Every yr, LEGO releases a number of themed units to have fun the Lunar New Year. In 2021 (Year of the Ox), the set was a Spring Festival in a standard backyard. In 2024 (Year of the Dragon), the set was the LEGO Auspicious Dragon, made to appear to be a bronze statue on a stand.
LEGO Spring Festival Trotting Lantern
2025 is the Year of the Snake, and LEGO is releasing three units to commemorate the event. The first is a Lucky Cat. The second is Good Fortune, a pastiche of Chinese iconography that features a ornamental fan, a calligraphy pen and scroll, and golden ingots. The third, most luxurious set, which we constructed and photographed for this evaluation, is a duplicate of a standard trotting lantern. Like all LEGO builds with this form of intentional focus, the lantern is far more than it seems at first look.
We ought to take a second, nonetheless, to understand its exterior. This mannequin is detailed to the purpose of extravagance. Every inch of this set has one thing ornamental hooked up to it – from the purple lanterns that cling from the buttresses, to the gold detailing on the partitions’ borders, to the partitions themselves, which depict open sky and clouds framed by rocks.
Building the lantern is an train in layering. First you construct the essential, core lantern. Then, you construct the small print to overlay on high of the construct. And lastly, you construct the small print to layer on high of these particulars. There’s an anticipatory pleasure to this course of – to appreciate that you just’re not fairly performed, and there is nonetheless much more element to pile on high of all of it. The now-retired LEGO Carousel is the final set that gave me this sense of enjoyment, of questioning what elaborate, ornamental factor got here subsequent.
Real trotting lanterns, which date again to the Han Dynasty, have been powered by oil lamps. The mild projected silhouettes of paper cutouts in opposition to the edges of the lamp. And in the meantime, the generated warmth turned propellers, which in flip rotated the silhouettes.
The LEGO designers put in a mechanism to approximate this impact, albeit in a restricted method. An upright rod triggers a lightweight brick, which makes the underside of the lantern glow with yellow mild. The mild brick shines via a transparent piece with black-lined picture on it, inflicting the picture to challenge on the lantern’s facet. If you flip the aforementioned rod, the picture will rotate across the lantern.
The packaging advertises that you would be able to challenge the picture from the lantern onto a wall or different floor. When I attempted doing this, the picture did challenge, nevertheless it was blurry and troublesome to discern. I’m undecided why LEGO would promote this means as a promoting level – not solely as a result of it is ineffective, but in addition as a result of the unique trotting lantern was by no means designed to do that anyway.
What’s extra spectacular is the higher tier of the lantern, which opens as much as reveal three dioramas: a meals stall that serves dumplings, a decorations stall, and a shadow puppet theater. That these dioramas will not be obvious at first look, however are as an alternative nestled collectively like a Polly Pocket throughout the lantern’s cylinder, is a little bit of visible foolery that depends on the typical individual’s poor notion of depth and house. The set comes with 5 minifigures, one in all which has a snake costume on his head. The equipment embrace a plate of dumplings, a purple envelope, a shadow puppet, and units of chopsticks.
Whether you purchase this set in all probability relies on which gimmick you are shopping for it for. If you are shopping for it for the lit-up, rotating mechanical impact, it’s neither spectacular sufficient nor visually clear sufficient to justify the worth. But in the event you’re searching for one thing aesthetically beautiful – that conceals some spectacular minifigure-scaled surroundings inside an much more impressively detailed container – this set is a superb celebration of the Lunar New Year. It’s rated for anybody aged 9 and up, nevertheless it appears to be like like an 18+ construct based mostly on its cumulative finish end result.
For extra, take a look at our picks for the general greatest LEGO units, in addition to the perfect Marvel LEGO units and the most costly LEGO units.
Kevin Wong is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in LEGO. He’s additionally been revealed in Complex, Engadget, Gamespot, Kotaku, and extra. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinjameswong.
