REVIEW: Bandai Japan’s SAINT SEIYA (Myth Cloth Collection)

Epic anime/manga series receives top-notch collection of action figures...

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Often, at the beginning of an action figure review, it’s nice to say a few words about the franchise at hand, the movie or comic or puppet show or whatever on which the figures in question are based. But here, we’re discussing manga and anime. And there certainly do exist manga and anime franchises with simple, clear-cut concepts and plotlines; but this is not something for which these media is generally known. Saint Seiya certainly isn’t one such simple story. so we’ll do our best.

Saint Seiya is the story of Seiya, a young Japanese boy who is one of the Saints of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war. And as such, he and his fellow Saints are foes of evil. Athena provides them with special armor that grants the Saints the powers of certain constellations; Seiya has the power of Pegasus. (Yes, yes, non-zodiac constellations such as these usually aren’t associated with superpowers; but we are dealing with an incredible array of usually unconnected cultural concepts here already – surely some made-up astrology can’t hurt things.) But that’s just the setup. From here, Saint Seiya goes on to over 100 episodes in its initial 1980s run, each building upon the last. You know how watching just a single episode of “Lost” doesn’t get you too far? Same deal. And that’s not even considering the manga, and the periodic new anime material that Toei has produced since the original run.

Such a long-running series assuredly deserves its own set of figures. Here we’ll be looking at the recent Bandai wave of five of the Saints: Seiya, Shiryu (powered by the constellation of Draco), Hyoga (powered by Cygnus), Ikki (Phoenix), and Shun (Andromeda).

PACKAGING: The packaging for this series is quite impressive. Each figure comes in its own little box, which is basically composed of two boxes, connected to each other by cardboard along one edge and by a bit of Velcro on the opposite side. The whole therefore opens up a bit like a book. Only when the box is opened like this may the figure and its array of accessories, distributed between the sub-boxes, be seen. While this doesn’t allow for seeing much of the three dimensions of the toys, it still makes for an awfully attractive, almost museum-like, display. And the closed box makes for very convenient storage, to boot.

In the anime, the Saints each get their armor from a sort of largish, stone box. And one nice touch of these packages is that, when closed, they counterfeit the look of these boxes. The copy is certainly not perfect; Bandai is pretty much obligated to put pictures of the figure within on two sides of the package. But the resemblance of the rest of it to the characters’ in-universe packing crates is still pretty neat.

SCULPT: The sculpts on this line are perfectly excellent, resembling the characters depicted and just generally getting the job done. The problem of representing spiky anime hair in three dimensions is handled especially well. For those unfamiliar with this series, it may be worthy here to note that Saint Seiya is heavy on the bishonen - the beautiful androgynes, or, more prosaically, the boys who look like girls. Shun and Hyoga, here, are particularly strong examples of this concept. And while the bishonen thing is popular in Japan, for reasons probably best left unconsidered, it will not be to all American tastes.

All of these remarks on sculpt refer only to the heads. The bodies of these figures are very, very simple, with precious little by way of sculpting at all. They are in fact all exactly alike. But that’s okay, really it is, there there, don’t cry; the accessories make up for this, and how. But more on that in a moment.

PAINT: There isn’t much at all by way of paint job on these figures. They’re mostly made of plastic pieces that happen to be the appropriate colors, with no shading or accents or anything of the kind. But they look just fine all the same. Indeed, the coloring effects, or lack thereof, are actually pretty appropriate to the style of the anime. The only real paint to be seen is in the eyes, and very good work is done here. Which is as it should be. As we all know, if you ain’t got big watery eyes, you ain’t got anime.