Welcome to the Core Principles page, which archives The Review's principles of high-quality stuffed creature design. It is here we answer a critical question: what makes for a successfully fun and compelling stuffed creature, and what makes for a run-of-the-mill, or even disturbing stuffed creature?
[Note: The Axiom of Proper Abstraction has been modified since it appeared as a Saturday post.]
[Note: The Axiom of Proper Abstraction has been modified since it appeared as a Saturday post.]
Stuffed Creature Design
Stuffed creatures are an imaginative, creative translation of animals as they exist in nature. Successful stuffed creatures take the physical attributes of real animals and modify proportions, configuration, and shape. Careful manipulation of the relationship between snouts, heads, paws, and bellies renders real animals cartoon-like and, therefore, engaging and smile-inducing. It helps if the animal is considered cute by humans: hence the popularity of stuffed bears, monkeys, bunnies, cats, and dogs. Slimy, scaly, and scary animals such as snails, alligators, and sharks, however, can be rendered huggable through the right design, coupled with high-quality fur and stuffing.
There is no mathematical formula, no ratio chart to consult, and, therefore, no need to bring a measuring tape with you to the store. You will have an instinctive, gut reaction to proportions, configuration, and shape. The Review, however, has definite opinions about what constitutes brilliant design, what is uninspired, and what is downright disturbing. The fact that this blog exists shows that The Review is not shy about sharing these opinions.
The Review’s Axioms and Corollaries will set you on the right path towards cute and compelling stuffed animals. Each Axiom establishes a fundamental principle of stuffed creature design. The corollaries are sub-principles that naturally flow from the Axioms.
Axiom of Proper Abstraction
The most satisfying creatures abstract, modify, and distort the essential character of a “real-world” animal.
Designs should start with the animal in nature, and consider it as a whole: what are the key proportions, configuration, and shape of, for example, a bear? In other words, what are the qualities that make a bear a bear?
A stuffed creature is created by taking these key characteristics and abstracting them through distortion and exaggeration. The result is a creature that looks nothing like the real-world animal it mimics, but that is instantly recognizable as that animal. The stuffed bear has a “bear essence” without mimicking what you see in National Geographic.
The following two Gund bears, in The Review’s humble opinion, brilliantly illustrate this process, as well as the creative potential of the Axiom of Proper Abstraction [Figures 1&2]. Both are definitively bears, but are drastically different from the mammals who roam the wild. Neither stuffed creature mirrors a bear’s shape, stance, or relationship between head, midsection, and limbs. Both, however, in their own way, capture essential features from nature.
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| Figure 1 |
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| Figure 2 |
The brown Gund in Figure 1 translates a bear’s midsection, snout, and ears into soft, round qualities. A bear’s large midsection, often padded with hibernation insulation, becomes a plump, round tummy, inviting of rubs, pats, and pokes. The elongated, sensitive snout of a wild brown bear becomes an appealing set of gentle circles. Protruding ears attentive to sound become diminutive accents. The design also retains the general head-body proportion of a real bear, but alters the configuration of head-body-limbs. The Gund is meant to sit upright and so has elongated appendages. This distortion works because his limbs are in proportion with the rest of his body; they are neither stumps nor sprawling noodles. [Note: This is Manny, a Review staff bear. Refer to the "Staff Directory" for his profile.]
The white Gund in Figure 2 has a very different bear essence, abstracting a bear’s large curves, snout, and ears into a huggable, gumdrop mass. His snout and ears retain some of the elongation found in nature, but they conform to his parabolic body. The roundness of this Gund is an appealing exaggeration of a bear’s back and ample behind. Note: legend has it that the creature was modeled after the crescent moon, with his upturned head gazing at the night sky. If true, it is an instructive lesson in the possible sources of inspiration within the Axiom of Proper Abstraction. The designer borrowed from the moon, but created a bear.
The differences between the two show the potential for imaginative design. The interpretation of essential bear features takes wildly divergent configurations in these two creatures, both to magnificent effect.
Let us look at the Axiom of Proper Abstraction at work with other well-designed animals.
The little creature below captures an “elephant essence” through selective shrinking and enlarging [Figures 3&4]. The massive midsection of an elephant found roaming the Serengeti is shrunk in order to emphasize an exaggerated trunk and ears. And this elephant does not roam; he sits on his bottom, freeing those wonderfully chunky, pink-bottomed paws for play. [Note: This is Frazier, another Review staffer. Click here to visit his profile.]
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| Figure 3 |
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| Figure 4 |
The elephant in Figure 5 is radically different. The design completely ignores a real elephant’s proportions, configuration, and shape, making the elephant above look eligible for the Nature Channel. He is essentially an orb with an elephant face. He works because his abstraction is so absurd; the largest terrestrial mammal is shrunk into a funny, tiny package that plops in the palm of your hand. [Note: This is Tucker, a member of the Review staff. Click here to visit his profile.]
