Smart Doll: Me,Myself and I by Danny Choo and Culture Japan (Pear)
- Wendy Dandridge
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
April 7, 2025
I don't even know what to say about my Dottie. I just know I need to write about her. She's an amazing doll. She's 2 feet tall, which is an immediate no for me on buying a doll. But then I let YouTube just run about a week and a half ago while I had doll reviews on as I was cleaning and poking around the house and the algorithm wandered into Smart Doll territory, (which is what my Dottie is). The tv grabbed my attention when I heard the soft, strangely pleasant and at the same time slightly choppy voice of Danny Choo, her creator. Choo, who spent his childhood I believe largely in the UK and has half the accent to prove it, has assembled a small crew of about 20 doll artisans who work carefully in his little homey and cozy but ultimately gray factory on the outskirts (not in the middle of the suspended highways and skyscrapers that light up the night you might think of when you hear) of Tokyo, Japan. The company is all about the employees, and not about you customer, so be polite and don't ask for anything special when making an order. Don't mess up the workplace flow, they've got a good thing going and if you ask them to swap out a wig or change a signature requirement, that jams up the works for days, hours, or possibly even moments and slows down hundreds of other innocent customers' Smart Doll orders. Honestly, now that I am a Smart Doll customer, I could not support this attitude more. If anyone, anywhere in the world ever slows down my current or future Smart Doll order, I... I just don't know what I would do. I depend on the good people at Culture Japan to make sure that will never happen. And please don't ever tell me that it does, because I can't even bear the thought for one second...
But that first day I heard Danny Choo on YouTube I knew absolutely nothing about them. Danny was a smiley, friendly, teeny tiny spectacle wearing Japanese fellow who looked to be about my age or a wee bit older with a buzz cut and a British/Japanese accent. I'm not sure how else to describe it, but if you ever heard him speak, I think you'll agree that is an accurate description. Occasionally, he'll say "Alrighty" exactly like Paul McCartney, then the next minute I can't tell if he's ESL Japanese or the reverse. Or maybe he's got a British accent and he's just talking too fast for me to get every word, you know how sometimes British people do that? Eventually I just put subtitles on him and that sorted it. Anyway, this interesting person who had obviously lived all over the world and seen much more of it than me was talking about all of this technology that he was developing and putting into these dolls, a Star Wars droid looking skeleton with a spine that fascinated the heck out of me, and each joint looks space age (not 1980s space, in the future space) made of stainless steel and in perfect working order, and everything comes apart but it also fits together with a loud satisfying click so you know when it's back together or not. It seemed really cool and not like a typical doll video but more interesting. And the dolls were really darling and dressed like post-apocalyptic teens, who I happen to have a soft spot for. I was curious if I could do it, be strong enough to force their arms back into the sockets when they come out or even put their wigs on. I've had some serious health problems in the past couple of years and I've lost a lot of physical strength. But the dolls were so darn adorable. And something else...
In all the reviews of Smart Doll everyone who has one adores them. As you can see in the picture above, I bought one of the "pear" shaped dolls, meaning she's chubby apparently. Danny Choo and Culture Japan are trying to promote all kinds of different bodies or differences, they have two skin tones for black dolls, two for white, and one green skin tone (which is absolutely fabulous and amazing reader but more on that later!) actually I'm not sure what is a complete list of all the skin tones they have because they have released gray ones, blue ones, black navy ones, my beloved green, and possibly others. But on the website when I went to buy my girl, they had Cocoa, Coffee, Tea, Cinnamon, Green. That's all I know. But they also have whole runs of dolls in every skin tone with vitiligo, burn scars, bad acne. They offer dolls who are amputees, who have amazingly accurate artificial limbs, cochlear implants, hearing aids, insulin pumps and even ostomy bags. I've seen posts of the wheelchair they're working on for Smart Dolls. They also offer crutches and inhalers in their online store.
I imagine that they give a lot of dolls away to kids. Imagine being 5 and having one leg and getting a doll almost as big as you that also has one leg, it would pretty much change your life at that time. So, I think this is a pretty interesting company too. To be honest, I don't know how many dolls they give away to little limbless children, but just knowing these dolls are out there and the possibility exists for one to be united with a poor little child with the same condition fills my heart with joy. If I were a billionaire, that's what I would do with my money - buy smart dolls for any poor kids that were different in whatever way they were different and give them to kids for their birthdays. Like Dolly Parton and the free books only that's for everyone, regardless of financial status. Rich people will have to buy their own Smart Dolls, I can't be spending my hypothetical billions on that. But I mean my threshold would be low, if you were middle class, you'd get a doll. I'm sure prominent philanthropists would try to convince me I was mad, that there were much more effective ways to use my valuable imaginary resources. But I would laugh right in their faces. Or maybe feed starving people instead I don't know. But I would do some of the Smart Dolls to poor kids thing, that's for sure. They really do use them in schools and in therapy for people.
