The Harry Potter world is filled with tragic characters. The title character is an orphan who lived in a closet, and it gets even more Dickensian from there. But Professor Snape is the most tragic asshole that graced both the books and movies.
Snape is a fascinating character, and ends up being one of my favorite. He has the type of character arc that takes him from “guy you love you hate” to “object of supreme sympathy.” It doesn’t hurt that he was portrayed by Alan Rickman, who imbued Snape with all the loathsome greasiness the character needed in order to be a perpetual thorn in Harry’s magical buttocks. Perpetually pissed, with a withering look of contempt for anybody and everybody who was breathing the same air he breathed, it was an excellent performance from an excellent actor.
With the initial three kids done and out of the way, we’ve needed an antagonist, and Snape is as antagonistic as it gets. I’ve been loking forward to Snape ever since he was announced, mainly because Alan Rickman doesn’t get enough action figure love. Bruce Willis walked into my house the other day, plucked this figure off my desk and threw him out a window. That was a pretty weird day.
Snape does an excellent job at doing exactly what a Snape figure needs to do. He doesn’t overdo it, he doesn’t underdo it. He does it. His all-black attire is well-sculpted and screen accurate. He doesn’t come with a robe, but he looks menacing and teachorial enough without it. Teachorial is a brand new word I just made up that means “Bruce Willis taught me a lesson once and I learned it well.”
The neck gets a nice range of up and down motion. The shoulders are typical Figuarts shoulders that give him a wide range of motion, from two-handed clasping his wand to spreading them wide, as if to say “gimme a hug, anybody.” Because Snape needs a hug like nobody else has ever needed a hug.
The torso articulation is restricted to his waist, but that maintains the sculpt of his shirt. He gets enough twist and bend that you won’t miss it too much. The hips and knees give a decent range. The robe flaps are pliable enough that he’s not impeded at all. All in all the articulation works very well and allows you to get him in all the poses you ordinarily expect from a Figuarts figure.
He has two face-plates that swap easily. The normal one is Full on grumpy Snape, which is dead on to Alan Rickman. The second one is an angrier, teeth-bared sculpt. These types of expressions always seems slightly off to me. It looks like him, but it’s also a weird thing to try to get across in a static pose. It’s not bad but I prefer the stoic head over this one. That said, it is effective in getting across a heightened level of contempt and anger if you need Snape to be extra prickly. The face-printing is excellent. It suffers under macro, like all face-printing does, but it looks like the technique is being refined more and more as time wears on.
Snape comes with three sets of hands: Fists, open and wand-gripping hands. The hands are all ball-jointed and pop on and off with no trouble. They all come with sculpted sleeve bits so you don’t sacrifice motion there, although truthfully the range of motion is still slightly limited by the nature of the design.
Compared to the kids, who got books and robes and assorted things, Snape’s accessories are rather bare-boned, as he only comes with a wand. I don’t know what else he could have come with outside of some potion bottles, so I guess the wand is a good enough inclusion.
Overall, Snape is a simple figure, but a necessary and well done one. Out of all the teachers, Snape is the most toyetic, so I couldn’t see a harry Potter figure collection without him.
