Animated Slave Leia and Salacious Crumb Maquette by Gentle Giant

This is one of the latest entries in Gentle Giant’s line of animated maquettes (or animaquettes). They’re basically statues of Star Wars characters in an animated style, and they’ve made a surprising number of them. The list price on this is apparently $99.99, which is way too much, to be honest. It’s relatively small at about 5″ tall by 7 inches wide (including the gargoyle heads). Given the simplified animated style, I’ve always thought that these pieces could be done in plastic or vinyl more cheaply and with less chance of breakage.

In fact, there have been a LOT of reports of breakage with this statue, with many people opening sealed boxes only to find the statue broken in several pieces inside. I heard that one online store opened its inventory to check after getting a complaint and found that 11 out of 13 statues were already broken. And in fact I got this on eBay from a store that has been auctioning off broken examples of this piece for weeks. I got lucky and won it for a bit less than $15, which is a fantastic deal even for a broken one. With mine, Leia’s left arm was broken below the armlet, and her pinkie finger was also broken off. In addition, there were some scuffs on the paint from where the broken parts rattled around in the box. The breaks were easy to fix with superglue, though, and I can live with the minor scuffs for the price.

However, there are some issues with the paint job as well. As you can see in this closeup, the flesh color goes way outside the lines and into the hair, and also over the bikini strap. Her eyes seem a little wonky, and the lips are uneven. There are similar problems in other places on the piece as well. I should point out, however, that these issues aren’t quite as bad as they seem, since when you look at it in person instead of blown up to five times normal size on a computer screen, you really can’t see these faults. It looks fairly impressive, in fact. I really like the style they used.

I’m very glad to be able to add this to my collection without breaking the bank, but I do think that Gentle Giant needs to step up the quality control. I wish they would make an animated Jabba to go along with this piece, but I don’t really expect it to happen, especially now that the animated line doesn’t have the momentum it once had.