I remember doing a test fold of this delightful model nearly a year back, but never got around to blogging about it… so I grabbed a trusty 50cm square of yellow/brown Origami-shop Sandwich paper and got gridding:

With just a 16 grid and some strategically placed diagonals, and a breathtaking “all at once” collapse, the general morphology of the model sorts itself out pretty quickly.

Finessing the details and pose are fun and fairly straight-forward, and before long the character of this simple but adorable little trash compactor begins to emanate from the otherwise inanimate paper from whence it sprang. I do not however know the author of this work – I only have diagrams with the author in Chinese (王翌宸) – thank you, whoever you are for such a stunning design.

Box pleating is so useful for these sort of models, and with relatively large grids quite complex models can be wrangled. I have folded Brian Chan’s WALL-E masterpiece back in 2011, and looking back I reckon I could do that model better now also – might re-visit it some day.

I loved the movie, loved this little plucky machine also so am very happy with the result. My only quibble with this model is that it does not have a back – there is plenty of paper, perhaps I will re-work it a little so at least the body is a solid cube – the illusion is broken when you look behind him.