Atlantis miniatures

[Big Bene]

For starters they are being sold as "Wargs" not "wolves".

Nope



Well, as for wargs, these were invented by Tolkien, who described them as particulary nasty wolfes. One time in The Hobbit, Gandalf(?) even identifies them as wargs (not wolves) by the fact that their dead bodies had vanished over night. Seems to imply that they can't be told apard by physical features.
Personally, though I generally like the LotR films better than the books, I didn't like Jackson's mutant hyena wargs at all.
But all this aside, I'm definitely talking wolves here. Not wargs.

Now let's go for wolves:

It's fantasy, and even regular animals adapted from this string of reality need to fit into styles of companies selling them.
That being said, I don't want regular looking wolves as mounts for any kind of race.
Our wolves stand for pride and sovereignty if you ask me.
It's just plain weird to see a wolf mounted by a goblin, the more realistic it looks the weirder.

Well, but these Atlantis Miniatures are not about a cartoonish or otherwise "special" corporate style. They're all "let's do them as decent and natural as possible". Even the Greenskins look like something that could actually exist in the real world, if there would be chances left to discover a hithero unknown humanoid species. Well, not really, but much more so than the ones of other companies.
Let's take an animal with no counterpart in the real world, a pure fantasy crature like a dragon. "Realism" in this case clearly refers to the style of the art, not to any similarity to the "real thing".
You can depict a dragon in a "realistic" way (art-wise), or in a cartoonish way (among others).
Look at these two takes on dragons, both of them by disney:


Now, which one is more convincing? Wich one is more impressive?
Which one would you like to have as a miniature (to really use it, not just as a novelity)?

Got what I mean?

Just have a look at the hounds:

These are naturalistic in style. They look convincing. They are in fact a bit "enhanced" in some details for a more dramatic buid and stance. But
And obviousely, this is what the sculptors intended. Are they any less fitting for a fantasy world?
So, what about the wolves?

[knightkrawler]

The sculpting of these Atlantis animals is ... not to my liking. At all.
That wolf looks like a lioness with the snout elongated just a bit.

Now, which one is more convincing? Wich one is more impressive?

I wasn't talking about comparisons at all.
I said the sculpting has to fit the style.
The old GW wolves shown by Goblin-King fit the bill because they looked good under their whimsical riders.
Is that Eliot? He fits into his world I'm sure. A world for 5-year old girls, probably.
I want to puke even imagining trying to mod a Darksword miniature (any one, really) as a GW old-style wolfrider.
Cohesiveness in the macrocosmic style is the key, not self-reliant microcosmic style.

I do get what you mean, though.
I don't like the Atlantis style at all (and the impossible money they ask), but it's cohesive.

[Big Bene]

I wasn't talking about comparisons at all.

Neither did I. I meant they just don't look convincing, expecially when compared to the other Atlantis minis (OK, that's a comparsion, but you know what I mean). And yes, looking a bit more like real world wolves would have made them more convincing.There's no problem making them look more menacing, "larger than life". I speak about giving them a "naked" face, a lion's mane, an extremely furry body, but much less hair on their thin legs. It's not about them not looking like biological accurate real world wolves. It's about them looking like something completely different, just not ringing the "wolf" bell in my head.

Having said this, the bulky, cartoony GW wolves are more consistent. But still, I don't like them.


Weellll...
The first wolves I got were some of these:

Though they were labeled as the stuff of legends, I was not very happy with the wolves even back then (the orcs were fine).
They were just furballs with legs and some sort of head, from which the upper and lower jaws just pointed out with no organic conjunction with the head. If you look at a real world wolf or dog, the jaws are part of the skull, just the elongation of bones that lie to a good part inside the skull (A). The great Nick Lund however just sticked them to the skull with no anatomic joint (B).

This problem has never really been solved. There were much better wolves, over the years, but I had grown to look at the problematic features with perhaps an over-sensitive eye. Even the best models have problems when the mouth is opened in growling or howling.

The gamzone one depicted in Goblin King's post is a really outstanding good example, doing it almost right: Actually, I'm a huge fan of Gamezone - I also love their zombie wolves, of which I own a pack for my WH army - these of course avoid the abovementioned problem by having mostly bare skulls.
Also look at the one in the background of this photo:

Our wolves stand for pride and sovereignty if you ask me.
A wolf is just too "noble" to be mounted by an Orc or Goblin. And too small/scrawny.

I know and like the human" tradition of the "noble wolf". I'm a huge fan of Elfquest .
It's also very much connected with the subculture of would-be-Native-Americans, hippies, truckers and rockers, as well as with nazis (Wolfsschanze etc).
On the other hand, there's the even older and richer tradition of the big bad wolf, the wolf as an enemy of mankind and a (lesser) personification of evil.
To me, both traditions work within their contexts. I don't care they contradict each other, as they are just this -human traditions. Two different narratives.

A real wolf is just a wolf. A predatory and social animal, almost extinct in Western Europe for around 200 years, but coming back since the 80ies. Tamed and bred into dogs in the mesolithicum.
He doesn't care what human features you want to see in him, be it "bad" and "nasty" or "noble" and "prideful".

Tokien uses the "big bad wolf" archetype, when he lets wolves (not only wargs) team up with goblins and orcs. GW does the same thing with thier wolfriders. D&D and The Dark Eye list wolves in their monster manuals as dangerous creatures.
So it's OK for me when a miniature manufactor uses them the same way.

Is that Eliot? He fits into his world I'm sure. A world for 5-year old girls, probably.

Yes, it's Elliot. The other one is Vermithrax from Dragonslayer, one of the most underrated movies.
If Elliot fits into his world is a matter of opinion. I didn't like the movie, even as a child I felt it insulted my intelligence.

[Anderas]

Elliot was so strange it was one few films that I actually turned off. As small child. Comic and real world didn't fit with each other. Didn't care about the story at all once I had seen that comic figure in the middle of a real film.

So as an overall statement, I understand Knightkrawler.

However, I buy minis if I like them. Feeling. I can't explain why I like them or not. Is that wrong?
I buy them only in a more or less fitting size because I want to use them all together. I didn't like my Kromlech Meganobs because it was just 50% bigger than even the GW Meganob. I like the Zombicide Heroes a lot because they fit so well with all the rest and by the way they are Filmstars you can play.

But then I don't like Heroquest Skeletons and not the Alchemist table just because the one has a too big head and the other let the heroes look like ten years old children. What they probably are.

So what's my conclusion? Don't know really. I buy models if my feeling likes them and my purse allows me to. May be interesting to dive deep to find out what and why I like, but I realistically feel that would change my liking, and it would be sad not to like models anymore that I painted in hours over hours.

Or not?