Set #70824 Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi: The LEGO Movie 2 The Second Part has come and gone, well not gone, but many of us have watched it and experienced it so the spoilers a review might include shouldn’t be a huge problem. That being said… there are definitely going to be spoilers in set reviews when discussing some elements of the sets. Fortunately this set doesn’t feature any huge spoilers, which is great. And now onto the rest of the review.

Box/Instructions

Box: The original LEGO Movie boxes were a dark blue in base colour with imagery on the front showing a film strip and was fairly generic compared to some of the boxes we’ve gotten since. The LEGO Movie 2 carries the colouring forward taking dark blue and making it dark purple to match the Systar System which is a huge element from the film. The design is pretty impressive and the images on the front and back of the box showcase the set very well, if I only had one complaint is that they do not include the names of all of the characters included in the set on top, only Minifigures are named on the top the Mini-Dolls included in this set are not named anywhere on this box.

Instructions: The manual for this set is very well put together with steps for building each of the buildable characters easily placed inside for you to follow along with. All of these are easy to follow along with and construct, it is interesting to note that there are two separate builds for Queen Watevra as there are two distinct versions of the characters you can build in this set.

Parts

There are a lot of parts in this set in the yellow, purple, maroon/rose and teal colour wheel from LEGO. You also get some nice printed eyeballs for Banarnar and printed facial bricks for Queen Watevra. Everything about this sets parts is really great, which is good because the set is a bit pricy for the parts actually included in the set.

Minifigures

Lucy: Wildstyle hasn’t changed much since 2014. She’s still dressed the same and has similar facial expressions to her old Master Builder Minifigure, but the print has seen some wear and tear, just as the character has, and her expressions are showing how unhappy she is to be a prisoner in the Systar System. As evidenced by the included handcuffs for an accessory. It is nice to see variants appearing though once more for Wildstyle.

Susan: This Mini-Doll represents a new character who may be the Queen’s personal Handmaiden. Or something similar, she is a Mini-Doll and includes a tray with drinks for her accessories. She’s using the lower dress element first seen on Cinderella and other Disney Princesses back in the day, as well as a nice looking blonde hair piece and a very fetching cape element. Susan overall looks great and it is awesome to see a LEGO System set with both Minifigures and Mini-Dolls included, proving that they can coexist.

Sweet Mayhem: This character is unique and doesn’t re-use a lot of past elements from other Mini-Doll lines. Her hairpiece is brand new with some nice pigtails on either side and in a very fetching sparkly blue colour. She includes a new bracket element for her space armour and a very interesting sculpted helmet piece. She also gets to carry a Space Blaster, her legs and torso sport a brand new print design for her all white with pink/purple highlights colour scheme, the parts themselves are standard Mini-Doll torso elements, but the colours and print are very unique.

The same for her head which features a very unique colour compared to other Mini-Dolls showing the versatility of the elements when not constrained to matching typical human proportions and colouring. Overall a very great looking character and one of the stand outs from the new batch introduced in this Theme.

The build

Bag #1: This is a first for me, in a sense, we haven’t seen this type of build since the first LEGO Movie where you get to construct buildable characters in each numbered bag. Instead of Micro Managers however here you get to build the character known as Banarnar while Lucy helps.

This build is not entirely accurate to how we saw him on screen, his banana peel seems to be permanently shut here compared to how often we saw it open on-screen in the movie so the build is fairly simple. A giant yellow banana with eyes. It’s not terribly difficult to make either, but it does have one glaring flaw, we’ll get to that in the next section of the review though.

Bag #2: Here it is folks, the first LEGO set to feature both Minifigures and Minidolls, two of them specifically help construct their queen into her Pony Form. This model is fairly straightforward to construct and features enough steps to make a very convincing looking brick-built pony.

These parts can also be re-built into the alternative form of Queen Watevra which is not a creature or animal, but a giant blob of bricks. It’s nice to see them giving this here as the build is interesting enough I suppose, but it is also included in the larger Creative Box style set that lets you build up a ton of Queen Watevra’s alternate forms.

