Vintage 1978 Barone Bendable Poseable Dog Toy Figure 🧸 Perrine Story Nippon Animation Anime Collectible

Remember Bendable Dog Toys From Nippon Animation? 🐕 Vintage Bendable Poseable Dog Toy Figure, Nippon Animation

Size: 5 1/2" x 3" ~ Spread eagle.

Here's a little bendable fellow from 1978, from Nippon Animation: Barone, Perrine's dog from their series Perrine Monogatari, in soft rubber over a bendable wire frame. Every leg bends, so he'll stretch out flat, sit up, do a handstand or strike a pose.

Nippon Animation made cartoons, not toys, so a piece like this was most likely a promotional or licensed item for the show, which was a big hit.

My kids and I had a great time posing him for the photos. He'll stand up on his own, but you do have to balance him.

Like everything I keep, he lives in the dark at under 40% relative humidity and a steady 72°F, climate controlled, so any age he shows, he had before he came to me.

🎨 Nippon Animation

Nippon Animation was founded in Tokyo on June 3, 1975, and it became famous for turning classic Western novels into anime in its World Masterpiece Theater series: Rascal the Raccoon, Anne of Green Gables, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tales of Little Women, A Dog of Flanders and more, plus Maya the Bee and Chibi Maruko-chan, which became a huge hit in Japan and around the world. Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata were among the people who worked there.

🐾 Perrine and Her Dog Barone

Perrine Monogatari, "The Story of Perrine", ran on Japanese TV every week of 1978, from January 1 to December 31, as part of the World Masterpiece Theater. It came from Hector Malot's 1893 French novel En Famille, about an orphaned girl named Perrine who travels all the way to northern France to find the grandfather she has never met. Here's the fun part: Barone isn't in the book at all. The studio added him, and he wasn't even in the show's original planning document, but he became the little sidekick everybody remembers, trotting along beside Perrine and her donkey, Palikare.

The show was a hit in Italy too, where it went on the air in September 1980 as Peline Story, and Barone turned up on records, plush toys, coin banks and figures for years afterward. Nippon Animation's earlier hit, A Dog of Flanders (1975), had its own famous dog, Patrasche, a big old working dog drawn from St. Bernards. Barone, three years later, is the little orange one with the floppy ears.

He'd look great on a shelf with other anime pieces, or on a desk where you can keep changing his pose. Nobody's making 1978 Barone figures anymore, and once these are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.