Ensky Figures, Nesting Dolls and Tilting Models

This is the part of the Ensky collection that does not need assembling at all. A tilting figure rocks back to upright when you nudge it; a kokeshi nesting set opens into five smaller characters; a stacking game asks you to balance a dozen moulded pieces without taking the tower down. Everything here is finished out of the box and sized for a desk rather than a display cabinet.

They are toys in the honest sense, and we print and mould them in Japan to the same high-quality standard as our paper and puzzle lines. The licence is official on every item, which is why the Totoro grey is the right grey and the Pokémon red is the right red. Ghibli, Pokémon, Kirby and Sanrio carry this line; the Japanese kokeshi shapes in particular sell to people who have never watched the film and simply like the object.

Sizes are small — most pieces stand between four and twelve centimetres — so the information that matters is in the entry: what the set contains, how many parts, and the height of the tallest. A nesting set containing five dolls reads very differently from a single figure at the same price, and the photographs show both the closed and open states wherever we have them.

As a gift they work where a 1000-piece jigsaw would not: no table, no hours, nothing to lose under a sofa. Fans of a show get a character they recognise at a glance; a child gets something sturdy worth playing with; an office desk gets the one ornament nobody asks about twice. Where a set is a balance game rather than an ornament, we say so, because the two get bought for very different reasons.

The latest moulds usually celebrate an anniversary or a film returning to cinemas, and they go out of production quietly. Questions about scale, materials and what is in the box are the ones we are asked most and they are answered below; anything more personal can go to our inbox. The excitement in this line is in the design being right at ten centimetres, which is harder than it looks.

If you came to Ensky through the puzzles, this is the page that surprises people. A shelf of paper theater kits and a 1000-piece jigsaw are both evenings of work; a kokeshi set featuring five characters is a thing you simply own. We print both because the same Japanese licence covers both, and because the people who buy our toys in Japan have always bought them together. The latest moulds celebrate the same anniversaries as the latest puzzle designs, they are official in exactly the same way, and the high-quality finish is the one thing we will not trade for a lower price. Fans who keep a desk tidy buy one; fans playing the balance games buy three and look for the fourth.