At the start of this year, I reviewed Living Dead Dolls' Series 12 Frozen Charlotte, a Christmas gift to self last year, and one of the most treasured grail dolls in the LDD collector community. She's still one of my absolute favorite LDD designs, as well. But this wasn't her final design. She got a Resurrection doll (and variant), and that Resurrection was very compelling to me. Would she be as precious as the original?
Charlotte is one of the last Resurrection dolls and one of the last classic LDDs. I got my copy sealed.
One benefit of not being tied to a uniformly-branded series with matching packages is that the doll's packaging can be more color-coordinated to the doll, and as such, Resurrection Charlotte's box caters to her icy blue tones. In Series 12, her tray was pink tissue that poorly suited the doll's box display. In this end-days era of LDD, the cardboard doll trays lined with tissue were tossed out and replaced with two-part plastic trays forming a shell around the doll, more similar to what Return dolls use. LDD Presents dolls used plastic trays and twist wires, but these late LDDs have no wires, sandwiching between plastic layers securely. It has the downside of weakening the visual display, but for Charlotte, you can charitably read her as frozen in ice.
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| With the plastic window lid removed. The chipboard rests over the top layer of the plastic shell. |
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| The doll falling forward with the top shell layer removed. |
The blue color of the box is the inner cardboard walls of the coffin, like the way the Series 1-5 LDD Minis coffins did color inside. The tray pieces are just clear plastic. I like the look of this a lot. While the plastic trays are definitely a drop in appeal from the tissue trays, this is a really sleek way to color the interior, and the doll stood up in the empty box this way would make a striking display.
A 20th-anniversary seal appears on the clear coffin lid, which is an applied sticker.
This was the doll that taught me Res XII existed and that the final Res dolls weren't standalones.
The chipboard art shows a photo portrait of Charlotte in ice and the text is the doll's name and Res series with the LDD text logo on top.
Charlotte's death certificate is a reprint of the Series 12 text with the graphic design used in the era of Res Charlotte's release.
Here's the doll out of the box.
And a comparison.
Like the Series 12 doll, Res Charlotte's design invokes blue-pattern cracked porcelain as well as a stylized icy shattered design, mixing the lore of the "Fair Charlotte" ballad, about a woman who froze to death, and the Victorian "frozen Charlotte" china doll style named for the ballad. LDD's Charlotte skated on an unsteady frozen pond while unsupervised and was chilled to death in the water she fell into. Like with most Resurrection variant duos, the original design has essentially been divided in two. Main Resurrection Charlotte is more accurate to the original tone of the doll with her vintage winter look, color palette, and the ice skates she's so known for, while variant Charlotte is instead more accurate to a few specific details, having a slightly more similar hairstyle and face design as well as earmuffs, while overall being much more modern with her puffy snowsuit and blue hair, and is the only one of the Charlottes frozen to not have skates.
It's possible I'll get variant Res Charlotte next winter, seeing how this has gone!
While the original and Res-variant Charlotte dolls wear earmuffs, Res-main Frozen Charlotte instead wears a perfect miniature knit bobble hat in white, with a big pom-pom on top and chin strings with pom-poms that hold them in a knot around her jaw.
The chin strings can be undone, but tweezers might help in loosening them. The hat can be pushed backward off Charlotte's head for another way to get more slack in the strings, but the hat pushing back is more of an annoyance if you're not careful.
A knit hat is one of those types of mini doll clothing that always feels pretty impressive and enchanting, and no other LDD has anything like this--though Wolfgang and Jasper have knit sweaters. At some point, however, I noticed a couple strands of knit had come unwoven somehow.
Under the hat, Charlotte couldn't fit her Series 12 ponytail, so she has shoulder-length white hair styled as a side-parted straight bob that sweeps to her right. It's a cute hairstyle.
The fiber is a little disorderly (what LDD's isn't?) but it looks fine, and a choppier look suits this character. Series 12's hair looked great with her spicy "icicle" bangs, even if the effect was unintentional. so I embrace a little chaos in Charlotte's hair here. The hair is a purer white than Series 12's, which suits the stylization. My biggest problem with S12 Charlotte is the hair and vinyl not being as stark white as the color palette would thrive upon, while Res Charlotte seems to have the bright white shades I want. Res's hair and skin are actually whiter than her costume whites.
