It’s been a while since I did one of these, but usually miniature photography takes a bit of time for me to setup, pose the figures, and get images that I like. I’m getting better, but it still took the better of six hours, although I ended up with a few creative pieces out of it, including this blog post. BTW, if you hate spoilers, you can just go to the gallery of images at the bottom and ignore my ramblings, cause this is going to get spoiled like four month old milk.

Today’s anime figure is the Nendoroid of Homura Akemi from the anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica. You try saying that five times fast. The show was a blockbuster back in Winter/Spring of 2011, but I actually didn’t pick up the show until later. If you want to watch it legitimately over the ‘tubes, Crunchyroll has the show. If you subscribe to them you can watch it at 1080p, which is fantastic.

I was planning to re-watch this series, but then around the time Crunchyroll announced it, I ended up reading another one of their blog posts and getting side tracked watching Futari wa Pretty Cure. Yeah that’s right, I watched that. Madoka and Pretty Cure are both magical girl shows. Neither of them fall into the Sailor Moon shoujo type of romcom/kill-monster-of-the-week type of show though. For me Sailor Moon was one of the gateway animes when DiC brought it out back in the mid 90s. I imagine for most people who are my age, they probably started there or somewhere within the vicinity of it and then began their exploration into things like Evangelion and what have you.

As for Pretty Cure (Precure as it’s called now), there’s actually a whole pantheon of magical girls and it’s been on the air since 2004. Crunchyroll also has the original Futari wa Pretty Cure (We are Pretty Cure) on their site, but you may be annoyed by the hissing from the VHS tape quality video they have. That’s the one I watched and I think of it as the “buddy-cop” magical girl show. There are only two characters (hence the “We are…” in the title), Nagisa and Honoka, and like a buddy cop movie, once they move out of their slice-of-life story mode to demon-battling-mode they usually cause a lot of stuff to explode. Every showdown is resolved with a battery of fisticuffs and punctuated with a thing called a Marble Screw that’s a magical beam the diameter of a house.

Madoka is akin to a deconstruction of the magical girl genre. Precure and Sailor Moon both have the magical creature. Honoka and Nagisa have Mipple and Mepple. Usagi has Luna. The critter imbues the girl with magical powers after choosing them, you know, it’s destiny and fate. In Madoka the girls are offered a choice. Kubey’s the show’s magical critter, a cuddly little guy that presents the girls a contract to become a Puella Magi. But, unlike Sailor Moon or Precure there’s a consequence. Once you start down that road, it leads to some pretty dark and disturbing things, and it makes the show fun to watch in its own way. It is also violent but this was built for a late night audience, not little girls. Also, the show might have Madoka in it, but for most of the show you’ll probably be interested in today’s Nendoroid: Homura Akemi.

Yes, that’s a rocket launcher. For me, she was an impulse buy because of that rocket launcher. Oh and the desert eagle and pipe bomb accessories. Here’s a shot of all the goodies you get when you purchase her:

I remember watching the show and thinking “why’s that girl got a shotgun?” Too bad her toy doesn’t come with one. Homura’s magical power is time travel and she’s been looping through trying to save her buddies from their miserable fate for many cycles. When she started out as a Magi, she was like this:

A nerd (minus the pipebomb). To help her fight the witches (that’s what the baddies are called) she freezes time, goes into a police department, and robs them of their weapons. She ditches the glasses and pigtails and becomes a badass time traveler with a ton of guns and grenades at her disposal. It’s nothing frilly either; it’s just ordinance to get the job done.

Some close up shots of her:

Check out her shield, a lot of detail. It looks fantastic. On her hand, she’s got her crystal from the contract she made with Kubey.

The paint job’s mostly nice, but you can see on her scarf it’s a bit messy. The ends of the pigtails come off as well. I was worried that the ends of her pigtails might snap easily, but since they come off I’m a little less worried about them.

If you own more than one Nendoroid, you can interchange the parts, which is why this is my favorite type of anime figurine to collect. Let’s borrow the body of Kuronuma Sawako from Kimi ni Todoke:

That’s for all the guys that like moe.

And guns.

Some more goofiness — I feel that these two make the perfect buddy-cop pair.

And a cross over from the two biggest blockbusters in recent anime history. Yui should probably not be holding that.

All pictures are in the gallery below along with a few others.