LEGO has just announced the company’s newest IP: Dreamzzz.
LEGO Dreamzzz, as implied by the name, is set in the dream world and encourages children (and adults) to flex their creativity. The story plays out in a TV series, as well as through comic-inspired instructions for 10 LEGO sets releasing later this year. In an exclusive interview with Gizmodo Australia, Cerim Manovi, creative lead and design director at the LEGO Group, took us through the roughly four-year design process, the unique approach Lego Dreamzzz takes to instructions, and why there will always be stickers.
What is LEGO Dreamzzz?
There have been teasers for Dreamzzz appearing for weeks now, with various Ninjago characters telling their friends about their dreams (which just so happened to feature Dreamzzz characters).
The story goes that siblings Mateo and Izzy go into the Dream World at night and wield a superpower called Dream Crafting, which allows them to create stuff and focus their creativity. Dream Crafting uses a kind of special sand which is stored in hour glasses. Using it is a double-edged sword, because the more sand you use, the less time you have in the dream. If that sounds like a video game mechanic to you, then you’d be right.
“Right now, there’s [no game] that will immediately come out. But… I mean, it has all the right components. It has the characters, it has the energy bar, and all these different places, all the different play functions. It’s definitely something we will explore in the future,” Manovi said.
Mateo’s primary character trait is that he loves to draw, and has a creation called Z Blob, which he draws comics about in his waking life and summons to the dream world through Dream Crafting. He’s also quite quiet and introverted.
Izzy, his sister, is one year younger, and is more bubbly and outspoken. Her thing is that she loves plushies and anime, and she summons Bunchu, which is the main character from her favourite anime.
There are also nightmare creatures, like The Grimm Keepers, which have prison bellies to keep captives, and a Nightmare King who wants to steal the creativity of children.
Other characters include Zoey, who is a brave musician. Cooper is a brilliant engineer who lacks imagination. Logan is a gamer and a jock with a lot of self confidence. Mr Oz is the kids’ high school science teacher by day/a genius space-faring chimpanzee at night. And Mrs Castillo is your typical kindly item merchant NPC.
What makes LEGO Dreamzzz special?
That all sounds like a fun plot for a TV series, but one problem LEGO IP sometimes has is weaving the more involved narratives into the play sets beyond just ‘this thing looks like the thing from the show’.
That was the big challenge for the design team.
“How do we translate this into physical play? And it’s basically quite simple: It’s two components that we did here. One is the story-led building instruction and the other one is like a choose your own adventure,” Manovi said.
So, in each instruction booklet, there is a “light comic book”, with a bit of a story woven through.
An example Manovi gave was that Mateo is asleep in bed, then kids build him and he’s in the dream world and they’re helping him by building what he needs. It’s not a whole story, but it gives the builder a narrative purpose for the activity with the story being more active in the instructions compared to, say, the building facts sprinkled through LEGO Architecture instructions.
The choose-your-own-adventure comes in when the builder is 80 per cent done, and then they get to choose how to finish. The instructions have two options for how to finish the build.
“Internally we call this guided creativity. So, it helps to show the kids the possibility of like, ‘Hey, you can build more, you know? This is our take on it. Take these parts and build something else. Take your brick bin and activate that. Go on, be creative.’ And what we saw while showing this to kids in tests and in-home testing is that it works as a catalyst. At first, some kids choose one, some choose the other one, but actually, most of the kids built something else on it after just three weeks, which is super awesome,” he told Gizmodo Australia.
LEGO Dreamzzz has been in development since 2019, and thus was subjected to all the challenges of collaborating on toys and a story with a large team while everyone worked from home. With such a big multimedia IP, the challenge is always working out where to start. But, according to Manovi, the answer was doing everything at the same time.
“We work very collaboratively. So, especially in the beginning, we work with story writers, designers and marketers to see what is it? What do we do? So, then everybody gets on this roll. I love to create the concepts as well, and the concept phase is always in the beginning where you write stories and build models, draw things, conceptualise it. It’s a lot like the chicken and the egg. The writers will come in with an idea like a turtle caravan and then it just springboards,” he said.
Who is LEGO Dreamzzz for?
Children, mostly. While a decade ago Lego seemed to be going in a more gendered direction for its toys (Friends for girls, Ninjago and City for boys), the company and its designers have been focussing more on play pattern expectations for each set (nurturing, fighting, rescuing, etc) rather than gender. But it was really important to the team that Dreamzzz appealed equally to both boys and girls across the play pattern spectrum.
“It’s more about the passion point than the gender, I would say, that gives you the entrance. Because if you love anime like, or you can see yourself in Izzy, it doesn’t matter who you are basically. So I always use this [analogy]: We build a house with different doors, and one is golden, one is silver, one is wood, one is a sliding door, and you choose which door you want to enter, but then in the house we’re all together,” he said.
“Because the cool thing in the story is they’re normal kids, they have normal problems in school, and you see their daily lives as well. And then they’re heroes at nighttime, where they bond as a team. But it’s not the ‘chosen one’. It’s always about the team effort.
“In the beginning when we went to kids, I was taught girls and boys. I worked on Bionicle, I worked on all these boys-focused things, I worked four years on Ninjago. This was one of the coolest experiences break down everything – let’s put them both in the room and see how they talk and react, and how they bounce off each other. So that’s what we’re trying to do here.”
Of course, though, gender is not so easily cut and dried, there is no one way for boys, girls and non-binary kids to act.
“Like everything, it’s a spectrum. But you can define the ends of the spectrum. And not even that, but you can see that you will always have somebody chipping into the other side, because boys are also interested in nurturing. They might call it training. Girls are also interested in conflict, but they might not want to go bash on, they want to outsmart the enemy. So it’s really hard to predict, but you somehow need to define some points there in order to not be totally lost. I mean, otherwise the possibilities are infinite and then you end up doing nothing for no one,” he added.
Adults can also enjoy Dreamzzz, but the building difficulty and story is more aimed at kids 8-12.
What will the sets be like?
Although the LEGO Dreamzzz TV series launches on May 15, there’s a while to wait before the sets are released in August. There will be 10 sets as part of the collection, ranging from small, affordable “treat” sets (like the brick-built Bunchu), and going up to large 1000+ piece sets, such as the tree house.
If you’ve ever been within 5 metres of an adult fan of Lego, you’ve probably heard them complain about stickers in Lego sets and how they’re so much less precise than printing. The good news is that all the eyes are printed in Dreamzzz, because Manovi thinks it’s important to get the expressions just right. The bad news is that there are still lots of stickers.
“There are stickers, there’s prints, and there are stickers. I mean, one thing is of course the possibilities that you have with stickers. I’m a big sticker guy. I’m sorry for that. Like, my designers are sometimes ‘don’t put stickers there!’ But you have to put stickers on there, because kids love stickers,” he said.
Episode one of LEGO Dreamzzz premieres at 7 pm on May 15.