Hunting the Elusive

Full name: Clalaclan Philias, character inspiration: Tony Taka, series: Shining Wind, released: October 07, price: 5800 yen, scale: 1/8, manufacture: Kotobukiya. Just got this the other day because HLJ was shipping via SAL and it got held up by quarantine because the figures looked too realistic for them to not be alive and therefore be the midget carrier of some strange moon disease.

Not a very popular figure, obviously, as HLJ still has stock for it, but a pretty outstanding figure in its own class. Notable of course is the Tony Taka influence on the design, as well as the rather large assets protruding from the front of this figure. It is partially cast-offable as in the Monroe-esque blown-up-dress is removable by detaching the leg/lower torso of the figure from the chest part, displaying white knickers and leaving the princess in improper disarray.

That said, I was quite surprised that there was no upper-body cast-off option, as it did seem to be possible at first glance. Nevertheless, let us begin.

You might have noticed that I have five sides of the figure as opposed to the normal and more even four sides. That is because this figure seems to hold quite a bit of charm when viewed from the side. Of course at one point in the rotation (second last picture) if your viewing level is low enough, the blown-up skirt is gonna give a glimpse of white underwear.

Here be some angles on the head/face of the figure, which is pretty good. There are of course mass production inconsistencies in the plastic making up that crown-like structure, and another problem is that printing screen effects are visible in the eyes. I mean we're used to anime-style eyes being printed and then transferred onto figure (or however they do it), but they're usually done in a high-enough resolution that the printing artifacts are not visible. Here, if I look closely at some of the photographs or at the real thing, I can see pixels in the eyes.

That said, great detail on the ear and the pearl earrings, as well as a great sculpt job for the fringe. Most mass-produced figures just leave the fringe as a single mass with sculpted texture on top, but this one has actually cut through to create gaps under which we see bits of the eyebrow and forehead.

Going onto the shield/abdomen area. The same sculpting detail is present for the hands holding onto the shield. Fingernails galore and spindly fingers like you find in illustrations. No, seriously, I've been noticing how fingers are drawn by my favourite artists and they almost always have a spindly tapering effect like the ones on this figure. The shield is also sculpted, as well as possessing shading within the grooves. You can see there that some of the ink used for shading has smeared out of the groove as an effect of mass production, but the sheer fact of the effort is impressive.

The shield is in possession of a single handle at the back meaning if another figure has the grasping capabilities, they could equip themselves with a giant shield. Also, note the opening of the dress at the abdominal area.

The hair is pretty impressive. Those oft-cliched terms like "waterfall" or "cascade" makes perfect sense in this context, with the waves and rivulets sculpted in the hair being blown by the wind. A detailed job which adds quite a bit of dimension to this figure.

The inside of the dress has the most incidence of manufacturing faults, and considering the angle at which the dress is blown upwards at the back, some of the flaws are quite visible, such as the flash lines.

But the detailed sculpting (and here, the shading) is still present on the main body under the dress, from the minor folds of the underwear to the translucent effect present in the stockings (one of the more striking examples of what outstanding shading can offer) as well as the flowery decorations along the top of said stocking.

Boobshot is just there for the sake of it.

Photography notes:

Current bout of flu as well as some fatigue issues affected my camera holding skills especially at short range. Luckily I take multiple instance of the same shots so I could eliminate those that were blurred by shake. Lighting was weird again, but I rather like the "cloudy dusk in room" effect which brings out the contours of the figure.

Recently, I've become quite conscious of the angle at which photos of figures are taken. If the lens is too low, you get a slight angle upwards at the face of the figure, resulting in some pretty weird effects. Similarly, looking at figures from too high an angle will also screw with the facial proportions (though most of the time the effect is preferable to being too low). And I'm not even sure that looking evenly on level with the face of the figure is necessarily the optimal angle.