Canti

From the minds at Gainax (the studio that brought you Neon Genesis Evangelion) comes Canti, one of the main characters in the hit anime FLCL.

Canti is a robot who literally springs out of the head of Naota, the protagonist of FLCL. The story is too complicated to explain here, but you can read a summary here.

The Canti toy is extremely articulated. It is made entirely of plastic and has 17 points of articulation, including a variant hand.

Canti’s head has a translucent red “screen” that looks great.

Unfortunately, the figure is now without flaws. First, It is very top heavy. Don’t try half of those poses you see on the back of the package, because they’re not going to work. You can get some cool poses, but you have to spend a lot of time balancing him. He is also quite the shelf diver, so you will probably end up posing him sitting down.

The paint and molding is another issue for this figure. The plastic has a ton of little bumps and imperfections, and the paint application is just a little sloppy. Look at the yellow vents on the chest or the shoulder design.

As is typical of Kaiyodo/Xebec toys, Canti has some pretty funky joints. I don’t understand why they do this, but the right hip joint is different than the left joint. This can cause some confusion in posing.

Kanchi was imported into the US in 2002 by Diamond Comics Distributors, so he can be found at local comic book stores and of course, ebay.