I haven't obligated myself to make Dia de Muertos posts each year, but I do enjoy getting festive and timely, and I've wondered for a while about spotlighting a Living Dead Doll for the holiday.
LDD's first nod to the celebration was actually in Series 18, with the doll Calavera doing double duty for Halloween and Dia de Muertos alike. It's not totally fair to conflate the holidays, but their proximity is so close that it can be read as Calavera being a Mexican kid who likes to mix her two celebrations. She can be read as a generic Halloween skeleton when masked, but under the mask, she has face paint in full likeness of her namesake.
She seems to be a fairly impressive, well-produced doll, but I've always been mixed to neutral about her. I might like her variant more, though it skews further toward Halloween.
LDD did a full tribute to Dia de Muertos with Series 20, fully themed on the Day of the Dead and its participants.
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| Left to right: El Luchador Muerto, Santeria, Savannah, Camilla, Catrina |
I've always been pretty mixed to neutral about this set too. It's disappointing but unsurprising that LDD didn't depict any brown skintones here, even though this is a series full of Mexican characters. The Luchador is kind of cool, but his mask is pleather and unlikely to be pristine or durable today. Santeria has awesome face paint and I love her flower veil, but her costume looks cheap as hell and her name has nothing to do with Dia de Muertos, instead being the name of an Afro-Cuban religion. Savannah is kind of cool with her orange/grey dress/hair contrast, and she's one of two fully cast in skeletal white, but she doesn't quite click for me. Catrina is kind of boring, almost like the vibe of Mildread, and doesn't live up to the grandeur of her namesake at all.
I've liked Camilla for a good while now. Her face is a mix of endearingly troubled and sympathetic and also off-puttingly weird and eerie in a way I love, and her overall character design is my favorite of the group. I wanted to look at a Series 20 doll at last, and making the sale on my Series 27 Banshee encouraged me to convert that into getting Camilla, but I committed to doing so on the 25th of October, with it very possible I would end up getting Camilla on the last night of her festivities--November 2...if not later, past the holiday. It was looking like the best-case scenario was a rush job. If the seller dallied, I was instead looking at a narrowly belated review. That wouldn't be enough to postpone her publication 'til 2027, but I didn't relish it. I wanted to try, though. And hey, I was timely last year!
I was overjoyed to get Camilla swiftly, the day before Halloween and with practically abundant time to bang out a review of her before November 2 passed.
Camilla is my first Series 20 doll, of course, and now that leaves only Series 19, 21, 30, and 35 as far as series in which I've collected zero dolls. Series 30 and 35 are projects I want to review as groups, so they can't be sporadically selected for roundups, but I have been making slow progress collecting Series 31 in the background to work on another project including the whole series, and got one Series 34 doll in the background for another series-spotlight that hasn't had steam for ages, and won't be picking up super soon either. Series 30, I'm saving to get more simultaneously for when I feel like the time is right.
I got my Camilla sealed.
Series 20 is the only series that has a fully-bespoke coffin print, and the packaging is half of the reason I wanted to talk about Camilla. It's beautiful.
The box is printed to look like old wooden planks, somewhat like the 13th-anniversary coffins shortly after, but in more realistic coloring and no number 13s printed to be carved all over the wood.
This is the only time the LDD cardboard coffin lid identified the release of the doll inside until the Return dolls.
It's still the only cardboard lid to name the collection of the release (Return instead names the character and has a matched photo portrait on the back of the box, but doesn't label the doll inside as part of a specific collection).
The interior of the lid is printed with a unique design too, and the wood scratches being on both sides of the lid allows you to interpret that this was a live burial...
Here's the back of the coffin body compared to the 13th-anniversary coffin. The blood splatter is retained, unlike the anniversary box, which shifted the design elements to make room for the 13 logo.
The coffin window is also a unique print, and, perhaps alongside the black "?"-printed lids for the Series 35 mystery dolls, is the most divergent design for the plastic lids.
The typical LDD graphic design has all been replaced except for the brand logo in the middle, which is printed in metallic red like Series 10. The spiderwebs and "We're dead/pure evil/we sleep with the worms" slogan are absent, replaced by yellow Dia de Muertos flourishes on the top and nothing in the lower corners, while the skull design by the logo even replaces the typical skulls seen in some versions of the LDD logo:
These skulls are not printed on the standard window lid, but the Series 20 lid is making reference to this LDD logo.
Oddly, the age recommendation is also absent from the S20 window lid, and it's moved onto the chipboard instead. Here's a comparison of a standard window lid with S20's.
The standard window lid seems to be returning largely unchanged for LDD's new "basic-tier" character debuts if the photos they put together for RotsAnne are to be trusted!
