Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Mushroomland Dolls Review

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Fairytales come alive with Mushroomland Dolls. Mushroomland sells cute dolls and characters from the stories by Natasha Guruleva. Natasha writes and illustrates fairy-tales and fables where many characters are mushrooms. Together with their human friend, they explore different realms of nature – Flower Kingdom, Butterfly Empire, Underground Maze, Big Pond and so on. For the illustrations she uses photography placing the characters that she makes herself into the natural environment– in the forest, ponds and meadows of Long Island. The basic thread of her stories holds together beads-ideas about recognizing and appreciating life around us, life under our feet, treating everybody as equal and seeing ourselves as a part of the unity.

She also single-handedly created a feature film, based on her first story “Adventures of Little Herbert in Mushroom Land.” It’s made in an old-fashioned style of stop-frame animation. She built over 50 characters out of fabrics and wires and designed the sets in the woods (Forest Town, Mushroom House). She photographed every movement of those characters, then “photoshopped” each frame to get rid of supporting wires and make the mouths move. She also edited (digitally) the entire movie. Now it’s airing at the various local TV networks as a series of episodes, and the next animated adventure “On the Wings of Butterflies” is in a process of creation. She not only wanted to write the fairytales she wanted to bring them to life through her dolls. The dolls are unique. They are kind of like stuffed animals, I love that they are characters and go on adventures in the fairytales, now you can take those same characters on new adventures wherever you go.

I like the way mushrooms look and I used to collect mushroom items. So, when I had the opportunity to review a Mushroomland Doll I was really excited. We received the Russell character. I thought it was really cute. Russell is a fun and magical guy. The Mushroomland dolls are homemade and I think that gives them all extra character and no Mushroomland doll is exactly the same. You can tell that a lot of love went in them. The company is really nice as well. Natasha’s nephew decided that Noah would like a bigger one, so we received a larger size of the Russell doll. I thought it was really sweet and warmed my heart. Mushroomland dolls would have been great for my Grandma Diana, because she collected and made dolls. I thought when I opened the box that it looked like something she would make. So, Mushroomland Dolls are great for anyone not just children.

For more information please visit Mushroomland’s website HERE

Thank you to Mushroomland for sending me a Russell Doll to try out.

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