In my next Underfoot episode, I’m going to be playing around with the distinction between dolls that seem fully alive and dolls that seem less so.

I talked about this a long time ago when I mused on dolls that appeared to have souls. It’s nothing I can really put my finger on, but some dolls just seem more alive than others. All of my Wildflower dolls fall into the fully alive category, as do most (but not all) of my ball joint dolls. I think it has to do with looking at a doll and having a sense of what they must be thinking about.

In any case, in this next episode, my fully alive dolls (Jinjur, Buu, and the bulldog) are going to encounter “dead” dolls. Not undead, just plain old dead.

The episode grew out of something else altogether – my desire to get the girls fully outfitted. They stumbled on a few accessories in their last episode, but it just didn’t make sense for that shop to have every item they needed. So, I thought maybe they just found a box of discarded doll items. And that led to the idea that, among those discarded items, there were probably some discarded dolls. Hence, the living dolls meeting the not living dolls.

I had two possibilities for their initial discover of the dolls. The first was that the dolls were covered up by other items and, in removing those items, they discovered the dolls underneath. Sort of like this:

The other is that the accessories are scattered across a doll graveyard of sorts, like this:

I liked the CSI-vibe of the first one, where the bodies are uncovered, but I just couldn’t figure out a good way to show both the alive and dead dolls in a single shot in that version. In the second version, it’s much easier to do the contrast. I suspect I’ll go with the second version, but we’ll see how it plays out.

Speaking of alive and dead dolls, I decided to cast the Michael Caine action figure as Rosie’s guardian in the next version of the Mia Fiorello story. I’m completely pleased with this doll, who seems so real that I can easily merge him into shots with real people and not have him look out of place. For example, here he is with my husband on the beach at sunset.

Happy labor day to everyone.