Saturday, October 27, 2018

Tamashii Nations Movie Realization Series: Ronin Boba Fett


 
Super behind on these awesome figures, let’s take a look at one my wife got me for my birthday over the summer: Ronin Boba Fett. As was detailed several months ago with Samurai General Darth Vader, this line of roughly 8” figures takes Star Wars characters and reimagines them in the aesthetic of feudal Japan. Ronin were unattached samurai that traveled around seeking employment, which sounds pretty bounty hunterish to me.


Longtime favorite character Boba Fett is already a great visual character, and one that feels like it slips into this creative reimagining effortlessly. Already being a person wearing stylized armor, this version simply trades the space armor for samurai armor. I say “simply,” but this is the precise kind of reimagining that is usually so, so difficult to execute well and not have it come across as “just” being an armor swap. But the design here pulls it off really well, again in that way that seems effortless to one unfamiliar with design and sculpting. From the helmet to the sandals, this is a painstaking adaptation of perhaps one of Star Wars’ most iconic looks, and it hits on every level. Visual details such as the Madalorian insignia and the little chest detail that I’ve always thought was the planet Saturn are there, as well as the basic design of the chest plate. Touches like Boba’s wrist rocket are present, this time in the form of a throwing knife. We’ll get to this, but the rocket backpack is outstandingly rendered in this feudal style, and these synonym moments help establish this figure as something new and different from the original, which is probably the most exciting thing about the series.

Fett’s helmet by itself is a masterpiece of artistry, absolutely capturing the source material while simultaneously being a thing never before seen while ALSO being completely familiar outside of the context of Star Wars. It looks like a helmet that would be on a displayed suit of armor, vacant and empty, yet somehow exhibiting life from behind a deep black interior. The panels that form the sides of the helmet are not attached to the black underneath, truly creating a sense of mystery as there is no visible face, but this is also not a visor as is found on actual Boba Fett. So, maybe like a haunted suit of armor. There are details all over the helmet, including the metallic painted and moveable antenna on the right side. The dark maroon paint that surrounds Fett’s visor is very dark and matte on this figure, looking like paint the warrior would have applied to his own finely crafted helmet, a touch of personal modification as opposed to something that was added to the helmet as part of a plan. Simply put, the helmet is gorgeous, and captures attention for full minutes at a time upon every viewing.

The paint is a really interesting teal, more seafoam than green or blue, with excellent weathering on the forearms and legs. The chest is relatively clean, but the clothing underneath the armor is dirtied up quite a bit. Accessory-wise, Boba Fett comes with a ton of hands in various stages of openness, ranging from closed fists to almost flattened palms, allowing him to gesture and hold his array of weapons. The weapons range from various throwing knives and blade weapons, most of which can slot into grooves above his ankles, to a samurai sword, to his trademark EE-3 blaster, another piece of the figure that is magnificently reimagined into this aesthetic. The blaster even has a moveable hammer, and the scope is legitimately a spyglass. The stock of the weapon is rendered to look like wood, and the barrel metal. But it looks like an old musket rifle. 

The rocket pack is also a total masterpiece, a highly stylized and detailed piece painted in a slightly dull silver. So, not anything shiny, but like the helmet, a detailed piece that is well painted and thus is a real attention grabber. There are metallic blue highlights on the engines and cones of the rockets, and they make for excellent highlights, though I don’t know if they are supposed to indicate anything about the actual rocket pack: they are not scorch marks or anything similar, although if I had to guess I’d probably say they were supposed to represent heat effecting the metal that the backpack is made from. So, not scorch marks like burns, but clear indications of the metal having been heated and cooled from use. (I like that, let’s run with it. –mr) The thrusters look like they should be moveable, but I haven’t seriously tried to do so, as they seem to be attached via a thin peg and I’m not interested in stressing or breaking it. The entire pack is removable.

Boba Fett has a great assortment of joints, including double elbows and knees, wrists, ankles, and a waist, a ball jointed head and shoulders and hips. The various skirt pieces and shoulder pads do get in the way of some movements, and the figure, and the series of figures in general, require some patience when posing do correctly deal with all the moving parts. Boba Fett’s posing is complicated by the fact that this piece enters the Coffin collection having been previously owned, so some of the joints are already really loose. The ankles in particular on this piece are loose, or were at very least, as some clear nail polish tightened them up a lot, but needed several coats to do so. I think back with General Darth Vader I’d been wondering what would happen if the joints began to betray a figure like this, and the answer is not at all good. Prior to some polish, this guy was real floppy, and would without provocation pitch forward on the shelf because the ankles would just let go. It’s those smaller joints that seem to suffer, ankles and wrists, although other parts, like the shoulder armor, which attach via a simple and small ball and socket, and those types of joints do tend to wear out anyway. Again, some nail polish fixes things at least for the immediate present, and these are not toys that get a whole ton of in-hand time anyway, so even if nail polish is used to solidify an ankle for standing, the end result is a stable and attractive figure.

Psht. . . nothing personel, kid.
This figure, like the others in the Movie Realization series, are so unique and so stylized that I find them really difficult to talk about. They are things that need to be looked at to be appreciated, and talking about them like “normal” action figures doesn’t seem to do justice to them. It makes me feel like I lack the language to really work through a review of them, but they are so terrific that I feel that I have to try regardless. This Boba Fett is really difficult to come by, and if people buy these figures based on their aesthetic value, it’s easy to understand why. On the shelf that houses my entire collection of these, Boba Fett explodes out thanks to the amazing color scheme against a group of Stormtroopers and Sith lords. Future releases for the line look to include New Trilogy characters, so that shelf is no doubt going to grow ever more crowded over the next few years.

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