The series 20 lid is a really pretty print, and this bumped up the price of my Camilla because cheaper offerings didn't look to have the clear lid--or the lid intact. I saw one cracked and split, and for a design that appeared in no other series, I needed it pristine. I kind of got that; my lid is yellowed as often happens, but it isn't broken.
The Series 20 coffin tray has black tissue.
The chipboard matches the rest of the box in a way that feels unusually harmonious and diegetic, like this is part of the same wood as the rest of the coffin.
No other chipboard is meant to read so literally. Camilla's calavera face paint is replicated on the skull in the middle. This is exactly how the Series 20 chipboards should have been customized to the characters.
The poem forgot to close the quotes at the start. It says:
"She loves all things morbid", it was often said
In regards to the outcast with a flower on her head
But every single day is a date with death
When you walk the streets in the land of the dead
I'm not sure what this means. Dia de Muertos isn't a morbid holiday so much as a celebration of those who passed, while acknowledging they are dead. Was Camilla out of tone with the holiday? What does the land of the dead here mean? Is that the undead world of Living Dead Dolls? Did she cross to the afterlife? It's unclear, and the poem rhyme feels awkward. How about:
When gathered were all for the feast of the dead
Off went Camilla, with flowers on head
She sought out the veil to her ancestors' home
Shunned since her birth, she desired to roam
I don't know why LDD went so far with the packaging design for Series 20, and then never again for any single series. Did one of the guys have a connection to Dia de Muertos that demanded more effort and tribute? I'm an outsider myself, but the series doesn't feel designed by an insider to me. I've also wished for this kind of extravagance and variance in the packaging for other series--like Series 23, which could have made its boxes look more like the design of vintage tea tins. I'm very glad Series 20 got this level of box design...I'm just confused that it only happened this once. The only thing comparable, again, is the 13th-anniversary coffin, but that was used for almost every release that year, not a single themed set.
The only part of the packaging graphic design that Series 20 didn't customize is the death certificates, which are standard.
Camilla died during Dia de Muertos (November 1) in 1939. The certificate poem says:
Stoned to death since she didn't quite fit
Into their games, into their cliques
She tried to run, but had a trip!
Poor fallen Camilla didn't die quick
And a rewrite:
She never quite got it, she never quite fit
She couldn't find kinship in anyone's clique
Her bones were so broken by stones and by sticks
When she came back the next year, her revenge wasn't quick.
I don't like to leave things completely tragic.
It would have been nice if the text for this series was bilingual English/Spanish or even monolingual Spanish. LDD not doing either is another sign of this being an outsider effort, potentially not even intended for a Mexican audience.
Here's Camilla unboxed. Her hair is advertised much straighter and more out of her face, which is what I liked in her, so that will need work.
Series 20 debuted LDD's method of attaching hair decorations with velcro squares, and Camilla and Catrina both have red roses done this way--likely the very same piece produced for both dolls' production lines.
A girl wearing a flower on the side of the head this way will always remind me of a classmate I had who adopted this as something of a style signature once she really began to find herself and become more confident. That always made me happy, because the earlier years when I knew her weren't as easy for her.
Camilla's hair is black and center-parted and more waved than it should be. When I later boiled it, lots of fried ends revealed themselves, and I also found some rooting flaws at the front of her hairline. Some hair seemed to be mistakenly partially rooted below the hairline in incomplete plugs in her forehead and that had to be pulled out.
Camilla's vinyl is all white, which I enjoy for Dia de Muertos characters without full bone sculpts because the coloring still lets them be portrayed as either the actual skeletal dead while working for a living celebrant in makeup. Savannah is the other S20 character cast in all white. LDD never did an anatomical bone body sculpt, and that would be really hard to work into the design lens of classic dollies, but I can't say I wouldn't be curious to see a bone sculpt that still evoked the dolly look.
The face paint here is maybe my favorite of Series 20's. Not sure if Santeria's wins or not, but pretty much none of the rest of her does. Camilla's face paint not being visibly Catholic in its imagery helps her appeal for me.
Camilla has a big yellow flower on her forehead, with a center that looks eerily like her actual eyes, and the bold, graphic look is great. Camilla is one of the few side-glancing Living Dead Dolls, looking to her right, with yellow sclerae, small pupils, and an oddly grid-like bloodshot vein pattern. It works, but it's strange. The eyes are surrounded with black skull socket shapes with grey rings inside, and red dots surround them. She has a nasal cavity painted over her nose in the shape of an inverted love heart, and her cheekbones are decorated with red swishes. The paint isn't perfect there.
