainers also hit them and scorch their feet as they teach them to dance, pray, ride toy motorcycles and rocking horses, play wooden guitars, shoot toy guns and pull trolleys.
Some topeng monyet even smoke. Only about 60 per cent of the monkeys survive the basic training.
The governor is also worried about disease: urban macaques are known to carry the simian HIV virus or rabies.
Malik does not know about disease, but agrees about the training: ''I didn't train them but I know it is cruel,'' he says.
But asked if it's cruel for the monkeys to live chained among the refuse of a slum, Malik looks around.
''It hasn't crossed my mind,'' he says.