Charlotte's face is the main draw. While the original Charlotte was extremely darling and adorable, and this doll follows, the appeal is completely different. Series 12 Charlotte was sweet and smiling and a little bit creepy. Resurrection is heartbreaking.
She introduces a new sad face sculpt with downward-sloped eye sockets and a retracted frowning lower lip that makes her look seconds from crying ice cubes. This is a little girl who has made a terrible mistake and feels terrible about it. You just want to give her a hug. This face sculpt was used next for Resurrection-variant Maggot, and then has been dormant since. I'd thought maybe the frowny face could be used for angry scowls too, but the eye sockets seem to lock it into sad mode.
Charlotte's ice cracks are more extensive on her head this time, if less elaborate in return, but are painted in a very similar way to Series 12's with layered shades of blue.
The darker blue on this Charlotte is more saturated and matches her coat more, while cyan airbrushing also gives her face some frosty dimension in a way Series 12's face lacked. Her eyelashes here are entirely on the lower half, and she has thin blue eyebrows that match the slope of her sculpted eye sockets to intensify her frown. Her inset eyes are blue and look decently realistic, with sclerae visible only on the outer corners. The eyes and airbrushing combined give her face a very delicate look with more of a realistic portrait effect. I'm not sure of the intended time period of the doll's overall aesthetic, but the face lands "old beautiful doll" much more accurately than the Series 12 doll. I adore S12 to the very depths of Hell, of course, but the Resurrection face has that fragile precious antique look.
Here's a face comparison.
There's a lot different. I almost feel like there's an uneven gap in styles. The Res doll's face could suit the hair and costume of the S12 doll for a fully pseudo-authentic Victorian antique look, while maybe the face style of S12 would fit the more vibrant retro tones I see in Resurrection. It's not to say that more recent decades than the 1840s didn't have dolls with inset eyes, but the look of the Res face feels a bit further back in vintage than the rest of her, while perhaps S12 is more cohesive. I don't dislike the Res design and she's lovely, but may be slightly disjointed.
S12 Charlotte used dark blue and faked gloss effects with white reflective patterns to invoke glazed blue ceramic patterns, while Res Charlotte sticks with her new color palette. Neither is a fully authentic or plausible old doll in terms of visual design, but both have their charms.
One painted crack on Res Charlotte goes under the area where her hair is rooted. It reminds me a bit of how Hollywood had a section of scalp painted pink and red under her hair rooting, though that was more of a hidden suggestion of gory detail, while the paint here seemed to just forget or disregard where the rooting was going.
Charlotte's coat is a different style from her original doll, and might feel a little less antique than the S12 doll's, though I'm not sure what period I'd place it in exactly. While Charlotte's original coat struck me as potentially period-accurate to her 1840 death date, while plausible for styles up to the 1940s at least, I'm not sure about this coat. Maybe more 1950s or 60s, but that's really grasping at straws. I can't be certain, but the textures and simplicity of some photos attributed as 1950s clothing feel familiar.
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| Incredible outfit here; I hope this girl knew she was dressed impeccably! |
That's not to say this coat is worlds apart from the Series 12 piece, nor that the Series 12 piece is especially accurate to the Victorian era. Both pieces are fleecy and simple, but the collar capelet with fur trim does make S12 look from an older era.
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| Supposed Victorian children in winter clothes. |
The Resurrection coat is a more vivid and green-tinged blue than the Series 12's pale powder color, and is all fleece with no other accent materials--no fur. The fleece itself is thick and fluffy, moreso than the S12 coat's material. The coat has a smaller collar and is trimmed with a big attached bow of the same fabric, which is attached to the top flap of the coat. Fake glossy buttons trim the flap as well. I like the tailoring of the coat, but the velcro might stick out too much.
The coat wants to photograph bluer and milder than it looks in reality, where the cyan and saturation is quite clear.
Charlotte's torso clothing is one layer as in Series 12, and I wish that had been changed.
By Resurrection XII, there would be more of an expectation for there to be clothing under the coat piece, some hidden dress to discover that would make the costume more realistic. Ava and Agana had full dresses under their coats, and Res XI Isaiah had a T-shirt under his zipped-up hoodie. Series 12 mass-market got away with not dressing Charlotte in clothes she'd wear out of the front hall when she hung her coat up, but Res deserved it. She does, however, have one more piece of clothing than Series 12 by virtue of some typical LDD striped tights, here done in a unique color combo of light blue and white.
