LEGO Ideas 21365 Love Birds: Seeing the birds for the tree [Review]
LEGO Ideas contests let builders bring their own spin to a selected theme, and fan designer Micah Longden entered a number of challenges in the process of growing into the love-themed submission that turned into 21365 Love Birds. It’s botanicals-adjacent with a twist, and some lovely new colors in plumage and foliage. Let’s take quick look at what we can do with it.
LEGO Ideas 21365 Love Birds | 750 Pieces | Available now | US $49.99 | CAN $64.99 | UK £44.99
The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
The Build
The box has the now-standard adult branding, with a sand green bottom border and a full shot of the set on the front. The back adds a close-up showing how to pose the birds in heart shape (a requirement added by a design manager walking by!), along with a schematic telling you what a tree looks like to a robot with wireframe vision. Inside are 7 paper bags and one modest instruction booklet. The “build together” feature is only available with the LEGO Builder app; unlike some sets, if you tried to work it out yourself, you’d be hard pressed to do so until you get to the final bags with the two identical love birds.
There are a few new pieces and one new color in this set: warm pink. In the designer round table, they mentioned that with no minifigures in the set, there were a few more “frames” – basically the budget for recolors, new molds, and new prints – anything that would take up a storage bin in a LEGO factory – available. The corner curved slope and 1×3 curved slope (shown here next to a 1×2 curved slope + 1×1 tile to contrast the available lines) are great pieces to have available; the 1×3 slope is a very subtle difference, and the corner slope fills a gap with otherwise very different and imperfect solutions.
The new color is Warm Pink, used as one of the layered shades on the love birds – it’s the 2×6 wedge plate in the middle layer of the wing below (and don’t miss the coral hearts used for some extra love). There was a push to get parts in it out, and that also made a few more frames available – 8 recolors introduced in this set alone. The push also meant that other sets were coming with parts in the new color, which also made more parts available to use in this set. It’s not always a virtuous cycle, though, because other unreleased sets might be planning to use a piece, but then change their minds – and suddenly the set you’re working on needs another frame in your budget.
The build is largely layered reddish brown and dark browns, over various supporting structures with plenty of studs-not-on-top supports. Most Ideas sets have several easter eggs, references, or tributes to the fan designer, and one is visible here as internal pieces reference the colors of the Brick Bank, Micah’s favorite modular building. It’s an attractive build and convincingly organic, although every once in a while there are some distracting colors that come through, like the medium nougat hinge bricks visible at the bottom middle here.
Micah’s initials are also patterned in the bark, although as was demonstrated on the model shown at the roundtable, it’s easy to get that detail slightly wrong. The roundtable also included some amusing commentary about pairing this set with LEGO Ideas 21349 Tuxedo Cat, including how easy it is to take the head off one of the birds (easy) and what’s be needed to put it into one of the cat’s paws (maybe just a jumper). The foliage is one of the more notable changes from the original fan design, and was much discussed and voted on by the LEGO for Adults design team, with the original lavender deemed too cold with the overall color palette. The spring yellowish green leaves aren’t new, but work very nicely here, and with nearly 80 of them this is by far the biggest source for them.
Alternate Build
There’s been some talk about the tree from this set being able to drop in to a minfigure scale scene, so I took a quick shot at seeing what that looks like. Here some Forestmen are using the tree as cover to ambush some Lion Knights.
I think there’s definitely potential there. Things took a turn though when one of the birds came back, and it doesn’t seem to have been in a very loving mood… might need to take those heart tiles off the wings!
Final Thoughts
One obvious question with a set like this is, what about swapping the leaves, and did LEGO consider including a change of season, like with the Bonsai or Treehouse sets. And yes it was considered, but LEGO has gotten feedback that this sort of feature is not always a favorite – it’s hard to make it easy especially without eating up a lot of parts – and that it also makes it really hard to show the full value of the set on the box. And at $50 for 750 pieces, this set is excellent value. Whether you want the new warm pink, the foliage, or the brown shades, there are loads of useful pieces on top of a versatile final model. We think you’ll … love it.
LEGO Ideas 21365 Love Birds | 750 Pieces | Available now | US $49.99 | CAN $64.99 | UK £44.99
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