Her lips are painted black while skull lines stretch beyond horizontally and vertically and give her a toothy look. Her lower lip looks askew on the sculpt, but part of the problem is that the vertical toothy lines aren't symmetrically done on the corners of her lips, making them look more off-center than they probably are. The doll might be intended to have closed lips, but from afar, it looks like her mouth is open slightly in worry, which looks great. It's pretty difficult to portray a nervous character without eyebrows as a crutch, but LDD nailed it here. She's creepy with those eyes, yes, but she still ends up in the endearingly cute bracket of LDD characters.
I think the yellow coloring in Camilla's face paint is her secret weapon. It lifts her out of the generic horror red, black, and white palette while not removing her too far from it either. I wouldn't want to see blue here, for example, but yellow is just the right touch.
Camilla's chin has another vaguely floral design with a black center and white petals with grey dots in the middle. This element definitely doesn't look centered, and it's probably the messiest element, but it's alright.
Camilla's costume feels quite appropriate for a chilly autumn night, though it might be relative depending on which country or region she's celebrating Dia de Muertos in. She has a fuzzy thin-fleece red bolero jacket and a black dress over cotton tights and black Mary Janes.
The jacket is very simple, but feels more polished than any of the Series 1 costumes which its flat color-blocking and material might recall. The sleeves hang long with ruffle cuffs that shrink Camilla a bit and make her look younger, while the collar and lapel and breast of the jacket are one continuous ruffle around the whole torso edge.
The jacket left some faint stains on Camilla's arms.
The dress has short sleeves under the jacket and is a simple coffin piece with a rounded neckline and high horizontal seam. The inner edge of the collar seam needs trimming.
The floral decorations are appliqué in two colors to provide some more detail. Hibiscus flowers decorate the top, while I wasn't sure which species was on the bottom.
I'd probably prefer printing or embroidery to appliqué, but the visual is nice.
Camilla's tights surprised me by being sewn far too low. While she wears the dress, it's okay, but the legs are too short or the waist isn't high enough, because with the legs fully filling the tights, Camilla's hips and butt aren't covered.
Series 20 had a variant set, which was black-and-red-themed as most variant sets were. I think this set arguably improved Catrina and Savannah.
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| Variant Catrina. |
I don't think Camilla benefited, though. I like the main more. The addition of stripes on the tights is an interesting departure.
Here she is tidied up. Post-boil, her hair looked like an erratic nightmare, but it disguised itself and it combs fine while dry despite the hair damage.
Gosh, she's sweet. I don't feel like Camilla is talked about a lot as one of the cutest LDDs, and she's not some über-grail on the market, either. Maybe her creepy eyes put people off, but I don't think that's fair to her. Better for me, anyway. I appreciate her not being so embraced and coveted because it made her easier to get.
Frozen Charlotte really feels like an outlier since it feels like she's the only "cutest" LDD who isn't red and black and white in some way. There are plenty of other LDDs I find extremely endearing who also have different palettes, though...and consensus hasn't elevated Camilla to the status of Maggot or even Chloe.
I rushed through Camilla's photos because I liked the idea of publishing her on the very Dia de Muertos date she died on--the first of November, not the second. To start, I took her outside to the only yellow flowers remaining.
Then I staged a gravesite with some colorful flowers and leaves.
And some pictures with just leaves as a backdrop.
Then I had to stage her cover. I wanted to make her a little ofrenda and the coffin was so important to spotlight that that had to be there too, with her in it. I printed a simple headshot I took and put it in a frame, and put G3 Skelita's concha pastry on the table as a food offering. My Skelita dolls have been getting by with a generic skull-print backdrop, but I got a partying-skeletons Dia de Muertos paper for Camilla to fit the holiday even better.
Here's the scene in candlelight.
It got better when I added a light inside the coffin.
That take felt too bright, while this one, while cool, was too dark.
My cover take found a good middle ground.
Here she is enjoying her table.
And portraits just with the wallpaper.
Here's Camilla with G3 Skelita.
Skelita feels like a more authentic piece of depiction, but Camilla captures a tone Skelita doesn't. While Skelita is literally dressed up like the holiday, Camilla feels more like how an actual participant would be dressed for the holiday. You don't really see actual people wearing papel picado in their clothing. Camilla also embraces the strange aesthetic of skeleton faces more than Skelita does, with Skelita's fashion humanoid face sculpt clashing with her anatomical bone details. Skelita is the more intricate and novel doll with her body design. Camilla is still very sweet and she displays well and her series has LDD's coolest coffin design. G3 Skelita doesn't have a box worth displaying at all.
It was fun rushing out Camilla's review. I'm a little surprised the timing worked out! I don't have plans for more Series 20 dolls and don't know if I'll get more dolls for the holiday next year. I'd love more G3 Skelita designs, though!
I'm going to take a bit of a breath. My next review will probably be the final Hatter Madness interlude before the sixth review can be published. I need to get supplies for that doll's table settings (human-scale and doll-scale)!
Thanks for reading.
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