Charlotte has mittens, as expected, and they're separate from the coat. These ones are white, and neither coat nor mittens have trim separating them visually, so making them a different color is a nice choice.
The mittens are a closer fit around the LDD hand than the S12 pair, and have a white band in the wrist shaping them. It's not elastic and these mittens don't stretch, so they're significantly harder to pull back onto the hands than the S12 pair already were. I had to use tweezers to grip the mittens from both sides of the fabric so I could pull them over Charlotte's thumbs when re-dressing her. One mitten has a much more defined thumb than the other, the way they were sewn.
I like this costume, and it suits a winter-weather skater well, much better than S12's insensible bare legs, but the higher amount of cover set an expectation for reduced ice-crack detail on the doll, which proved true. Her only ice cracks are on her head. S12 used her bare legs to put another crack on her left ankle.
Charlotte's skate boots are basically unchanged from Series 12's, with the only difference being the skate platforms being white instead of black, The texture of the fur is also less scraggly, but I don't know if the Series 12 doll got that way from age or disarray or if it's an inherent texture difference.
Interestingly, Res-variant Charlotte uses the same skate boot mold, just with the skate blades not inserted in the bottom of the modified platforms, leaving the slots open. I guess producing the same skate boots minus one step was easier than adding the fur and bobbles to the standard boot mold instead.
Charlotte's hips were mobile without heating, but still felt a little too tight for me to not worry about them, so I heated the legs and popped them off and did minor surgery to loosen the joints just a tad. No hip pegs needed repairing.
While Charlotte's hair comes fully bundled in, like a zealous winter dresser of a parent has prepped her, I might like her more with some hair poking out, or even with the strings not tied. She's cute both ways.
It's hard to say if this Charlotte reads as a different age from S12. While the bob cut can make her maybe look older, her face is such a tragic little kid's expression that she could be the same age or younger than S12 looks.
I first planned for this post to be a "part 2" to my recent main-edition Nohell post, framing Charlotte as the second part of my "Living Dead Dolliday ReduXmas" celebration, but the photo-session weather requirements for Charlotte pushed her review out too far for me to feel it was appropriate to frame this post that way. As such, I've removed the "part 1" from the Nohell post's title. When preparing for my first vision, I framed an "unwrapping the coffin" tableau for Charlotte to pair with the cover photo for Nohell. It's a nice piece still worth sharing even though it became obsolete. I think the final timing is quite appropriate, rhyming with the start of last year--a Charlotte is the second doll review of the year again, and follows a Resurrection review as the first!
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| Nohell's cover. |
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| The image I designed as counterpart. |
Had the snow been timed better, I'd have put this post as a companion to Nohell's. December here started like no December in recent memory by being copiously snowy and cold...so of course I got Charlotte when the first real melt in weeks occurred, postponing my plans. At the same time, I was working on my Posey project, which was directly at odds with Charlotte's in terms of photography, because I didn't see snow as the vision for Posey's pictures at all and rather wanted a melt for her photo set to suit her more.
Fortunately, January brought back a little snow so I knew I could at least get a few appropriate photos. I couldn't accept a Charlotte shoot without any real snow. She suits moody outdoor winter photos!
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| Dejectedly sitting like a defeated child is a display that suits her very well. |
She also looks great against this retro cyan paper pattern I found inside a vintage book of the tale The Mitten.
Then I put her behind a window.
Here she is behind my trusty fake-frosted glass cylinder, like I used for Series 12 Charlotte.
LDD recognized that Charlotte's cyan worked well against pink in their official photos of her, and that contributes to the 1950s tones I read in her design.
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| Promotional photo of the doll. |
I made sure to try pinker contrast in some pieces, too, and started here.
Last January, when I staged S12 Charlotte skating, I had visions of giving her a real tiny frozen pond on which to stand and then to fall into, even digging a hole outside, but holes don't hold water very well and I resorted to laying a pane of glass over the hole as ice, which worked really well--for everything except staging her falling in.
This time, I had a better idea. I have the bowl of a fire pit which I was able to fill with water and place outside near another tree. With the right temperature, the water inside promised to freeze, plus the bowl created a larger "pond", such that I could frame the photos so it looked even larger by going out of frame. And since I unlocked better photo editing and the skill of replacing backgrounds in April last year, I knew I could easily take out everything but the snow, pond, doll, and tree for a more immersive edited image.