The completed model

Banarnar: This is a simple looking model which is fairly nice and a buildable character, so in essence everything in this set is a character in the movie be it Minifigure, Mini-Doll or Brick Built Creature. The trouble with Banarnar is that his model does not translate very well into physical form. His legs are too thin and he likes to topple over far too easily.

Perhaps this was intentional since he’s always falling over in the movie to make the queen laugh, but when you put it together and put it up on a shelf next to your other LEGO Movie collections once you finish playing with it having it tumbling down to the floor isn’t exactly the best of ideas. Or very fun. Other than this problem though the model is still really good and does a good job looking like the version in the film.

Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi: This pony form is unique to this set, it cannot be built in the Creative Box though I’m certain that set includes all the pieces that you could make it if you wanted, but the stand she’s sitting on probably wouldn’t be there. I’ll know more once I pick up the larger creative box so I can see what they did there.

For this small cheaper set it’s nice to get the main body she uses in the movie and her pony form which are both equally cute and share printed elements for the eyes and mouth. There’s open and closed eyes to simulate different expressions and distinctive looking mouth prints for some great options. Overall a very creative pair of models that can be rearranged into whatever you want, don’t be constrained, use your imagination with these parts and try to make your own funny or crazy design for Queen Watevra.

Overall opinion

This is a really nifty set. It stands to reason that it’ll be very popular as it includes some really great characters and models from the sequel in a very nicely priced set. A few extra parts might have helped with the parts-to-price ratio admittedly I could have seen Banarnar having the loose peel that we see in the movie with more versatile elements. Unfortunately the 1x2 brick with side-studs used in BrickHeadz sets only comes in Grey so making them yellow to build up the peel for the character probably would have cost more.

Still I think it’s a decent little set for 25$ and features some great character selection. Strongly Recommended.

OVERALL RATING

A low-priced set with a large number of characters, that nonetheless comes out as a bit of a disappointment.

BUILDING EXPERIENCE

This set's build is fairly simple, all things considered. The brick-built characters go together quickly yet satisfyingly, and not much is included in the way of scenery. However, some variety is added thanks to instructions being included for two versions of Queen Watevra—the horse form she originally appears in in the movie, and the more amorphous mass of bricks that she tends to shapeshift into between forms. A slight disappointment is that neither build uses all of the available parts—her horse form understandably omits the extra facial features but her "pile of bricks" form comes frustratingly close, only leaving out the two Bright Red inverted slopes.

PARTS

As parts packs go, this set is nothing too exceptional. The main attraction is the assortment of printed eye and mouth bricks used for Queen Watevra and Banarnar, which can be combined in various ways. Two different pairs of eyes are shared between both versions of the character, while two mouth styles are included for the horse form, one for the pile of bricks form, and a final one for Banarnar. The fact that each horse mouth is only printed on one side is another slight disappointment. The new crown mold for the queen is also a decent part, but you could do more with the five included in the larger Build Whatever Box than with the one included in this set.

PLAYABILITY

Apart from rebuilding Queen Watevra and changing the facial expressions of her and Banarnar, the set offers very little in the way of playability. The queen's platform rotates and that's about it. The queen's "pile of bricks" form doesn't even fit on the rotating platform.

VALUE FOR MONEY

The value for money for this set is not the best, with only 115 pieces for around $20. However, the set still has some draws that make it more attractive, mainly its largish assortment of characters. It is the cheapest way to get the very charismatic character of Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi (in a unique form, at that). Banarnar, despite using relatively few unique parts, looks comical and distinctive. The Queen's handmaiden Susan is also unique to this set despite having a relatively small role. And Sweet Mayhem and Lucy round it out, with the former having a facial expression that is shared only with the larger Movie Maker set. Ultimately this set will provide you with the most value if you are interested in assembling a large number of characters from The Lego Movie 2 without shelling out for the larger and more expensive sets.