Cutie Honey (The Live Ver.) – 1/7 Polystone (Aizu Project)

My first real involvement with the Cutie Honey franchise was the 2004 live-action film done by Hideaki Anno; the one with the perky (yeah I know, in more ways than one) Eriko Sato as Honey Kisaragi. The fact that it was such a great guilty pleasure to indulge oneself in bored out of your mind late night at some anime convention with no hentai room was a big reason why I decided to further pursue other entries into the franchise such as the original 1973 anime, the Gainax OVAs, and last year’s Cutie Honey The Live live-action drama.

If you haven’t bothered with anything Cutie Honey, the drama’s a great place to start since Mikie Hara’s probably the best (read: bubbliest) Honey to date and the fighting scene work by AAC Stunts is pretty darn impressive. The ending may put off some fans, but The Live is all-in-all a great piece of tokusatsu television that I’m surprised hasn’t put out more merchandise to date.

Kudos to Aizu Project for covering Honey's latest look.

While Honey’s combat outfit in The Live probably isn’t my top favorite in the history of the franchise (that honor goes to Re: Cutie Honey, Tadashi Hiramatsu is a talented man), it definitely worked with Mikie Hara working the goods. The only thing was that Honey’s hair wasn’t well… poofy enough. Hara’s hair was definitely long enough when she wasn’t in Honey-mode, so I don’t get how the magical perm translated into something that wasn’t more similar to the traditional Honey hairdo.

Yeah...

Instead we got…

WHAT HAPPENED!? Ehh, still good I suppose, but not the best.

Sigh… Anyway, I can’t really complain about the quality of the sculpt since Honey’s supposed to be a huge ecchi icon by nature. I’m personally not familiar with the manufacturer, Aizu Project, either. But after a quick whirl around the company website there’s a good chance that after so many successful releases to market, they must be doing something right.

For people curious about polystone products, remember that this item is made of a material that can be a bit more brittle (not that you should be dropping or abusing your goodies in the first place) than much more common PVC plastics. However, you’ll also usually end up with cleaner cuts and edges on the sculpt as a trade-off; definitely only for the more serious collectors.

This statuette Honey Flashes for the price of 10,500 JPY (~105 USD) some time this November.

Source: Moeyo!

~ by djudge on September 14, 2008.