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This frog’s hilarious qualities rely on extremity distortion, much like the elephant in Figure 3 [Figures 6&7]. Real-life frogs have thick midsections, but this creature’s body is merely a pivot point for a bulbous head with googly eyes and rangy limbs. And to increase this creature’s silliness factor, a frog’s front-to-back leg ratios are distorted: two elongated back legs are translated into four noodly legs with chunky pads. [Note: This is Paddy, a Review staff creature. Tune in tomorrow for his profile.]
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| Figure 6 |
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| Figure 7 |
Good stuffed creature design requires balance and elegance. Retaining the essence of an animal through abstraction is an artful translation. It is all too easy to go to extremes, veering too far into exaggeration and distortion, or leaning too much on an animal’s real-world qualities.
Let us explore the extremes…
Over-Abstraction
Some designers are over-zealous when it comes to abstraction. Distortion and exaggeration can be overdone, taking an otherwise appealing “essential” feature and blowing it up to gargantuan proportions, leaving the stuffed creature with an odd, unsettling, or grotesque appearance.
Over-Abstraction can take many forms, but heads, eyes, and color are frequently the focus of excessive exaggeration and distortion.
Heads
The over-exaggeration of a stuffed creature’s head is plain abnormal. Nature rarely makes animals with gigantic heads perched atop tiny torsos. A stuffed creature with a ballooned head, therefore, is distortion gone wrong; it does nothing to accentuate an animal’s fundamental qualities.
The poor creature in Figure 1 looks like it is suffering from an unfortunate medical condition that has caused its head to swell. It is also difficult to discern exactly what this creature is supposed to be, it is so off-kilter: mouse, dog?
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| Figure 1 |
Mr. Raccoon has a bloated head that appears plunked on top of the wrong body [Figure 2]. There is no grace or elegance to the translation from real raccoon to stuffed raccoon. His lumbering head does not add to his “raccooness;” it simply looks awkward.
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| Figure 2 |
The brown Gund bear in Figure 3 is a wonderful illustration of how an exaggerated head can make an otherwise brilliant creature a bit off. This stuffed bear is the exact same design as the white Gund highlighted last week [Figure 4], but has a roughly 3:1 head-bottom ratio. His top-heaviness is not nearly as inviting and huggable for it renders his bottom paws and mid-section puny and inconsequential. One is presented with a giant head to hug. And this bear has balance issues, listing forward with the weight of snout and cranium. It took a number of tries to position him for the photograph.
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| Figure 3 |
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| Figure 4 |
Eyes
Another common, often troubling, Over-Abstraction is over-exaggerated eyes.
Recall the frog from last Saturday, pictured again in Figure 5. His protruding, googly eyes are brilliant because they are exaggerated in proportion with the rest of his body. [Note: this is Paddy, a Review staffer. See the Staff Directory for his profile.]
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| Figure 5 |
Consider the frog in the background of Figure 6. The appropriate response is a grimace and audible shriek. This is a frog abomination. The eyes on this stuffed creature are unrelenting black orbs with the power to suck in one’s soul, and its engorged red smackers suggest plastic surgery or botox injections. Taken together, this is one disturbing frog.
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| Figure 6 |
The elephant in Figure 7 has puffball eyes that compete with his elephantine qualities. His already diminutive ears must stand in the shadow of his eyes, and those relentless, unblinking pupils distract from the exaggerated trunk. He is an amusing creature, but not nearly as successful as last Saturday’s elephant, Frazier [Figure 8]. [You can read more about Frazier in the Staff Directory.]
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| Figure 7 |
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| Figure 8 |
An additional elephant to compare to Mr. Bug-Eyes above [Figure 9]. Both have diminutive ears and focus on trunk exaggeration. But this elephant works better because his eyes are tiny black dots, allowing the trunk to shine.
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| Figure 9 |
Color
Designers like to over-distort the color and fur-pattern of animals, in an attempt to be zany, wacky, and fun. The Review has a different view of odd colors and patterns: at best they distract the eye from the creature’s overall proportion and features, and at worst they are a cheap way to impose personality onto a stuffed creature.
Before we discuss this turtle’s color distortion, note its over-abstracted head and eyes [Figure 10]. A pleasing attribute of turtles is a tiny head peaking out of a large shell, a proportion easily translatable to the realm of stuffed creatures. But the head on this turtle competes with his shell, much to its detriment. And those gigantic glass eyes and hooded eyelids have the same soul-sucking qualities as the frog in Figure 6.
