This is probably my second-most overdue review, as this is the other doll I kept from my original teen-years doll collection, and I've cited her in multiple reviews prior. Last year, I finally covered my precious Feisty/Love Inner Monster, who also survived my teen-collection cull, but she needed replacement parts to be presentable. This doll, however, has been patiently waiting and had been reviewable the whole time I've owned her.
I was alerted to this doll by the Toy Box Philosopher blog review, learning of the doll a few years after her movie's release and her time on the shelves, and I fell in love with her combination of articulation and pseudo-antique porcelain styling. I love classic vintage toys, and the character design was wonderful. I didn't care too much about the source material. I didn't watch the movie until a few days ago!
Oz: The Great and Powerful was Disney's second major attempt to cash in on the Land of Oz franchise and eat some of the 1939 Wizard of Oz MGM film's nachos on the side, with maybe a helping of the musical Wicked too. Previously, Disney attempted a sequel based on two of the book sequels, entitled Return to Oz...and it's a damn good movie. It has a reputation for being a scary kid's film, and sure, it is...but that's great, and Fairuza Balk proved a very capable, likeable child actor as an age-appropriate Dorothy you could really root and feel for. It's overall a wonderful children's fantasy film of the era which captures the wit and whimsy of the genre, having an appeal right alongside Labyrinth. I love Return to Oz, but it's never been more than a cult classic, and Disney wants cultural dominance always, so they tried again decades later. Oz: The Great and Powerful is a prequel film instead, explaining how the Oz Dorothy arrived in came to be, with the protagonist being Oscar Diggs, the fraud Wizard himself, finding his place in Oz as a Wicked Witch terrorizes the land. Unlike Return to Oz, Disney couldn't even land a cult classic with this one.
The film is okay but was not spectacular or strong enough to achieve a significant passionate audience. James Franco is a creepy douchebag at the least, so perhaps it's no surprise that he's convincing as skeevy womanizing conman Diggs, while the film aesthetics are suitably retro and pay good homage to old Technicolor classics like the MGM film. I think the film has a pretty sketchy treatment of women, with sexualized costumes on all three Witches and a bitter story of Diggs' rejection fueling the transformation of a good Witch into the Wicked Witch of the West, who literally loses all capacity for goodness while becoming a sexier version of the character, and the character overall comes across as blindingly naive while good and exaggeratedly cruel when evil in a way that removes weight from the character's arc. If the tone was all elevated and caricatured, or all nuanced, it'd be fine, but it's disjointed, and the women in the film feel mishandled for a franchise historically celebrated for its rather egalitarian approach to female characters. I also would have appreciated more adherence to old-fashioned vocabulary and tone in creating the vintage world of Kansas and Oz. It's ultimately a film you only ever need to watch once, and I'm not surprised the film never became the franchise Disney wanted and has basically left zero cultural impact today. Trying to rival the MGM film for prominence in Oz media is absolute utter hubris, anyhow. (Funnily, Wicked did far better in this aspect--both the stage show and the first film were juggernauts, though the dropoff in cultural interest with the film part 2 was frankly catastrophic and may have ruined the film duology's chance of really sticking around).
Oz: The Great and Powerful is mixed at best. The China Girl is cute, though.
This character is introduced as the last living survivor of a winged baboon attack on Oz's China Town, which is a tiny town literally made of china, with dollhouse buildings shaped like teapots and the like. This is actually directly from Baum's original book, as Dorothy and her friends pass through the China Country on their way to Glinda after killing the Wicked Witch of the West, and cause a few mishaps. In the film, the aesthetic of the China Town is very dainty and classic, with blue and white porcelain patterns and wooden fixtures, while the book's China Country is more colorful and even garish with brighter painted features.
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| W.W. Denslow illustration from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. |
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| The devastated China Town in the film. |
When Oz finds the China Girl, he realizes she cannot come out of hiding because her legs have been broken apart in the chaos.
Great and Powerful does the thing the 1939 film and Return did where the main players in Oz are parallels to people in Kansas, despite Oz only being a dream in the original film and non-MGM films being unable to use that dream element. Here, the China Girl is a parallel to a young girl in a wheelchair who believed Diggs' stage show was real magic and begged for him to make her walk, to his shame because he obviously couldn't. Both characters are played by Joey King. In the land of Oz, Diggs can help the Kansas girl's counterpart, and uses some glue to put the China Girl's legs back together, whereupon she becomes one of his companions. I always like seeing how follow-up Oz stories use different companions from the original book, and the China Girl, in namelessness and in meeting scene, feels the most in-tone in Great and Powerful. It's reminiscent of Dorothy oiling the Tin Woodman.
