Customer Reviews

I Am Plastic: The Designer Toy Explosion

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I work as a designer in the entertainment industry and have always been fascinated and ispired by all the vinyl toys imported from Asia. This book is a great visual catalog of such toys. The production quality of the images are excellent on the glossy papers and they pretty much cover a wide range. These toys, as the book shows, are truly unique creations that push the whimsical aspects of toy design. Now, the book has hardly any text in it while leaving plenty of room for images to showcase the toys...and for the most part, the images speak for themselves in glorious colors.

If you can't afford many of these collectibles out there, this book is the next best thing.

It wasn't enough to have regular dolls like Barbie or G.I. Joe. Some people had to go messing around with the dolls instead of leaving them as they were. They melted and remolded the limbs, or they substituted a speaker or a model of a radio for a head, or they gave G.I. Joe an orange afro. This was only about ten years ago, and the dolls were coming in from Asia. "It was as if artists were taking toys that I remembered from my childhood and imposing an adult aesthetic on them," writes Paul Budnitz, "They were cute, scary, hip, violent, scarce, expensive, and beautiful." Budnitz, a film-maker with a fine arts degree from Yale, was so taken by the strange dolls that he went to Hong Kong and started a toy company to manufacture more. In _I Am Plastic: The Designer Toy Explosion_ (Abrams), Budnitz has provided three hundred lovely color pages devoted to his obsession, both the designs made by his firm Kidrobot and by many others who are participating in a lively new art form. And if the prices for these items on e-Bay, for instance, is any indicator, there are lots of enthusiasts just as obsessed.

Budnitz asserts that these are true works of art, but that they have an unusual canvas, usually bright, smooth plastic assembled in parts. They come in limited editions, like prints, and many buyers are interested in collecting sets. Because there are so few made, the artists are free to take risks and make something very strange and otherwise commercially infeasible. The artists wind up putting their own money up for production, and spending their own time to sell their sculptures, when of course they'd be happier just being artists. It's a risk, and they want their customers to take a risk on buying, too, and buying just because the offered toy is "really, really weird." Weird they certainly are, and often laugh-out-loud funny; these are generally cartoonish creatures, although some are scary. Often they are beautiful, and the lovely pictures in this book will make anyone want to see the real objects. A set from Devilrobots inexplicably titled "Maffy Kubrick" looks like gumdrops of different colors with smiley faces. Devilrobots also manufactures cubes that come in mock tofu boxes, but the cubes of tofu have faces (usually unsmiling) and are driving around in little bumper cars. Lots look like they would fit into Japanese monster movies, for instance. There are bunnies here, too, mostly in the form of "Smorkin' Labbit", a puffy rabbit figurine whose cuteness clashes with the cigarette in its mouth. The labbit in each of its incarnations is physically identical, except for its paint job, which might be garish, pastel, plaid, or bondage-themed.

There is page after page of whimsical figures, full of color, with molding revealing fine detail. The people who produce these objects obviously love their work. The people who collect them, and pay premium prices, obviously love them, too. I certainly would be more interested in viewing a collection of these pieces than I would a host of items from the Franklin Mint. I didn't know a thing about designer toys before I opened this handsome book, but it is clear that this is a trend that will continue. Perhaps _I Am Plastic_ will be a foundation document for an established art movement in the future, to show the movement's Golden Age, but it stands on its own as a fine introduction into a very odd artistic and commercial endeavor.

I was hoping this book would give me a little insight into the world of the designer toy. Instead, I got a pictorial, not a book...not a word of explanation, just pictures of the various toys. Too bad - it would have been more enlightening if the author included even bullet descriptions of the provenance of such toys: why are they called designer toys, when did this phenomenon start, where is it a craze, will it continue to be a craze and what makes one toy a hit and one not. This short review has more words than you'll ever read in the book.

I bought this book without really knowing it, trusting the reviews and the intriguing cover. I was not disappointed. (Except by Amazon's delivery- the book was torn and not clean). This book shows a lot of funny toys. No words, only nice funny pictures. I would recommend this for anyone who likes toys and action figures.