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| Figure 10 |
The final strike against this turtle: its aggressive pinkness and swirling, multi-colored shell. The colors and pattern scream for attention: I am one crazy turtle who knows how to have fun! It is simply trying way too hard. If the color palate remained closer to a real turtle – greens and browns – there would be more possibilities for this turtle’s personality. Imaginative play would have freer reign.
Caveat: The Review is fairly firm in rejecting all over-abstracted heads and eyes, but is not so rigid it rejects all over-abstraction of color.
There are ways to add distorted colors and patterns without plunging head-first into the deep end of extremes. Take the turtle in Figure 11, for example. The turtle’s head and flippers are a pastel shade of green, staying close to the hue of a real turtle. Distorted colors of light orange, red, and blue are confined to the shell, a sensible translation of the patterned and multicolored shell one would find in nature.
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| Figure 11 |
The Review rolls its proverbial eyes at the clearly gendered intention of pink and blue stuffed animals, but must admit some pastel-hued creatures are quite successful.
An example is this pink Gund bear [Figure 12]. Yes, we have seen this bear before; he is the same brilliantly amusing design as the creature from last Saturday [Figure 4 in this post]. The Review tolerates his pink fur because of his superior configuration. [Note, this is a Review staffer, Gum-Ming. Check the Staff Directory for his profile.]
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| Figure 12 |
Under-Abstraction
Some designers try too hard for an accurate translation of an animal’s essential qualities into the realm of stuffed creatures. Indeed, whole lines of stuffed creatures are devoted to the realistic reproduction of animals. Many of these tend to be produced by educational companies or “save-the-environment” organizations. The Review avoids such lines.
The whole point of a stuffed creature is imaginative play that references real-life, but is removed from the everyday, and these animals are too anchored in reality. These lines can also produce creepy stuffed creatures with beady eyes, scaly claws, and menacing looking beaks.
This frog is simply too life-like [Figure 13]. He doesn’t have the amusing, cartoon-quality of the frog in Figure 5 because the design sticks doggedly to the real-world shape of a frog’s head and webbed-pads. It is hard to imagine this frog doing much else besides lazing on a lily pad, waiting for flies.
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| Figure 13 |
Someone took great pains to make this stuffed creature look like a real Rottweiler pup [Figure 14]. He is well-designed, but is lacking the abstraction that makes stuffed creatures hilarious and fun. Since he looks like a real dog, there is not the same desire to animate him in the silly ways you would another stuffed creature. But he is not a real dog, so one cannot expect him to fetch or roll over. He is caught in a boring limbo zone between real and stuffed.
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| Figure 14 |
The Axiom of Essential Detail
The translation of real-life animals to the realm of stuffed creatures requires attention to small-scale particulars. Essential details of real-world animals, such as specifically shaped and configured ears, eyes, snouts, wings, beaks, trunks, and fins, must be retained so the stuffed creature is instantly recognizable as a bear, duck, dog, cat, elephant, etc. Essential details give stuffed creatures an identity and personality, and help answer the question posed by the Axiom of Proper Abstraction: what makes a bear a bear?
Essential details must strike a balance between reality and distortion, just like the creature’s overall design. A meticulously translated wing or claw is best left for a natural history museum exhibit. But a poorly articulated wing or claw might look like nothing at all; just a stuffed lump of cloth. Some accuracy is required.
And not all features of a real-life animal should be translated. Particulars such as fangs, talons, scales, or whiskers are, at times, better left off. Essential details give a creature an identity, yes, but they also help give a creature amusing, playful qualities.
A designer, then, must think long and hard about what details to include, how to include them, as well as what details to filter out.
The Axiom in Action
We return to the elephant-orb from Stuffed Creature Design I for further explanation [Figure 1]. This little creature verges on “Over-Abstraction.” He is a tiny, soft orb, a design that has no relationship to a real-world elephant. He could easily be mistaken for a mouse. But this creature is instantly recognizable as a pachyderm because the designer included a recognizable trunk, billowing ears, and tusks. The tusks are an intelligent inclusion for they reinforce the fact that he is, indeed, an elephant. The other elephant highlighted in Stuffed Creature Design Part I has no need for ivory protrusions: he is more obviously an elephant in shape and form [Figure 2]. [Remember this is Tucker and Frazier, Review staffers. See Staff Directory for their profiles.]
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| Figure 1 |
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| Figure 2 |
The duck in Figure 3 is a similar example of the elephant-orb above. The designer chose to abstract the shape of a real-world baby duck into a sphere. If the elephant above is an orb, this creature is a hacky sack. This duck, however, is undeniably a duck because of his orange beak, subtly webbed feet, and tiny wings. It is important for this little creature that his details are well-designed: unarticulated orange stumps or misshapen lumps for wings could lead to an identity crisis. His well-crafted detail makes him a duck, allowing his abstraction to provide amusement. [Note: this is Mush, yet another Review staffer. Click on “Staff Directory” for more on Mush].