Not sure what the optics of the film's disability depiction are and if it's great for there to have been this parallel. Surely the girl in Kansas could have been an ambulatory girl who was injured and got helped up to walking to create a similar parallel, or else, she could be somebody Oz could have helped but refused to, so he can genuinely symbolically make up for it with the China Girl. Helping the China Girl but never seeing the Kansas girl again, and never having had a way to help the Kansas girl anyway, feels weird. As it stands, he still made a disabled human girl upset and looked like a jackass to her, while fixing a non-equivalent problem faced by an Oz girl.
In the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz book, glue and repair are well-known to the residents of the China Country, though that doesn't contradict the prequel story of Great and Powerful, as it could be taken that the movie is explaining how glue was introduced to the land of Oz as a fact of life for future china people.
The China Girl proves herself to be pretty feisty but sweet, and is an asset in the climax as she is able to deliver Glinda's wand back to her by passing through the enchanted poppy field (she doesn't breathe, so she is immune) and sneaking around through the Emerald City unseen.
As was the pattern for the era, two main doll lines emerged for the movie--a retail line by Jakks Pacific, and a Disney Store line (also apparently produced by Jakks, but at a higher standard of likeness and construction). The Jakks line notably omits the Wicked Witch of the West, and it would have been fun to see their lower-budget take on her, but the Disney Store line features her. I was familiar with the Jakks/Disney Store system of parallel doll lines from the later push of Alice Through the Looking-Glass dolls, which were a big phase of my original doll collection.
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| Disney Store Hatter next to Jakks Hatter. |
There were three dolls of the China Girl produced for the movie. One was actual porcelain and 19 inches, in a limited edition of 500.
I think this is probably the most screen-accurate doll, at least by specifics. Her crazed surface is clearly defined with grey cracks, her facial proportions look accurate, and the dress captures the lace overlay effect seen in the film. However, I think her color is a bit too stark and cold, her face paint looks too flat and simple, and most of her sculpted joints are static because a porcelain glossy doll can't really be crafted with the mobility of the CGI character. I believe only the head, shoulders, and hips move. This doll might also be a tad larger than "life-size".
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| Photo from drj1828 on Flickr. I prefer the nuanced warm face and mobility of the smaller doll. |
There was also a small figurine size designed to scale with the Jakks fashion dolls. She was included with the Oscar Diggs doll, as well as being sold separately under the Disney Store label--one of the proofs that Jakks covered both lines! This one was articulated basically the same as the giant version, and had a darker, sculpted dress and simpler production. She seems to be an easy fit for a 1:12 dollhouse, where she'd be human-sized!
In the middle of the giant and tiny China Girl was the Jakks standalone plastic "life-size" China Girl, though it's also been credited to the brand Tollytots? Is that a manufacturer for Jakks as a distributor? This is the most articulated toy version of the character, but not really the most screen-accurate, and is a bit smaller than the film character should be. Her facial design looks more mature than the film character's, and the dress is a fairly weak imitation, but she's a lovely design on her own. Since Great and Powerful is 99.9% likely to never be merchandised again and has practically zero chance of sequels that could revive this film character, this, for me, is going to have to be the best option I can hope for!
I got this doll in 2016, where I photographed a review sequence for a blog I ultimately never wrote at the time! I can actually document the unboxing through decade-old pictures!
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| Already, the box art shows contrast between doll and film model. |
The doll's legs are fairly short as-is, but her pose in the box had them bent forward and squeezed down a bit, making them look shorter.
The Jakks line included big China Girl, Oz and mini China Girl, Glinda, Evanora (Wicked Witch of the East), and Theodora (Evanora's sister pre-transformation to Wicked Witch of the West).
The back of the box clearly has a perforated panel that's meant to be torn away, and yet I apparently never noticed this or used it when taking apart the package:
There was an absurd amount of tape on this doll's backdrop.
The doll came with a poor excuse for charm jewelry. At the time, I made this a necklace for the doll using a marionette ribbon from Monster High Freak du Chic Honey Swamp, but no longer have the ribbon or charm. The charm has the initials "CG" as a design.
I don't think this is a worthwhile inclusion. With nothing provided to put the charm on, it's more likely to be lost or discarded, and no such piece appears in the film, nor in the rest of the doll line.
Here's the doll as I have her today. She's just two pieces--body and dress.
The China Girl's design is very sweet and quite beautiful, though not authentic to any style of doll or ceramic product.
She fuses the visual aesthetics of blue-painted china pottery with the idea of an antique porcelain doll in a way no real antique specimens would ever demonstrate, and she's not all that realistic for an antique doll, either. Her short flipped bob hairstyle feels more modern than the rest of her, maybe for relatability to the 2010s audience, while real porcelain dolls for children whose hair is part of the sculpt almost always give the hair painted color for more realism. Here are two examples from my mom's childhood pieces:
I think the China Girl's hair being the same color as her body is part of the doll capturing a pottery aesthetic. Not that I'm complaining. I love dolls which look like blue china. I did a short-lived Monster High custom based on the idea:
The doll never made it out of 2023, though, since she was a very unstable repaint that got destroyed in storage within months of creating her. I'm interested in re-attempting the idea from the ground up, but I know I absolutely need a white-cast doll base to do it this time, and will probably have to sacrifice a gloss finish.
