Tom Haney produces animatronic figurines that gesticulate on their own; the creation, of which, requires an unique assortment of skills like sculpting, carpentry, and mechanical prowess. Although some see his work as a reaction to today’s throwaway society, he sees it as a way to reconnect with the past. ‘I cherish traditions, not trends. I love the old ways of doing things, old tools and traditional techniques.’ He says working with one’s hands still has value and while there is a rich tradition of these mechanisms, it is soon becoming a lost art in the wake of the digital age. I hear that.

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I am a huge fan of designer toys and this one has just got me excited. Inspired by the Munny (a white moulded figurine that you can add your own designs to), the Fonzo is a 6″ tall DIY figure brought to life by Venezuelan designer toy outlet, Freak Store. Trivia: the Fonzo is based on the store’s owners French bulldog!

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Paula Tantsurina is a Tel Aviv-based toy designer. For years, knitting has been her greatest passion, but she found a demand for her goods not so long ago. As she says: ‘There is nothing in the world that can be compared with making toys. It’s not just creating a doll, but creating a whole world around it’.

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Ottawa-based Daniel Picard does some pretty wicked photography work with collectible toys. The one with a 12″ DX12 Batman by Hot Toys spraypainting a wall to out Clark Kent as Superman is super cool. So is the one of a 1/6-scale Battle Droid by Sideshow Collectibles sitting on a toilet seat to poop.

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We have a weakness for wind-up toys, and what’s the greatest about these is that they can be completely random and daft. Here’s some of the best ones we raked up from eBay.

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Ebay is a strange, strange place — it essentially hosts a bunch of stuff that people have and want to get rid of. Recently I’ve become quite fascinated with looking at its listings of space toys from before 1970. These are future-themed toys from the past, so it makes so much sense to actually see these in the present.

And yet I can’t imagine any actual kids from today actually playing with any of these toys. Maybe just overgrown adult-sized kids. Here are some of the toys: they are odd and funky all at once.

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Defenseless toys have only one escape from the cruelty of humans: insanity. Want to help them? Enter The Asylum and find the correct treatment to cure each one. Will you give them the Rorschach test, analyse their dreams or watch them paint and play music? Travel deep into the patients mind and discover why Kroko the crocodile is paranoid, or why Lilo the hippo is obsessed with a jigsaw puzzle.The mentally ill toys were created by Martin Kittsteiner, a toy-maker from Hamburg, following a joke between himself and his girlfriend (a fan of soft animals). Kittsteiner hopes his creations will help children suffering from mental illnesses.

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London-based startup company Makielab makes these 10″ super-poseable made-on-demand action dolls with faces and features designed by you. The 3D-printed and hand-dyed makies are pretty cool — and equally impressive is Makielab’s dedication to local manufacturing. The dolls are printed and assembled in London and Amsterdam, entirely assembled in London, and even the packaging materials are sourced from within the UK. Well, now you know where to go if you want to bring your imaginary friend from childhood to life.

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Sergey Safonov from Moscow has in a short time managed to make quite a name for himself in the toy design world. He won great praise for Moon Fox and other characters from his Moon Wanderer series. Safonov explains that, as a child, he often wondered what happened at night while people slept, and so he created these characters who only exist at night and follow the moonlight.

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Brian Castleforte is a independent artist, creative director, motion graphics designer, and animator based in Los Angeles and the founder of NicePaperToys, the first papertoy social network. For anyone who hasn’t heard of papertoys, think of it as a mash-up of origami and designer toys, a viral Internet art movement that used to be limited to designers and illustrators.

Papertoy Monsters is a fabulous book created by Brian (Workman, January 2011) and it’s the first papertoy book made especially for kids (though crafters, toy collectors, techies, and gamers of all ages will enjoy it, too). With 50 die-cut templates, all you have to do is pop them out, fold, and glue. There’s no cutting. Everything is prefolded. Simple as that.

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My newly released toy is inspired by Japanese Kaiju sofubi. It is a solid cast (no articulation) resin figure titled Useless Toy. The first, ultra rare edition, comes in all white with a high gloss coating. What makes this edition extra, super duper special is that going forward, all toys designed as USELESS FRIEND will have a white edition. It is the only colour that will be a constant.

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If you’ve ever looked at a gummy bear and mentally dissected it to its bare bones and insides, you obviously share Jason Freeny’s vision. He’s been there too and he’s figured it all out for us less imaginative folks. This skeletal amping is quite a pattern — he’s done it to cartoon characters too. In case you were wondering, this 8.25” tall x 4.5” wide x 4” deep see-through monstrosity of a gummy bear has 41 bones in it. And you shouldn’t try to eat any one of them.

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Courtesy of Oeuf online, you can get yourself a plump knitted pigeon, if the ones outside on the street just aren’t enough for you. These little toys are actually pretty cute and lovable, quite different from the scavengers that like to invade your sidewalk lunch.

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Who would have thought that teddy bears would fall to the zombie holocaust too? British illustrator Phillip Blackman clearly did, making these bloody, slobbering brain-thirsty zombies called Undead Teds out of these cute little things formerly known as teddy bears. Always knew soft toys were kind of terrifying. Now we have proof.

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Self-taught photographer Franck Allais messes around with the relative size of objects in his shots, taking them out of context to get a chuckle out of people. The ones of kiddy toys dwarfing their human playmates have a blend of textures and color that’s plain beautful.

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For his The Real Toy Story photography series, German artist Michael Wolf — who we’ve previously appreciated — visited toy factories in China to document the mass production of heaps of toys ranging from SpongeBob SquarePants to Mickey Mouse, as well as the factory workers behind the assembly, finer paintwork, and the such. Surprisingly, there are very few grumpy faces we spotted in there.

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Toronto-based artist Amy Swartz’s Pests series began in 2011 and has expanded to include thousands of miniature sculptures that fuse insects and toys into one darkly fascinating collection. There’s something meticulously beautiful about the project, especially more monstrous creations like the werewolf butterfly, which the Swartz says ‘explores the idea of obsession — not only in the practice of art, but also in humanity’s perceived control over nature, life, and death’.

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Fireworks in your home without burning the furniture down. Hell, why not? A Japanese company, Sega Toys — the same manufacturers of the bathtub planetarium that transforms your bathroom into a starry universe — has created the In Home Fireworks Theater to bring the sight and sound of fireworks to anywhere you like indoors. Actually, it sounds like a light projector with speakers. Still, it sounds pretty darn awesome.

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Unhappy faces. Workers asleep under benches. The gauzy memories of too much lead in the paint. Interestingly, despite the close-up nature of the work, none of the employees (mostly women) shown in this photographic log of a Chinese toy factory assembly line wear glasses. Or smiles. Okay, one or two have half-smiles.

And there are piles and piles of generic, mostly-unidentifiable toys in various states of entropy. Which makes you think of how these products, designed for the amusement of the very young, are somehow a reflection of the mature lives in charge of assembly. According to the article, 70% of the world’s toys are manufactured in China. These photographs create a somewhat chilling juxtaposition between the Chinese workers and the little bundles of disposable joy they’re paid pennies per hour (at a guess) to assemble. 

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Between 2005-2007, as part of Custom Con, Hasbro Inc and Marvel Inc (along with creators Geneva, Joshua Izzo and Bruce Ross) collaborated on creating a line of action figures based on the Marvel Comics story of The League of Marvels Volume 1, Volume 2: Rise of the Skull, and Volume 3: Denouncement set in 1890.

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