Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Figma R. Dorothy Wayneright Part 3

The dress is the winner

An introduction of Figma R. Dorothy Wayneright's articulation design after the previous posting. ^^




Between forward and backward tilts for the figure head, only the former is possible, ...


... as the bottom of her hair part on the back turns out to be the perfect stopper to any attempt in bending the head backward. ^^;


Luckily, horizontal tilt is not a problem at all for the head.




A ball-type joint gives the waist a very wide and flexible range of posability.
Like Haruhi School Summer Fuku Ver., it's an actual waist joint as opposed to the more common chest-embedded joint as seen on other Figma figures (Mari Illustrious Makinami and Kamen Rider Thrust and for examples).


While the base of the sleeves are sharp-tipped to create an rigid, anime-accurate image for Dorothy's dress, there's allocated room in the shoulder block for the "tip" to slide in, thus allowing a standard bending range for the shoulder joint.
It's a subtle but very effective design idea executed to preserve the posability of the joint while creating a show-accurate image for Dorothy at the same time. ^^


A few articulation points of the arm shown in one go: (1) the upper arm can swivel around on the shoulder joint, (2), standard more-than-90-degree bending range for the elbow, (3) standard swivel and hinge combo for the wrist joint.


The shoulders can swing forward and backward.


Dorothy's long dress is actually consisting of two separated soft plastic pieces.
The clever usage of the folds on both sides of the dress effectively covers up the seam lines between the two pieces. ^^



The hips are of the standard ball-type joint design.
Without the ability of the dress to "expand" using the two-piece design mentioned above, the hip joints' articulation range would be severely limited. ^^;


Standard 90-degree bending range for the knees.


Normal forward-backward bends for the ankle joint.


Using its peg joint, the ankle can swivel from side to side as well.


Taking advantage of the good hip and leg articulation design, and the dress's two-piece design, Dorothy can be posed in a very natural-looking kneeling pose, for whatever reason you would want to pose her in such a way to begin with. ^^




On other figures, this kneeling pose would be used to demonstrate the hip and leg articulation's range of posability, but for Dorothy, the dress's flexibility turns out to be more impressive instead. ^^

Overall, Dorothy's articulation design is pretty normal for a Figma figure I think. Having an actual waist joint and the dress's two-piece design are definitely the more interesting points to highlight, but even they are not exactly super-spectacular designs. ^^;

On the other hand, the neck joint limitation as seen on Dorothy is unfortunately a good example (^^;) of the "resistance to change" I mentioned back in Mari Illustrious Makinami's review regarding the discontinuation of her "non-Figma joint" type neck joint after three Evangelion figures. The double-hinge neck joint implemented on Mari would be a viable solution to the inability of Dorothy's neck joint to be bent backward, as the second hinge at the base of the neck could be used for that action. Since the collar and front frill part on Dorothy are in a different color as compared to the rest of the dress, the collar can be used to hide the appearance of that particular neck hinge, just as how the same part was designed and implemented on Mari. ^^ Then again, in actuality, the more conventional Figma joint is used on Dorothy, which is evidently inadequate as one basic movement is missing on the figure. ^^;

Some action poses of Figma Dorothy after the introduction on its articulation design:





It's very difficult to adjust a good pose that shows Dorothy holding Pero with the kitten being a completely fixed figurine. ^^;



From certain angles, Dorothy looks like she's about to strangle the kitten instead. ^^;




Not too much useful application for the option fringe part with expanded memory drive. ^^;

More action poses from Figma Dorothy in the next posting, which will be the last one for this review series. ^^

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