I also love my LDD Frozen Charlotte dolls, from Series 12 and Resurrection XII.
The Series 12 doll wears the China Girl dress really well!
I did actually once have a china baby doll from the same pool of my mom's old pieces who compared well to the China Girl's coloring, unpainted hair included, but she's vanished in the years since and any photos I'd taken of her back then are also lost. She was a bisque finish and wore a yellow baby dress.
Beyond the blue-china theming, the China Girl has other aesthetic distance from real porcelain dolls, primarily since her jointed articulation would not be achievable on a glossed ceramic doll. Real porcelain dolls tend to have either soft floppy bodies joining ceramic heads, hands, and feet, or else they are bisque-fired with no gloss and have looser limbs strung with wire or twine, or maybe elastic, and no articulation past the shoulders or hips swinging. It's fairly uncommon for a porcelain doll's head to be a separate piece from the neck and/or torso, too. Many porcelain doll heads are the same piece as the neck and torso, or else are a head and neck sewn into static position on a cloth torso with holes in the ceramic--this photo contains such a piece, repainted for horror effect.
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| White "bust" on the second shelf on the right was a doll head sewn to a cloth body. |
The film indulged the doll-like look of the China Girl by giving her prominently visible joints that wouldn't actually be achievable with the ceramic production she depicts. The movie could have left the jointing out and just had her ceramic bend like skin. I doubt anyone would complain, especially since her face and hands already work that way, defying logic in their motion. I do still like the use of prominent dolly jointing in the look. It feels like another parallel to characters like the Tin Man or Tik-Tok whose artificiality and animation are equally in contrast. But given that the China Girl's design is, if not impossible, significantly infeasible to make real and fully-jointed simultaneously, Jakks was only able to match the film character so well by casting her in hard glossy plastic. I'll take it. She's less actually fragile and can move more for display, which is the magic of the doll--to pose her to look more alive than a real antique doll.
As mentioned, the China Girl is made of rigid hard plastic with a gloss finish that does good job of visually mimicking ceramic. I also think the color is perfect for the nuances of ceramic, being able to be rosy and warm in some lighting, or stark and pale in some other setups. The Limited Edition doll is farther on the side of just being stark white. The doll's body has molded cracks all over, even a few very subtle ones on the face, but it's more visibly pristine than the rest of the doll. These would realistically be crazing in her glaze finish and not detectable by touch, but molding them makes sense when paint could be too difficult and costly to mass-produce the effect with.
The hard-plastic-as-cracked-ceramic and shifting color tone of the material is similar to the later Return of the Living Dead Dolls Eggzorcist doll. Return Eggy is the only other doll I know of to capture a faux-porcelain look in such a manner, though she's quite deliberately scary.
I like the shape of the China Girl's hair, which seems to be a separate assembly from the face portion of the head. There's a prominent seam line which is unfortunate, but the shaping looks good.
The face is not a great likeness to the film, but I do like it.
She has wide blue side-glancing eyes and a friendly look with a red-lipped smile and pink blush on her cheeks. In the film, the China Girl has glass eyes with working eyelids, and would probably be most accurately replicated with the classic sleepy-eye doll mechanism, but these eyes are fully painted. I think the eyes are maybe too large, and perhaps the mouth, too, to resemble the film character perfectly, and the side glance doesn't help the likeness either. She looks more like the character if she were in a fully-animated cartoon movie, rather than being a realistic doll in a world of mostly live-action characters.
The dress is not a great likeness, either. Jakks prototyped the doll with a differently inaccurate costume, but neither dress reflects the pale lace-overlaid dress with its slim profile. The Jakks dress is printed cheap satin which rumples and audibly rustles, and has a puffier profile.
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| Prototype. Not sure, but the prototype body might be paler and the lip and cheek paint is pretty different. |
I don't think this is a good dress, but it's the best she's got. I appreciate that the waist ribbon bow is attached on one side of the velcro and doesn't need to be untied.
The China Girl's body proportions are a good match for the film model, with relatively long arms and big hands with shorter legs and small narrow, long feet. The torso is featureless and boxy and features sculpted underwear which is painted with a matte finish. I feel like real cloth underwear would add some value here.
The doll's shoes are sculpted on, which is not at all unheard of for porcelain dolls, but the shoes are the same matte finish, which looks incorrect.
The doll's elbow joints and wrists feature film-accurate blue painted motifs on the edges of the pieces to emphasize the dolly jointed construction and blue china themes in a fun aesthetic way. The joints feel deliberately obtrusive and the opposite of seamless for artificial effect.
