Spinosaurus (Animal Adventure/ANIA by Takara Tomy)

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Review and photos by Charles Peckham, edited by Suspsy

Depictions of Spinosaurus have undergone massive changes since Nizar Ibrahim published his famous 2014 reconstruction. It’s a fairly popular dinosaur and it has many toys available, but almost all of them show a bipedal animal with a half circle-shaped sail on its back. However, more and more companies are now depicting a quadrupedal animal with a soft M-shaped spine. There are CollectA’s 2015 Standard and Deluxe versions, the 2016 Kaiyodo expo set, the 2017 Favorite version, and the new 2019 versions from Safari and Schleich. So it’s pretty neat that Takara Tomy has also produced a new Spinosaurus. For fans of packaging and extras, the ANIA line comes in a nice little box that reminds me of Barnum’s Animal Crackers, and two trading cards, which is really just the same trading card in English and Japanese.

The toy itself is painted a nice blue color, with yellow highlights that are unfortunately more splotches than stripes. The coloring shows countershading, with a lighter, almost white-blue on the bottom and dark blue on the top. The integument includes stretchy, elephant-like skin over most of the creature, with five rows of distinct tubercles on its topside. I can’t comment on the accuracy of this last feature.

Speaking of accuracy, the head is perhaps a little too wide, the torso is perhaps a little too short and probably too deep-chested, and even though Spinosaurus had especially long arms, theseones  seem perhaps a little too long. If it sounds like I’m nitpicking, that’s because the figure doesn’t have any glaring flaws that I can discern. The toy has webbed feet, which is a speculated but not proven feature, and most reconstructions give sharp tips to the ends of the spines, which are not present in this toy, presumably because it’s a toy. It’s depicted walking on the knuckles of its front limbs, which is another speculation that has never been seen in a dinosaur before, but nobody has a better hypothesis as to how it would have walked, so there you go.

The level of detail on this toy is quite good, but the build quality makes the details a little difficult to appreciate. Measuring about 15 cm long and about 7 cm tall, this toy has articulated jaws and two joints in the tail that allow it to move, like many of the toys in the ANIA line. This unfortunately leads me to my chief complaint with this toy. Although it is perhaps repairable by adjusting, the upper and lower jaws of the toy meet at a slight diagonal, which gives the figure a stupid, underbite-like expression that reminds me of Kermit the Frog reacting to Cookie Monster being substituted for a letter of the alphabet.

To me, the ANIA Spinosaurus comes incredibly close to perfect, but between the off-center jaws, not to mention obvious seams in the arms and tail joints, it ultimately loses a good deal of charm it could have had. Even though these flaws are minor, they stand out enough for this figure to be bumped down from ‘one of my favorites’ to ‘pretty cool.’ Worth the purchase, but it’s not quite a must-have. I got mine from Baopals, which is sort of like eBay for immigrants living in China. I can’t comment on where it could be acquired elsewhere in the world, thought I imagine it isn’t too difficult.