– A Magical Maid Appears –
I ventured into the realm of Tinyfox with their 1/4 scale Liluta. Tinyfox is a China-based doll brand, spun off from Doll Zone and Doll Chateau. They started off with 1/6 PVC dolls and now have made several fullset releases in 1/4. Ordering through their official English language site has steep shipping fees, so I ordered from their Taobao shop using a proxy. Including shipping and proxy fees the total cost for Liluta was around $290 USD, still less than a new MDD body from Volks. The packaging for Liluta is nice – similar to Azone’s Pure Neemo packaging, just scaled up to 1/4- a window box with nicely printed character illustration, with the outfit, wig and eyes packed behind separately.
Liluta’s body is made from a firm and hefty PVC plastic- seriously, she’s surprisingly heavy. Her hands and head are made from a slightly softer form of plastic. Staining is a possibility given that it’s still a vinyl body. This outfit seems likely to stain, and I forgot to get her a body suit, so it probably won’t stay on her for long (at least the black parts including shoes, which are black inside). Honestly the outfit is quite tightly fitted already so I’m not sure she’d be able to fit a bodysuit underneath anyway!
She uses 16mm eyes and a 7-8″ wig, so closer in scale to some of the 1/4 Parabox dolls or other 50cm dolls than to MDD. The head has plastic eye sockets which makes eye placement tricky, though it’d be easy enough to trim them off if desired. Her eyes are some sort of print/decal on a gently curved white plastic surface, without a clear lens.
Next to MDD she doesn’t seem too far out of scale – I could see trying an MDD head on this body. With the DDP present though she starts to get a out of scale.
Liluta’s skin tone is more pale and less pink than Volks SWS. A DD head won’t match perfectly, but maybe resin like SDC or ShouShou doll heads would work better.
Without her outfit, you can see Liluta has a more mature figure than MDD. Tinyfox has released 3 bust sizes for this body, and Liluta has the Large bust. She has the D-04 head sculpt, same as Tinyfox Tatiana. Although she has an internal armature like DD, the sculpt and posing have a lot in common with resin BJD.
Her knees are single jointed and don’t appear to slide out of the socket for increased range of motion (though I didn’t want to pull on them too much!) The ankle joints are similar to Smart Doll and bulge out when the foot in angled such as wearing high heeled shoes. The rotatable thigh joint, similar to the older Pure Neemo bodies, allows some twist on the leg poses and she can do a ‘suwarikko’ sitting pose.
The arms have this round cap piece which I assume needs to be taken off in order to remove the arms and change the bust. I haven’t tried it, she didn’t include any documentation on the body itself so I’m not ready to take things apart just yet!
The softer plastic hands attach to a post on the wrist joint. It’s similar to Obitsu and it’s a bit hard to get them on and off. Liluta came with a relaxed posed hand set and a ‘fox’ posed set. It’s not really possible to use these hands for DD/MDD.
The torso has a pretty good range of motion, you can start to see the inner workings when it’s posed to extremes.
Liluta’s head has a plastic wingnut to hold it in place. There’s a channel on the head, similar to some Parabox heads, so that she can look down further than standard DD/MDD.
The elbow joints are also pretty limited in motion range, so she can’t touch her shoulder or nose easily. Sort of like DD2 body without the ‘secret joint’ that can be pulled out for more range.
UPDATE! There is, in fact, a ‘secret joint’ for the elbow. By heating up the vinyl, you can soften it up enough to pull out the rest of the elbow ‘peanut’ and get a much wider range of posability. Tested it out and confirmed this myself- though some earlier 1/4 Tinyfox bodies may not have this function. Thanks to the folks at DollDreaming Tinyfox thread for sharing this info!
Liluta’s profile is very sweet. Here you can see that the body surface has some unevenness, most noticeable on the bust. She also has some seam lines on her hip and thighs. I assume this is something from the manufacturing process and may vary between individual dolls.
Overall, while the 1/4 Tinyfox body has some flaws and limitations, fullsets are a good value and the body is a nice budget option for collectors. I’m looking forward to Tinyfox’s future ‘pudgy’ bodies which would be very competitive with Puyoo Doll Kumako and mochi-ashi MDD.