Everyone remembers the toy that defined their childhood. For millions of people around the world, it was Playmobil. The simple figures are made of plastic, stand just three inches tall, and have no noses to speak of. But open the packaging and you can get lost in a medievals fairy kingdom, explore the Wild West, or orchestrate an epic battle between pirates and knights.
Those characters come out of a factory in Malta, which produces more than 100 million figures each year. Alastair Philip Wiper takes you behind the scenes to the factory floor in a fascinating series that reveals how these tiny arms, legs, and faces come to life. "There’s always something interesting to me when you can take a recognizable figure and look at where that came from and where it was made," he says.
Wiper was into Legos as a kid, but his two kids love Playmobil. He was visiting his sister in Malta in September and decided to show them where their beloved toys come from. It was a good excuse to make some pictures while on holiday and indulge his obsession with factories and scientific facilities. “Forget about photography,” he says. “Just to be [in these places] and see the way things happen behind the scenes is fascinating.”
A global oil shortage spawned the development of Playmobil over four decades ago. German company Brandstätter Group made toy cars and telephoness, and wanted a product that wouldn’t require so much plastic. Production began in Germany in 1974, and moved two years later to a humble factory on Malta, a Mediterranean island just south of Sicily. Today, the factory has produced around 2.9 billion figures.
The Malta locations, one of five Playmobil factories, produces the figurines (other factories make the accessories that accompany the figurines). As his girlfriend and their kids checked out the Playmobil FunPark, Wiper took a three-hour tour with a guide more than happy to show him around a factory that covers almost half a million square feet. The factory runs around the clock, its 1,050 employees cranking out three million Playmobil figures each week (outpacing human births by about half a million). It can be hard to keep up with the demand: the company says its first run of Martin Luther holding a bible and quill completely sold out its 34,000 pieces in a record 72 hours.
Wiper photographed the process from start to finish. His favorite part was the gargantuan machine he calls "the octopus.” It has some 29 miles of tubes that weave above the factory floor. They suck colorful plastic granules from storage bins and deposit them into injection molding machines. “I love to find things that are beautiful that aren’t supposed to be beautiful,” Wiper says of the machine. "They’re designed to be purely practical and serve a purpose, but they end up looking just amazing.”
The injection molding machines weigh several tons apiece and are stationed throughout the factory. They press the granules into a mold up to 572 degrees Fahrenheit, making a distinct hissing sound with each press and release. There are seven different molds for the inner part, body, arms, legs, head, and hair. Some multi-colored parts are pressed in two stages; the head, for instance, first gets injected with an inner brown part that forms the eyes and mouth. “That face is never going to rub off,” Wiper says.
Some parts, like clothing, get printed on fully automated printing machines as well as smaller semi-automatic ones. Pink silicone printing heads stamp up to 2.25 million parts a day. A machine assembles the various parts together. And finally, workers package the figurines by hand.
Wiper captured the entire process using his Nikon D810. He set it on a tripods and used a wireless shutter release, as he always does. He had to move quickly, but he’s photographed a lot of factories and is used to that. “You only have a limited amount of time to see as much as possible and [the factories] are usually quite big,” he says. “You have to decide what is interesting and what you want to spend time getting the right shot of and what you need to skip over.”
The images pull back the curtain on a childhood toy in a way that's strangely humorous. It’s jarring to see disembodied arms and legs that are so recognizable alongside cold, industrial machinery. But that's what draws Wiper to these factories. He loves the weirdness of encountering the ordinary in a new way. “Playmobil is very everyday,” he says, “but this part of it is not something you see every day.”