The hands are a bit less glossy than the rest, but not matte like the shoes.
The best detail of the doll is the horizontal cracks in her legs where she was broken and glued back together by Oz.
Broken porcelain can fit and glue together fairly seamlessly, so finding the "scars" on the actual China Girl would be harder, especially with her crazed doll surface, and we see in the film that the breaks weren't as neat as the doll depicts, but the horizontal zigzags are a fair way to depict the repair with cracks that are stylistically set apart from the rest, since the detail, by being included, also had to be made visible. It would be hard to communicate that your toy design featured the character's points of repair if they blended in perfectly with the rest of the cracking.
The Jakks doll is missing one fracture crack above her right ankle, and that's a detail which the Limited Edition doll includes. The legs were broken in three places in the movie.
The doll's articulation is pretty good. It's a little clunky and the elbows are limited by the cut of her joints, but she's definitely capable. It's funny to think that this doll might owe something to the influence of Monster High in terms of both detail sculpting and joints.
The head is a simple rotation joint, but might have been intended to tip upward a bit too. The rotation is stopped from spinning 360 degrees, only turning a realistic 90 degrees in each direction, which is uncommon for dolls. My doll, however, had a fall and some internal breakage of her neck which made it loose and floppy, so I tied a bunch of twine around the neck and shoved it into the cavity to stabilize her head a bit. That's why I can't confirm the pristine articulation and whether she's meant to look up or not.
The rest of the joints are all rotating hinges.
The shoulders move well, while the elbows have some obstructions from the angles of the arm cuts and the wrists can't bend to 90 degrees. The legs sit pretty tidily and one-leg kneeling is pretty easy for the doll. It was a novelty to see this when I first got her, since Monster High and Ever After High dolls, which I was used to, have legs so long (even on the shorter characters) that they cannot achieve the one-leg kneel pose.
The knee pegs also don't rotate 360 degrees even when straightened, getting stopped like the neck joint.
The hip joints can be turned to make side-splits happen, as old photos demonstrate:
The ankles are the biggest weakness of this doll, literally. Despite an effort to make them click into different positions for stability, they're just not tight enough to support the standing weight of the doll and they buckle forward and tip the doll onto her face very easily. The feet aren't too small, but the ankle hinges are definitely too weak. Standing her is a challenge, and while you could always use a doll stand, I think that pretty much entirely defeats the purpose of what is basically a replica of a magical living doll.
The cheap dress stands up better than the doll does!
The China Girl is basically the perfect size for the largish black doll chair I have which is too big for fashion dolls and Living Dead Dolls. It's not her style, though, and may need a repaint to an antiqued brown effect to be more versatile for the dolls who end up sitting on it.
I couldn't really do much for the ankle joints, but I thought I could try washing in her cracks to give her more detail. I started by brushing pastel dust across the doll, but found much of the texture too shallow to hold it, so I began scraping into the lines a bit to let the dust hold. I also carved some delicate lines into the face because the film character is crazed there too and I didn't want there to be a conspicuous spot where her finish was untextured. Even the larger limited-edition doll had that uneven detail. I then switched to black-washing with paint and wiping where it looked too intense, which was much faster and didn't require as much carving. I think the result is striking.
I also dipped her feet into gloss varnish so her shoes would be shiny.
I then realized that I could very easily add the ankle crack the doll was missing myself.
Here she is in her chair.
It's hard to say if the cracks are now too prominently visible instead of too subtle, but I appreciate the visible detail being added, and I think it bolsters the doll's illusionistic factor as far as imitating a ceramic piece.
I set up some pieces to shoot her in a scene similar to her native China Town.
Then I took her outside. The doll being basically life-size to the character allows for fun staging in human-scale environments.
The China Girl is all too ready to take up arms in the fight, revealing herself to be carrying a tableware knife after joining the Wizard, but the doll isn't suited to holding one.
I made a few attempts at depicting the yellow brick road--all with color edits for the bricks and tiles I used.
At the time I got the China Girl, I was frankly obsessed with her, and exalted her as one of my favorite toys ever, putting her up there with classics from my early childhood in terms of my fondness and appreciation. I might not feel quite that strongly about her anymore, especially as she's gotten neck-joint damage and her weak ankles have grated on me, but she's still a lovely pseudo-antique wholesome classic whimsical doll design with a lot of charm. The likeness is not perfect and her gaze makes photos more challenging to stage, but she's really pretty and I think her medium is perfect for emulating porcelain while also emulating the film character's impossible articulation. Washing in her cracks added a bit more detail and finesse which I'm glad for. This doll has often been out for decoration in classic-toy tableaux, usually during Christmastime, and I'm glad I've stayed by my original copy rather than just replacing her. As the only indisputable survivor of my original doll collection, she's earned her place with her enchanting design. She's a little piece of Ozian magic, and you don't have to care for the movie to love the doll.
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