Monster High's Skelita Calaveras: A Guest Review!

For this post, I am thrilled to introduce an overseas friend who asked to write a guest review for the blog this week.  She and I both have Skelita Calaveras, one of the new Scaris Monster High dolls.  Since I am always bursting with opinions, I'll have to get my two cents in at the end, but I'll let our guest, known here as "LagoonaLicious," tell you all about Skelita first.  In fact, I'd like to start the review with her wonderful portrait.  I love this:

Skelita Calaveras portrait.

Over to you, LagoonaLicious!

Spring break had just begun, but I was bored already.  After a few minutes thinking what I could do, I came up with an idea: I wanted to write a guest article for my favorite blog, The Toy Box Philosopher.  So the first thing I had to do was to ask Emily if it was okay for her.  She agreed, so I started writing my first written doll review.

I chose to do a review about Skelita Calaveras, this doll is so unique and detailed!  First, let’s have a quick look at Skelita’s packaging. The box has a lot of small details and designs, on the sides there are little skulls and they are wearing berets! I love that! :D 

In the front corner, there is Skelita’s name and her picture. 

You can see a few people at the background, a gargoyle (and a cat), Deuce and a shadow of a girl. I consider that the gargoyle is supposed to be the Create-A-Monster Gargoyle from the Vampire and Gargoyle set. The shadow of the girl must be Frankie, you can see the bolts on her neck. 

At the back of the box you can see a picture of the other Scaris Deluxe dolls:

This is everything Skelita comes with:

The orange diary/sketchbook has a few designs in it and Skelita’s biography in foreign languages.   There is a family picture on the cover decorated with colorful flowers.

The inside:

Skelita comes with a cute pink suitcase, it has a lot of details on it.  In the center of the suitcase is a skull painted in white, there are also molded flowers and candles on the sides.

You can open up the suitcase, on the inside are a few molded details.

2 molded pockets and a padded pattern.

Again Mattel did a great job on details—notice the detail on the wheel:

Skelita has black hair with orange streaks in the front, a ponytail is supposed to make a poof—that is a little disappointing to me.  I guess there are supposed to be two big curls in the front but they got wrinkled in the box.

The face is wonderfully detailed, she wears special make-up for “Dia de los Muertos." If you look that up on Google, you’ll find a lot of faces similar to Skelita.  Skelita has big eyes, mine are slightly wonky.  

Her shoes are green high heels with a brown sole, on the sole are the same figures molded as on the belt, but I’ll talk about that later. 

I took off her outfit (it is actually a two piece “dress” ) and her accessories.  The top is made very well and has two different colors of trimming on the sides—one side has purple trimming and the other side has pink trimming. It closes with a long strip of velcro on her back and a smaller piece for her neck.  

The skirt is made out of a stiff synthetic fabric and it has a lot of bright colors on it, but the paint tends to come off after a while. 

It closes in the back with velcro, there is no “thong” to prevent the skirt from riding up on the waist.

These are all of the accessories she was wearing:

A bracelet, a belt and a necklace.

Here is the belt, as I already mentioned, it has the same molding on it like the sole of the shoes:

The bracelet has the skulls on it, just like the suitcase, and a few other designs.

Now when she is nude, I can show her body. She has a wonderfully made body!  It has a few differences between the CAM Skeleton Add On Pack, look at the legs and lower arms.

You might see a plastic torso cover on Skelita, and when she wears it she’s not able to sit down or “run."  I took it off and stacked a few books on each other, Skelita can sit on it perfectly! 

She can do the side-to-side and the front-to-back splits:

I also wanted to compare Skelita to a few of my other dolls, so here is Skelita next to different dolls:

LR: Barbie, Winx Club (by Mattel), Rapunzel (from the Disney Store), Skelita, an “old” Bratz doll, Bratzillaz (Meygana)."

All of the above text, photographs (and drawing) are courtesy of LagoonLicious!

Thank you, 'Goona!  I totally agree with you that this is a unique, highly detailed doll.  I still can't really believe that there's a skeleton doll on the market that's actually popular.  The anatomist in me is thrilled!  

At first, I thought Skelita's face was strange.  However, LagoonaLicious' explanation of the Day of the Dead paint is awesome and makes me like her face so much better.  That little bit of history really enhances the appeal of the whole doll for me considerably.  Impressive detective work!

