.•:*¨¨*: Oz The Great and Powerful - China Girl Doll .•:*¨¨*:•.

A few months ago I purchased a Jakks Pacific "China Girl" Doll from Oz The Great and Powerful film. 

I fell in love with the look of her - not the character herself though (she was bloody annoying!) while watching the film and hoped that there would soon be a doll released of her and to my delight both Disney and Jakks Pacific did.

Disney released a porcelain version, while being more movie accurate the cracks looked weird on her - well to my mind anyway.

I discovered that the Jakks Pacific version had been moulded to resemble a cracked china doll too, so I decided to buy her and paint the cracks so they stand out better myself.

 I decided to take photographs as I unboxed her as I had the idea that I would do a review when I wrote my post about her - I'm not so sure that I want to now though as this is another post which has been sitting in my "Drafts" folder for several months and I really want to just get all these posts up in the quickest time possible - but then again, what is the point of a post if I have nothing useful or interesting to say?!

The box as you can see has a large viewing pane shaped like an "O"  - a reference to the character Oz. Once the inner is removed from the cardboard you see it is made of transparent plastic, with a cardboard backing. 

The plastic is also shaped in a similar way to the cardboard outer box.

Be very careful when removing the inner plastic container as the cardboard box is very flimsy once this is removed.

Unless of course you don't wish to keep the box - In which case, just ignore me!

To remove the doll you have to take the inner right out of the cardboard box, and turn it over as the fastenings are all located on the back.

The plastic shell is fastened by a series of tabs which slot through the cardboard backing and are secured with sellotape with the doll itself being secured to this using cable ties... you have to undo all of the plastic tabs prior to attempting to remove the doll, to do this it is easier to cut through the sellotape holding them using a craft knife.

Once the plastic outer shell is removed the cable ties have to be taken out in order to get to your doll as she is firmly secured to the cardboard backing. 

The ties aren't the usual plastic coated ones that are normally used on this kind of packaging and this makes them harder to untwist.

After removing the twist ties you then have to remove the thingame ties (like you find on clothing) which is holding her neck onto the backing cardboard - these have to be cut off so that the doll is accessible as it is tied on pretty tight.

Now that all the ties are removed you can remove the doll from the backing - do this carefully...

Her dress is made of a tough stiff, slightly crunchy fabric (I'm not sure what you call it) it's also very shiny which made it hard to photograph well enough to show the pattern printed onto it.

"Arrgh... Bright Light"

Once I removed her from the packaging, I set about testing her posability and tightness of joints, in other words, how well she can hold these poses before her arms etc get tired and she has to drop them!

 Oh I forgot to mention, as well as her beautiful dress she comes wearing moulded on blue "kidney warmers" and a cute pair of Mary Jane style shoes (also moulded onto her).

Btw... does anyone know why they are called that?  When I was small we called them "Beetle crushers"!

Anyhoo, I digress...

Her body is covered in "cracks" making her reminiscent of an Easter Egg! 

These are moulded into the plastic and are all over her body, minus her girl pants and shoes of course... She even has fainter ones moulded into her face and throughout her hair.

Her limbs move smoothly, with only a very slight stiffness from her "newness" but this is good as there is nothing worse than floppy limbs. It is very easy to place her into a number of weird poses and she holds each with no problem whatsoever.

The above photograph shows the crack marks better and also her 13 points of articulation.

She has quite a wide body which makes her feel very sturdy and also helps with balance when posing her.

I'm not sure if I already mentioned that she stands at 15 inches high, or thereabouts, which is another reason her slightly stockier (compared to other dolls) frame helps give her a very sturdy feel.

I find her very deceptive as while she looks delicate she is anything but an would likely cope well with intense play - although this girl, being mine, is obviously not destined for that.

I decided I wanted her "cracks" to show up more as I love the way old dolls look when they have been cracked but are so well loved they have been glued back together many times over the years, and as that really fits with the theme of this doll, I decided I would bring them out with the help of my trusty tool kit!

I got to work on this straight away but I really was not expecting it to be the huge undertaking which it became, she is currently on hold as the paint job I've already given her took me two and a half episodes of  The Sopranos to do and became so tedious I began to wonder if I was going insane!

I kept trying to make the ones on her face show up better too but each time I did I found it detracted from her features and so I removed it as she has such a beautiful face I hated to do anything to it that made it hard for her beauty to shine through.

I'm still not 100% happy with the cracks in her hair so I'll probably redo them at some time...

I also retouched her eyes as I wanted them to have a more glass-like appearance, I'm not 100% that that worked either!

So work may or not continue on her - the plan was to do a full body crack definition on her, but I quite like the way she looks right now so I might not, an all over crack definition may be a bit too much and seeing as how long this small amount took I'd be right gutted if I spent all that time on her only to have to remove it all later... hmmm

Customisation aside, this doll is truly lovely - she's just as I hoped she would be: beautiful, easy to pose, holds poses well, smooth movement and is very very close to her onscreen counterpart.

 I'd definitely recommend her to anyone who wanted my advice about buying themselves or a child in their life one.

Hugs,