In barely a decade, the designer toy craze, which originated in Hong Kong, has taken the world by storm. Children and adults, celebrities and design aficionados now line up to pay anywhere from five dollars to thousands of dollars for these highly inventive designer creations.
I Am Plastic provides a colorful visual history of the phenomenon, which has energized not only the toy world but the global art community as well. Fashion designers, comic book artists, underground illustrators, graffiti and fine artists now lend their creativity to the task of coming up with innovative and striking new toy designs. Artists and toys featured in this stunning overview include Frank Kozik, Dalek, Gary Baseman, Bounty Hunter, Junko Mizuno, Jason Siu, Devilrobots, and Pete Fowler.
Paul Budnitz is the founder and creative director of Kidrobot and kidrobot.com, the United States’ premier designer-toy creator and retailer, with boutiques in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Budnitz, who has himself created several popular toy series, has a fine arts degree from Yale University and is an award-winning filmmaker. He lives in New York City.
Product Details
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams; First Edition edition (November 1, 2006)
Paul Budnitz is the founder of Kidrobot, the world's premiere creator of art toys, fashion apparel and accessories. He also owns and runs Budnitz Bicycles, a titanium bicycle company, is an author of several books, exhibits as a photographer and filmmaker, and has founded a dozen companies.
The son of a nuclear physicist and a social worker, Paul Budnitz was professionally coding safety analysis software for nuclear power plants by the time he reached high school. He also created video games for the now-legendary Commodore 64 home home computer. By the time he reached college he swore he'd "never touch another computer again."
Budnitz studied photography, sculpture, and film at Yale University, earning honors and a degree in Art in 1990. His first two films, 93 Million Miles and Ultraviolet won awards in Berlin and many other film festivals and were distributed worldwide. Artforum magazine hailed 93 Million Miles as "one of the best films of 1998."
As Budnitz's energies became increasingly devoted to moving images he became aware of gaps in existing technology. "Since there weren't any affordable ways to edit a film on a computer in 1995, I hacked my own hardware system to edit my films," he says. He made the first feature film to be edited on a home computer, an achievement chronicled in Wired Magazine in 1996.
That combination of entrepreneurial spirit, a keen aesthetic sense and encyclopedic love for global popular culture, and a well-developed talent for hacking would characterize all of Budnitz's future ventures, including Kidrobot.
"My grandfather was a small-town doctor and he used to say that I was missing a gene that told me that some giant risk I am about to take with my life is both stupid and dangerous. I'm grateful for this. Everything beautiful that we create in life requires a leap of faith."
For Budnitz, one venture lead organically to the next. He started his first business, M.O.B., while still in college, selling clothing he created to museum stores worldwide. This soon evolved into collecting, selling, and modifying vintage Levis and other wearable cultural artifacts, such as classic Air Jordans (which Budnitz sold in Japan for as much as $16,000 a pair).
In 1997 Budnitz began recording sound for his 16mm films on MiniDiscs, a new audio format that he'd run into while on a trip to Tokyo. Soon Budnitz was hacking and customizing MiniDisc players for film and sound recording and selling them on the then just emerging Internet. By 2001 Minidisco.com had become an $10 million business run out of a garage on software Budnitz had written himself.
Budnitz's career took another unexpected turn in 2002 when he came across images of cutting-edge vinyl toys that were coming out of China and Japan. These toys included "vinyl toys based on cereal box characters, and remixed GI-Joes turned into stylized B-boys."
He recognized the quirky, intricate toys as works of popular-art, pieces that mixed many aesthetic movements he loved -- including fashion, cartoons, graffiti, comics, music, and fine art. Budnitz sold Minidisco and sunk the proceeds into founding Kidrobot in a California garage in 2002, leveraging the technology he'd developed for his older businesses. He moved the new company to New York City in 2003.
"When I first started this company is was really hard to explain to people what I was doing. People would ask, 'are they art or are they toys?', and I'd say, 'Both, and selling them is part of the artwork too.' That question has always driven me a little crazy. Now the toys are in museums AND they're for sale in stores."
Budnitz called upon the talents of friend Tristan Eaton, the illustrator he'd worked with on his previous animated films. Together they created Dunny and Munny, two of Kidrobot's best selling characters. With a philosphy of collaboration, Budnitz brought in dozens of other fine artists, graffiti artists, and illustrators to work on toy projects with him. Kidrobot produces roughly 60 new toy projects each year and its toys are sold in thousands of stores worldwide.
In 2006 Budnitz co-designed much of Kidrobot's acclaimed limited edition apparel line. With clothing pieces priced between $175 and $3000, Kidrobot apparel can be found in Barneys New York and many other high-end retailers worldwide.
In December 2007, 10 Dunny toys and 3 Munny toys created by Budnitz & Eaton, with paints by various artsits, were accepted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Kidrobot's innovative toys were also the centerpiece of the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Museum Design Triennial.
Budnitz has designed or art directed virtually every product created by Kidrobot since the company's inception. Budnitz's original creations include Dunny & Munny with Tristan Eaton, Zoomies, MoochyPooty (recently animated for Wildbrain's brilliant Yo Gabba Gabba on Nick Jr.), and many others.
Budnitz has worked with many of the world's top artists, designers, and fashion brands. A short list includes artists & illustrators Frank Kozik, Dalek, Doze Green, Tara McPherson, Gary Baseman, Huck Gee, Tristan Eaton, David Horvath, Shepard Fairy, Eboy, Tilt, Mist, Joe Ledbetter, and Paul Pope; Designers including Heatherette, Lemar & Dauley, Jil Sander, Dries Van Noten, Marc Jacobs, Visionaire, and Paul Smith; Musicians including Swizz Beatz, DJ QBert, and Gorillaz; and brands like Nike, Barney's NYC, LaCoste, Burton Snowboards, The Standard Hotels, Siemens, Swatch, and Volkswagon; and many, many, many others.
Kidrobot runs a website and retail stores in New York City, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, & Miami. Its products can be found in over 1000 retailers worldwide.
Budnitz has also conceived of and co-designed all of Kidrobot's retail stores and the Kidrobot Room (within Peter Gatien's CIRCA mega-nightclub in Toronto). In late 2006 he authored the book I AM PLASTIC: The Designer Toy Explosion, published by Harry Abrams Press. This was followed in 2011 by I AM PLASTIC TOO, and his children's bookcreated with Aya Kakeda,The Hole in the Middle.
In 2010 Budnitz created Budnitz Bicycles, following up on his lifelong passion for bicycling. Often called the Aston-Martin of bicycles, Budnitz uses titanium to create the fastest, lightest, and among the most beautiful urban bicycles in the world. In 2012 Phaidon called Budnitz, "The man who made bicycles beautiful again".
He is currently working on a non-fiction book on business and art, and with Callaway Digital Arts on iPad stories for children and adults.
Budnitz still occasionally photographs, including a center spread for Readymade Magazine and album covers for Black Lab. Budnitz frequently appears as a speaker at conferences on business innovation and creativity worldwide. He posts blog at paulbudnitz.com.
Paul Budnitz splits his time between Colorado, New York City, and The Netherlands, where he rides his bicycle and wears size 13 sneakers.
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.
