Obi-Wan Kenobi (A New Hope) (Star Wars Animated) - Maquettes

Without fail, the Gentle Giant Ltd. Star Wars Animated Maquettes line impresses beyond expectations. If you’ve been bitten by the bug for this line, you know how you just cannot wait for the next character to be realized in animated polystone form. These collectibles, while somewhat overpriced, truly deliver hand-crafter artistic excellence, and the production versions of these pieces usually deliver the same quality the prototypes have. This is always an amazing feat, because one a collectible reaches “mass production” no matter the edition size, things can get rushed to meet deadline, and often the collectibles are the “ones” to suffer. This hasn’t been a huge issue for the Maquettes collectibles, and it’s something that we personally have been grateful for to date. When you invest so much money in these things, you want a perfect specimen. We’re happy to report that this has been the rule rather than the exception, and it’s been a worthwhile long-term experience collecting them. The same is true now for Obi-Wan Kenobi (A New Hope), but he isn’t perfect. And he could have been.

There are always some characters that come out better than others, and this has become apparent in the Maquettes line. Keeping in mind that these are unique collectibles, in that no source materials exist for these pieces. They are, for lack of a better term, concept art pieces and these Maquettes represent what these character would look like if there was a multimedia event supporting them. As you can imagine, this may mean that the translation of the character may not come out as perfectly as one might have hoped. This is where we stand with the Obi-Wan Kenobi (A New Hope) Star Wars Animated Maquette. It is a good collectible without a doubt, but there are too many features that are out of place here and we wish that Gentle Giant Ltd. would have noted the issues and “corrected” them prior to release. Of course our opinion of what constitutes and error is subjective. You many or may not agree, but we’ll try to sell you our points on why this collectible could have benefited from a little more work on the part of the artists at Gentle Giant Ltd.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (A New Hope) looks much too young for how his age appeared in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. You may laugh at that concept because this is clearly an animated take on the character, and how could we accurately judge it this way. But even though he has gray hair and gray eyebrows, his facial features relay a younger man, although the features are similar interestingly enough. Obviously his costuming is spot on to the real Obi-Wan Kenobi, but his body type is much too thin and skinny. Obi-Wan Kenobi was a relatively tall man and had some meat on his bones. He doesn’t need to be plump, but he looks unnecessarily slim in the Maquette translation. If Gentle Giant Ltd. somehow tightened up these aspects of the piece, we would have little to no room to complain in our opinion. He is nicely displayed on a Death Star base and he comes with a removable lightsaber blade to complete the look. Overall, we’re happy with the piece, but we would be lying if we said the points itemized above didn’t bother us a bit.