Reasons Why There Are No Dolls With Realistic Proportions

Chic Line and Idealian FTW! They are to me the most beautifully proportioned BJDs on the market right now. If you are looking for that kind of body. I really like what hobbywhelmed pointed out. I want to see a variety or realistic bodies. Not just athletic ones or plump women.

I personally cannot stand Iplehouse. The women look kind of nice but the men look odd to me. Combine that with their awful jointing and ugly (just my opinion, no offense) legs, they are just not for me. I wished there was a 60-70cm Chic Line proportioned BJD. Some come close but not close enough for me yet. I am really hoping the demand will increase and we will see more and more realistic dolls.
I do not want only realistic though. I really like some of the stylized, fantasy and really odd looking characters. I have a Doll Chateau and I adore him. Noting realistic about that one.

The companies make what is demanded and what they like themselves most likely. That is why we are seeing all these bobble heads. That is apparently what a lot of people (the majority it seems) like and nothing wrong about that. They will always be popular I think.

I want to have more options available though and I hope we will have that sooner or later. ^^

 

To be honest, I really prefer the more stylized dolls -- it's a valid style, and dolls being dolls don't need to be super realistic all the time. When it comes to bodies it's partly aesthetics, but also remember that these are resin bodies -- so you get issues like breasts don't squish so you get a choice of looks good in clothes or is more realistic nude and so on. I personally think when the head body proportions become to exact that the dolls don't look quite right to me. Now if they were people walking down the street, your average abjd would be freakish looking, but they aren't so they can get away with more. Sometimes what looks good on a doll doesn't look good on a real person and vise versa. However, there have been some more experimentation with different body types lately, though many of those aren't strictly realistic either -- just different.

 

I think the reason is simply japanese tastes regarding to manga. ABJD remind a lot of most manga characters. Maybe it's something like a beauty canon.

 

FWIW, I don't think doll companies should be compelled to follow Western/ Classical proportions instead of, say, the bishonen aesthetic or the anime aesthetic. I'm personally somewhat wary of putting the Western canon (which, after all, encompasses a lot of different proportions, from the seven-heads-and-a-half Greek canon to the elongated manierist figures, and from Rubens' carnal opulence to El Greco's ascetic bodies) as a mythical, all-encompassing aspiration for all non-Western cultures.

tl;dr: I don't see why non-Western artists should be expected to aspire to follow Western aesthetic conventions.

 

It's true. Matthew McConaughey is in the genetic vanguard. He has tiny little arms like a T-Rex. Check it out.

But seriously- this is an interesting question. I think the BJD, as a combination of doll, art form, and child-like object (small but humanoid) has to try and emulate a number of ideals at once: the fertile adult beauty (little waist, big boobs), ideal and faultless proportions (that alabaster musculature), and the subliminally appealing infantile appearance (huge eyes, massive head). I think if you try to aesthetically flout these "rules" by making a super-realistic doll, you're leaving the realm of dollydom and moving into representational sculpture (though part of the charm of the BJD is that they pretend to wobble along this boundary sometimes anyway).

 

I think this is getting to the real meat of it, something that as an animator I've become very aware of lately: Realism and believability are not the same thing.

Let me elaborate by first looking at this dilemna in animation. Early when animation started, some animators decided to try to simplify the process by tracing live action, a process called rotoscoping. But they quickly found out something weird: even though what they drew was based closely on reality, and therefore very realistic, their animations had no believability. They looked stiff, they floated, they felt more like puppets than living beings. On the other hand, if they used the live action footage as a reference but still exaggerated select things, the animation was suddenly believable even though it was no longer technically "realistic". This issue is being played out again today, this time with CG animation and motion capture. Sure, mo-cap characters are technically realistic, but only the ones that have been touched up by an animator's hand like the Na'vi in Avatar or Gollum in the Peter Jackson LotR feel right.

This gets carried over into other mediums like sculpture too. These art forms are all subject to the artist's interpretation on both a conscious and subconscious level, and we as viewers/appreciators pick up on that. It's basically the artist's job to filter out details into a representation of their idea, whatever that is, and when you try too hard to stick to the realistic something gets lost, and it just feels weird. So the artists of these dolls decide to give us dolls that represent the idea of a person, rather than something that duplicates a person, because no matter what they try they're doing the former anyway and they may as well make something they like to look at while they're at it.