Here's a real Dia de los Muertos mask:

"Calavera Decorada." Photo by Guillerminargp

I agree about the detailing in the accessories, too.  The suitcase is on par with Jinafire's wonderful tote, and I love that the retractable handle runs through vertebrae-shaped tracks as if it was a backbone.  How clever!  To me, the handle looks a bit like a caduceus, or a medical staff.

The handle is not very sturdy, though.  It wobbles precariously back and forth inside those vertebrae.  It doesn't bother me too much because the design is so creative.

I was sorry to learn that the color wears off the skirt easily, because it is a very vibrant and interesting skirt.  Almost all of the panels are unique, and (as Molly discovered) are patterned after Mexican party banners like these.  How beautiful!

And, as LagoonaLicious pointed out, the tiny patterns on the belt, shoes and bracelet all match. 

I'm not sure what the necklace pattern is supposed to be, though.  I do like the color:

I also agree that the hair is a bit of a disappointment.  The texture is soft, but it's frizzy and messy at the ends and is hard to keep under control.  My doll has decent curls at the sides of her face, but the poofy ponytail in back is not very well designed.  It leaves a bald patch on my doll that's hard to miss.

I am delighted that the body is a complete skeleton, but it has some issues.  Skelita's arms and legs are made out of a bendable soft vinyl.  Oddly, her lower legs are made out of harder plastic, but the entire length of her arms and her femurs (thigh bones) are bendy.  This causes warping in the shape of some of her bones, and also makes her more difficult to pose than other Monster High dolls.  For instance, when I try to flex her shoulder joint by moving her arm, sometimes her humerus (upper arm) just bends rather than causing any movement at the joint.  In addition, many of her joints were stuck in place when I got her out of the box, and I've had to work them loose.  Her knees are still quite stiff.   

Here's the plastic torso piece that LagoonaLicious was describing.  It makes the clothes fit better for display in the box, but I have no intention of keeping it.  It's very thin plastic.

Another friend, NatKat, pointed out that Skelita has rib-boobs.  I guess this helps her fill our her clothes a bit better?

She also has an oddly shaped pelvis.  She has very long, high ilium bones (the flared bones on the sides) and her bottom is a bit too...ah, shapely to be accurate for bare pubic bones.

The molded detail on Skelita's back is great, even though the scapulae, or shoulder bones, are not quite the right shape:

The rubber bands that held her in place in the box caused some crushing on one hand:

This has not relaxed back into shape yet.

The other hand is better:

I think the sculpting in the feet is especially realistic--look at the bottoms of her feet!

Like many of the Monster High dolls with unusual bodies, I think Skelita is the most fun to pose without her clothes. 

She has little patellas (knee bones)!

When Skelita is dressed without her plastic torso cover, her clothes hang loosely.  Her waist, in particular, is impossibly thin.  This disturbs me.  I don't know exactly how to feel about it.  She evokes some fairly graphic images of anorexia.  On the other hand, she's not appealingly thin in a way that I imagine would prompt girls to emulate her.  Her body is not elegant and lithe like other Monster High dolls--it's creepy and a bit shocking.  Especially when her clothes cave in at the waist or her rib-boobs show at the edges of her gaping arm holes:

Bottom line?  First of all, I agree with LagoonaLicious on almost everything about this doll, and am so glad to have had her come in and do all of the hard work for this post!

As for Skelita: once again, my hat is off to the creative team at Mattel.  While I wish they would avoid making some of the same mistakes again and again (frizzy hair, wonky eyes), I am impressed by how this line keeps offering completely new bodies and body parts.  Skelita's skeletal body could have been a cheesy painted version of the normal Monster High body, or a rough, cartoon-like sketch of a skeleton.  Instead, it is full of detail and cleverness.

The creative design of the body comes at a small cost.  The articulation on this doll is not as smooth as other characters in the line, mostly because of the flexible vinyl near the joints.  The delicate shape of the limbs, combined with the bendable vinyl, makes the doll prone to warping and distortion.  Another complaint for me, personally, is that because the body is anatomically accurate in so many places, the areas where it isn't accurate are distracting.  Namely, I think the pelvis and ribcage are strangely designed.

Last, I think it was risky to produce a doll that is, literally, skeletal-thin.  When I first looked at her, all I could think of was eating disorders.  The doll's face, which I originally thought was bizzare, actually saves the day here.  LagoonaLicious' astute comment about this doll's cultural connection to the Mexican Day of the Dead changed my opinion completely.  Now, when I look at her, I think of colorful, sacred celebrations and I marvel--yet again-- at Mattel's creative, intellectual, edgy approach to the Monster High line.