This is a very very good book for any vinyl lover or collector, It's got so many examples shown. Only thing I would have liked better is more detail on many of the vinyls listed. This book is mostly pictures with only just a lil info on each. It would have been nice to have more info on many of them but still overall a wonderful book.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys urban toys. Almost every page has very nice, large photographs of different single works and series. The book displays each toy very well; it includes different views of most of the works and some close-ups. It features artists from all over the world and contains some interviews as well.

A simply excellent coffee-top style manual with great colour photography for all fans and serious collectors of Japanese toys. My 11-yr old keeps it next to his bed.

I bought this book because I'm a fan of kid robot toys, but do not have the space nor budget to actually collect them. By having this book around it's almost like I have a big collection of these toys to gain artistic inspiration from - but it was inexpensive and there's no storage concerns.

If you like design and creativity, you are going to love this book. Great quality photos with the perfect size to enjoy them. The author selected designs that cover most available subjects and possibilities, and then reproduced them with the best printing quality you can find.

I Am Plastic: The Designer Toy Explosion is a stunning visual exploration of the designer toy phenomenon. Starting in Hong Kong and Japan in the latter half of the 1990s the movement has since spread around the world like wildfire with artists working in Asia, Europe, North and South America and Australia. Artists and designers from various creative backgrounds have all contributed to this exciting contemporary arts movement from comic book artists, poster artists and underground illustrators to graffiti artists and those with a background in the so called fine arts... it is indeed a diverse and vibrant phenomenon. Coming in two basic forms, vinyl figures and plush toys, a bewildering variety of objects have been created that cater for all manner of tastes. Wood, resin, metal, cloth and even latex art toys are also occasionally made. On first glance many people would wrongly assume that they're just silly toys, but the closer one looks the more one starts to appreciate that they are truly unique artistic creations of considerable merit. So don't let the fact that they're colourful, stylised and plastic fool you! Made in relatively small numbers of anywhere between as few as 10 or even as many as 2000 they are highly sought after by the serious collector and quickly become rare, desirable and hard to find objects. Most designer toys come in a selection of different colourways, also of limited runs of anywhere between 20 and 500 and are made in a wide range of shapes and sizes too with some as small as 2 inches and others as large as 12 inches. For me vinyl figures especially appeal to my artistic sensibilities with their playful sculptural quality and very postmodern sense of aesthetics, I also totally love the fact that they blur the line between what is traditionally viewed as highbrow and lowbrow art. Many designer toys unabashedly play on the cute factor but also have a darker edge, and others still challenge ones sense of what is considered to be beautiful or tasteful. Most of the toys are given a detailed back story and history that greatly adds to their appeal and in many instances there will be a related cast of oddball characters as well, or slightly different variations on the same character. One such example that illustrates this perfectly and which is included in this book is the truly eccentric Minitreehouse Series created by the gifted Australian born artist Nathan Jurevicius, who sadly is now based in Toronto, Canada.

After barely more than a decade now the designer toy movement is still going as strong as ever with more and more artists creating their own distinctive vinyl figures or plushies, which will make fans and enthusiasts very happy indeed. My only nagging fear is that large toy making or entertainment corporations will eventually cotton on and try to muscle in on the phenomenon and thus squeeze out the independent artists who've made this vibrant movement what it is today, but hopefully that's an unlikely scenario. Another name commonly used for vinyl figures is `urban vinyl' with this term being influenced by the fact that many of the designing artists find their inspiration in hip-hop culture, and also by the fact that those who collect their creations generally live in big cities. This wonderfully cool book by Paul Budnitz covers the work of many artists from all over the globe right up until the date of its publication (2006) there is also a short introduction over the first few pages that succinctly explains what art toys are all about and the rest of the book is taken up by a dazzling full colour portfolio that is categorised first by region and then by artist, brand or company. The details of each artist and maker are included on the top left hand corner of every few pages that provides important info, and also relevant websites. I Am Plastic: The Designer Toy Explosion is a truly amazing visual exploration of the art toy phenomenon that I'm quite sure will be valued for many years to come by collectors and artists alike. So if you're one of those slightly strange but hip people who can appreciate the aesthetics of this extremely fascinating postmodernist art form, then this sumptuously published coffee table book should definitely be on your wishlist.