Feb 15 Yukimura Sanada, Red Eyed Demon

Yakimura Sanada, the crimson demon of war, is sculpted by Tanaka Senu. I doubt Sanada ever imagined wearing a funkified Captain Morgan costume, but when the cold sets in and all you’ve got is a gym class swimsuit, whatever works, works. Such is the life of a twin fan wielding samurai girl.




She is the second of the Hyakka Ryoran figures and my favorite of the initial designs. Unfortunately, Yukimura Sanada was only available through Hobby Japan, the dreaded mail-order exclusive. Fortunately, Tokyo Hunter was able to get this for me. I’ve had Tokyo Hunter get a couple of things for me and have always been happy with the service. If I really want that mail-order exclusive that’s the first place I check.

Back in junior high, after school, my friends and I would pump all of our paper-route money one quarter at a time into Karate Champ and Yie Ar Kung-Fu. It took us a lot of quarters to figure out how to get past Chain, but after that it didn’t take us long to beat the rest of the characters. I always thought Fan was a cool enemy flinging her fans all over the arena. Too bad we weren’t stuck on Fan like we were with Chain. We beat Fan the first time we tried. Her fan attack was pretty to watch, so it was disappointing that we beat her so quick. I was a weird kid. Since then, I’ve always liked the image of fan-bladed warrior girls. So, I felt this dual fan wielding demon girl had a place in my collection.

These next three photos have an odd tint on purpose. I kind of liked how it looked, but if you want to see the ones without the color filter on it, you can check out the extra shots at the end.



There’s a lot of touches all over the place as far as rendering anatomy. Even better than that is an attention to weight and gravity in the overall flow of the figure, which see in a lot of Tanaka Senu’s figure work. You can easily draw an action line through many of Senu’s figures and see the weight follows action. Sanada has a great swooping curve. The solid line through her removes a lot of questions from the pose, making it easy to view without a lot of turbulence.

Even though I make a little fun about having a little Captain in her, I do dig the digs. Details from the “embroidery” on her coat and hat to the braids on the ropes are sharp.

There are two things I would criticize. One, even though you can’t see them, the area above her ankles seem to be a bit long. This opinion is based mostly on where her calf muscles end. However, the chunky shoes hide it very well (or maybe it is throwing me off). The other would be her bangs. They lack the confidence that the rest of the sculpt has in spades.

[Source: Happy Soda]