Kaiju Revolution: Girl Style Now!
Everybody’s jumping on the kaiju bandwagon these days, but paraphrasing a Bikini Kill lyric in the title of this post, it’s cool to see a female getting in on this largely boys’ club of a genre. Of the new, “I am a Girl” resin, Amanda Visell had this to say:
“This is my sort of kaiju, which seems to be monsters figures made by boys. This is a girl made by a girl, so twice as scary.”
The figures were sculpted, molded, cast, hand-painted and packaged all in the Switcheroo Workshop in LA. The dark blue figure shown at above left and center is the nitelite version. It measures 6.5 x 4 x 1 and has an undisclosed edition size. “Frosty Girl” shown at right, is hand-painted clear resin, limited to 5 pieces. All figures are bagged with header cards. You can choose which colorway you like (while supplies last) for $150 here.
I’m curious what people think of this. It’s an American-made humanoid resin female figure with fangs a pointy collar. It doesn’t exactly fit the formal definition of kaiju. Does it matter?
[UPDATE: This just in from Amanda Visell via Twitter after telling her there was a roaring debate going on (comments, Twitter, forums) about whether this character has fangs or a collar:
@jeremyriad ha, yeah I just read that, that's her dress, and not so much kaiju. Though she is hiding something dangerous behind her.
Now that we've got that settled, we can move on to guessing what she's holding behind her...]
The sculpt is great. Being a piece made by w woman and trying to get into Kaiju like realms is fantastic. I love to see more women take on such a task. But adding 2 fangs does a kaiju make?
Is it meant to be a joke/done as a humorous play on the term kaiju as it relates to collectible toys?
If so, she might want to make that clearer. If not, then color me confused on why she’s using the term Kaiju for it. I always thought kaiju was in reference to monster toys made in Japan (preferably designed by Japanese artists). But I’m also very new to learning what defines kaiju, so maybe I’m way off base. But it seems off to me from what I know.
It looks really good and I agree with Smack. Tho I am not an expert, I think kaiju means monster, so this would be more like a kaijin…
I’m very new to kaiju as well. Maybe it’s would be more “kaiju” if she had a tentacle for an arm and a couple extra eyeballs on the back of her head.
Aside from the fangs and being bagged w/ a header card, I don’t see anything extravagant or wildly imaginative about it that I normally associate with kaiju. Please feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken.
With all that said, she does look like a cool resin toy. I’m pretty partial to the frost version. ^_^
Those are supposed to be fangs? Why are they coming out of her chin and her mouth is just a little line in the normal place?
Maybe it’s two beards.
Well let’s see – if there were no fangs and it was titled Monster maybe??? True – girls can be scary too…I like the sculpt and the casted colors (very cool) but as we all know if it’s not “monstery” enough the Kaiju crowd’s gonna get in ya face. Other than the two things mentioned above i like it – GIRL POWER!!! I would have made it a zombie girl with some crazy colors and called it ZomBella…Just sayin.
Those are not fangs. They are the pointed collar of her dress. This is not a monster. It’s just a girl. It looks like something you could buy at Target for a girl to put on her desk for maybe $10. AV has created so many wondrous amazing creatures! What’s up with this? It’s just plain boring.
OK, one mystery solved. Another opened. Check the update above…
Both hands are visible as far as I can tell. Unless she has more hands?!? MONSTER!!! Or perhaps there’s a mini-me on her back!
[...] Let’s talk about the word kaiju and your aesthetic. People get very ornery around this subject. [Just yesterday, there was a heated debate here.] [...]