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| Figure 3 |
Let us look at an Axiom of Essential Detail failure. The creature in Figure 4 is very similar to the elephant and baby duck above: all three are circular distortions of a real-world animal. But what exactly is the creature in Figure 4? A hamster? A mouse? A gerbil? A guinea pig? The ears, feet, hands, and face are poorly articulated. They suggest “rodent” but do not point to a particular type of rodent. It appears the designer was more concerned with creating a ball to fit Ty’s Beanie Ballz line than creating a well-crafted creature.
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| Figure 4 |
Another potential mistake when applying the Axiom of Essential Detail is the translation of too many details, or the wrong details. Designers must be careful in choosing which features of an animal to include and which features to filter out. Two different Beanie Baby lobsters illustrate this statement. Pinchers, one of the original nine Beanie Babies, is a well-designed creature [Figure 5]. Simplicity works with this lobster because it helps translate a mildly frightening crustacean into an amusing and benign friend. H. Ty Warner wisely left out a lobster’s numerous pereiopods, or walking legs, which resemble a spider and, therefore, are creepy-crawly. Instead, he highlighted what makes a lobster a lobster: large pinching claws. But note how these claws are comforting, with their rounded, soft edges. And the long, probing, insect-like antennae of a lobster are translated into sweet black whiskers. It is the simple translation of essential details which makes this lobster cuddly.
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| Figure 5: http://world.ty.com/images/products/11514_lg.gif |
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| Figure 6: http://world.ty.com/images/products/972_lg.gif |
The shark in Figures 7&8 is a nuanced case study of the Axiom of Essential Detail. The designer veers close to “Under-Abstraction” with this creature. Unlike the elephant and duck above, the shape and proportion of a real-world shark is barely tweaked. He is an elongated, streamlined tube with pectoral, dorsal, and caudal fins, a fairly accurate translation of the ocean predator’s form. But this translation does not guarantee his identity as a shark. The essential detail for this creature is his red mouth and triangular felt teeth. Without this detail, you might mistake him for a dolphin. The particulars of his teeth also save him from blandness. Stitching the teeth so they jut out from the mouth was a subtle, but important positioning. They are reminiscent of a buck-toothed kid, giving the shark a clumsy, awkward appearance that is endearing. The designer also intelligently filtered out further details of a real-world shark, such as gills and secondary fins. Such particulars would clutter the design and render this shark dangerously life-like. [Note: this is Sharkie, a Review staffer. Visit the Staff Directory for his bizarre profile.]
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| Figure 7 |
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| Figure 8 |
Concluding Thoughts on The Review’s Two Axioms
As you go out into the stuffed creature world armed with The Review’s Axioms it is important to remember two things. First, there is a fluid relationship between the Axiom of Proper Distortion and the Axiom of Essential Details. Designs that pass muster strike their own balance between proper distortion and essential features. If a design is sub-par according to one Axiom, creativity and skill with the other could save a stuffed creature from mediocrity, or scathing Review commentary.
Second, the Axioms are principles; philosophical statements on stuffed creature design that represent a general approach. For those seeking a high-quality stuffed creature, the Axioms will help you weed out atrocities and sharpen your eye for superb design. They are helpful reference points rather than rules or formulas that can be followed to a predictable conclusion. The two Axioms work together to shepherd one in the process of analyzing stuffed creatures.
Caveat of Brilliance
Can a stuffed creature adhere to the Axiom of Proper Abstraction and Axiom of Essential Detail, the and still not be brilliant? Absolutely.
This caveat recognizes the vagaries of personal taste and the magical qualities of individual-stuffed creature relationships.
There is a difference between an object being well-designed and an object being liked and admired. Two people eyeing a stuffed creature might agree the animal is a success under the Axiom of Proper Abstraction and the Axiom of Essential Detail. But one might label the creature mediocre, the other brilliant. The creature just did not “grab” the first person, while it has the other by the lapels. The “brilliant” label, then, is a matter of personal taste.
The ability of a well-designed stuffed creature to “grab” someone hints at a magical connection. Brilliant design is like love. There are no sure-fire step-by-step rules that lead to either. There is a certain spark, an indescribable feature beyond words that is the key to brilliance and love. There comes a certain point in describing a brilliant stuffed animal where you run out of adjectives. The only expression left is to hold out your hands and stutter, just…look at him. Ask someone why they love another individual and a similar conclusion may be reached: I…I just do.