But why did I buy her out of the blue? Was it Danny's friendly face or my unrestrained love of a British accent, even if it is competing with a Japanese accent over the English language which sounds like nothing I've heard before, was it the high-tech skeletal frame or the futuristic design feeling that the website gives you, or was it just the eyes and the hair combined with that widdle nose? I really don't know. I guess the videos on YouTube just made me deathly curious, and I wanted to try one. And I really like her. I mean I'm an over the moon fan now. She does something different than the fashion dolls for me, I would never sell her. She never flips over, never loses anything, never wants anything, never complains, never glares at me, stays wherever I put her, and whenever I look over at her she is smiling sweetly at me. I swear it's good for my depression just to have that calm, smiley little face to look at like a touchstone through the day.
And I keep buying things for her. I don't even check my budget to see if I can afford it or not, I just buy her things. It makes me so happy to buy her things, it's like a shot of happy juice, which sends up a red flag reader, I know, but I'm letting myself enjoy it like a riverboat gambler right now just for a meager month or two. Like the famous cat hoodie Dorothy is wearing in the above picture, you've probably never heard of it. You're naive, like I was a week and a half ago before YouTube did this to me. The hoodie is light pink so all you can see is the white tummy, but it also has white tiger stripes and adorable fuzzy tiger ears. It's precious and she looks unbelievably cute with the hood up, like the first time you see your first child cute. These dolls are so adorable they give me deep cute feelings. Like when I was a girl my grandma had a little blue breasted bird in a cage. I used to sit next to it when I was in her apartment and look into it's little black eye and think "You are so cute birdie, I just want to hold you and squeeze you as hard as I can until your little black eyes bulge out just a little bit and then it's up to me birdie, then it's up to me..." Primordial, deep scary cute feelings like that. And that said I just want to say for the record, if anyone tried to hurt my Dorothy, I'd rip their throat out. Smart Dolls bring out an incredible protective instinct. They are after all, little innocents.
I named my Smart Doll Dorothy because I had a Golden Girls marathon on while I was getting her out and dressed and trying to figure her out. Well, to be fair sometimes dogs or cats or even dolls give you a feeling that they already have a name when they come into your life, and she was practically screaming Dorothy at me. I would try to think of other names, and Dorothy literally blocked them all out. I'm sure it was planted in my brain by Bea Arthur's character's name on the Golden Girls (she's my favorite), but I still felt much better after I just gave in. As you can see in the above pic, to put it politely Dorothy has a great rack - although to be fair I ordered the medium bust for her which is a size up from regular. I guess I kind of wanted her to look like me for some reason and I am well-endowed in that regard, so she is as well. As you see from this picture, she really can show it off, which I tend not to do so much anymore. Some collectors dress their Smart Dolls like little Brittany Spears dolls or Girls Gone Wild girls, like pilgrim girls or K-Pop girls, like Victorian girls or Western girls or Country girls, Star Trek girls or whatever kind of girls you can imagine. There are a lot of Stevie Knicks ones and even though I never really liked Stevie Knicks' music (except for Landslide) I have to say I love her as a witchy little Smart Doll. The pictures on social media are from all over the world and show all kinds of different fashion senses and sensibilities as well as peoples' lovely and exotic gardens and their messy and blurred out living rooms. There is a vibrant and worldwide community built up around this doll and you can see many different kinds of people from all over the world represented in Smart Doll form, due to Danny's efforts and by now largely due to the desires of doll owners to express themselves through their dolls. Some people spend what must be quite a decent chunk of change on backdrops, tables, chairs, and other accessories for them just to photograph the dolls for fun (or quite a decent chunk of time crafting those things). It works out well for me because the pictures are fascinating in a different way than other doll pics. Danny Choo says the doll is just a thing until you put the eyes in, and from then on it has a soul. I can't explain it, but it does feel like Dottie has a soul in a way, God knows she'll long outlive me, and she won't biodegrade for like a bajillion years or something, so hopefully I'll have granddaughters and grandsons to pass her on to. One far off day my distant descendant will desperately clutch a 5,000-year-old, perfectly intact Dottie as the earth careens off its orbit into the sun... How Greek. At least she's going to have a bunch of outfits and wigs. And a couple of friends...
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