Nintendoannounced this week thatAnimal Crossing is getting the Lego treatment. The11-second trailer released on the company’s Twitter pageshows popular critter companions like Tom Nook and Isabelle watching aLegorepresentation of the game’s flying white-and-red present rise up into the air, lifted by a blue balloon. As it goes, the clouds part, revealing the two crucial logos: Lego andAnimal Crossing.
This is a very smart collaboration, a better match even than Lego partnering withSonicorMario. While those Lego sets let users express their creativity by building Sonic and Mario levels, both series are, at heart, about running and jumping. Animal Crossing is about design, especially afterNew Horizons, which allowed you to customize an entire island however you wanted. You could do other things, like fish and fraternize, but the main verbs revolved around making stuff. It’s a perfect alignment with what Lego represents.
So, my beef with the Animal Crossing collab isn’t philosophical. This is a logical extension of both brands. No, my problem is entirely aesthetic. The minifigs are too damn tall.
In the Animal Crossing games, the characters' heads are the biggest part of their bodies, with Bob the Tomato-style plump proportions. Their torsos are thinner, but longer. And their legs are short and stubby — the smallest part of their body. But, the nature of Lego minifigs evens out the height differential between each of these parts. The animals' legs are just as long as their torso, and taller than their heads. This makes Tom Nook look like a full grown man with a raccoon head. It doesn’t look right.
I understand why Lego went in this direction. If they had made the legs closer to their video game proportions, they would have ended up with figures that were exclusively child-sized. This is typically reserved for a small number of figures in a line, usually characters who are children. Anakin Skywalker’s Phantom Menace minifig had these proportions, with an adult-sized head, torso, and stubby child-sized legs. The same went for some iterations of Harry Potter in the early movie tie-in sets.
There are drawbacks to this design. Full-sized Lego minifigs can bend both legs. you may pose them to look like they’re running, balancing on one foot, doing the splits, or sitting behind the wheel of a car. The smaller minifigs didn’t have this flexibility. Their legs couldn’t bend at all. If you wanted it to look like Anakin was sitting in his pod racer, you could swap his legs out for adult-sized legs, or stand him up and hope that it looked close enough. Nintendo and Lego probably don’t want the entirety of the Animal Crossing minifigs to be that limited.
But, the result is that the proportions are off for the figures shown in the trailer. Tom Nook shouldn’t have a grown man’s proportions. Isabelle shouldn’t have full-length legs. These are chibi characters. There may not be a good solution. But it just looks wrong.