When the water froze, I could cover the edges of the bowl with snow and commence shooting.
While I waited for that, I took a few more portraits of Charlotte, trying to use blacklight but struggling with the results. One of my favorite S12 photos of Charlotte was taken with blacklight of her head against darkness, but I wasn't getting those results this time, so improvised with different takes and photo edits of non-blacklight pictures.
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| The S12 photo from last year which I wanted to emulate. |
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| One edit made her eyes go super dark, which I loved. |
By the next morning, the freeze I wanted had arrived! There's a strange lump in the ice, but that's okay.
I set to taking pictures. Here's one of her skating, with a lot of post-production. The retro reindeer is a plush I own and is about that size, but I added it in post after forgetting to stage it live. Some of the shadows on Charlotte had to be digitally toned down because the lighting was falsely making her look composited in against the snowbank from the live photo!
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| Raw photo. |
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| Produced piece. |
Here's some of her sitting on the ice, more bundled up.
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| Base photo. |
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| Edit. |
Here's her take on a figure-sulfur skating pattern.
Then I struck the ice with a hammer, hoping (successfully) that there was liquid under the surface!
From here, I was able to break a hole in and take a proper photo of Charlotte falling through the ice--waist up had to be kept above water, though, to protect her inset eyes.
I subbed in S12, too. She was worse at taking the falling-in picture because I knew cold might make her surviving S12 hip peg snap when trying to move her legs, so I was too afraid to bend her waist as much as I did for Res.
However, Series 12 Charlotte could safely submerge and lie under the icy surface for a more authentic image than glass over a dry hole!
I can now say my Frozen Charlottes have both been basically frozen for real!
The icy snow wasn't great quality for building Res a mini snowman, but after she'd thawed inside, I took her back out to see what I could do. This is a bit more of a slushman, as I had to put the icy non-packable snow into the ice water of the "pond" to form it into lumps.
I set the dolls on a towel on the radiator to warm and dry them up.
Here's all of my Resurrections together.
I haven't yet let go of any LDDs from my collection, but there are two potential candidates in this group--Lilith and Revenant. Lilith's hair has fried and I know
w that I could reroot her to fix her now (as well as the original Lilth!), but I'm on the fence about whether I still want her or not. I tied the front of her hair behind her head to show off her ears and control the hair a little better for now, because I lean more toward keeping her. She is pretty and has a unique mold, so maybe she can get a reroot restoration next Halloween. Revenant, meanwhile, is just too wonky. Her lips were badly painted and her eyes aren't aligned, and I can't get the personality from the doll that I fell in love with in her LDD photo. I got a chance on a rare doll, but I think I was handed a poor copy. I'm okay keeping the winged Resurrections off the shelf in storage as I continue to think about it.
I adore Series 12 to the greatest extent in terms of her design. She's so sweet and darling and eerie...but the doll's manufacturing and aging has let her down. I'm still disappointed with the strange off-white tone of her vinyl and hair and fur trim, since I think a starker look would be so beautiful, though there is perhaps an authentic antique quality therein? My Charlotte also has a dent in her forehead mold and some yellowed spots I've struggled to get rid of. As a Series 12 doll, she was made with inexcusably brittle hip pegs--and received a transplant on one side because of it. Resurrection Charlotte has all the polish I wanted from the Series 12 doll, and has that starker white quality, but her design doesn't quite win out for me. To her credit, she is incredibly cute and I like that she can straddle the line between more antique pseudo-Victorian and more kitschy vibrant midcentury-retro, but there might just be something about her that can't compare to the appeal of Series 12's design. Nothing is wrong with Resurrection Charlotte. I can't recommend any changes to her design; she's a lovely doll with great appeal. You just can't compete with the original. If the Series 12 doll was manufactured more brilliantly white and didn't have her aging/quality issues, she'd be the knockout winner between the editions, but she's not perfect and Resurrection is great too.
I'm glad to have gone out for this doll. Her tragic charm and my new photo ideas made her well worth pursuing.
(Will I complete my Charlotte collection next year with the Res variant? Not sure. I'd almost certainly prefer a Return edition, but I'm not holding my breath for that.)
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