LEGO reveals its Avatar minifigures once looked very different, and very weird

The LEGO Avatar team says the plan wasn’t always to bring back the longer minifigure legs – and the Na’vi and human characters once looked very different to their finished versions.

First introduced in the Toy Story sets in 2010, establishing a height difference between Buzz Lightyear and Woody and Jessie, the longer minifigure legs seemed to open up a world of possibilities for the LEGO Group. Which other themes and characters would implement these extended limbs? Would Chewbacca finally get the recognition he deserves?

In the end, those legs (and their corresponding arms) were seemingly locked to the Toy Story theme, and disappeared from production almost as quickly as they arrived. And despite more potential use cases emerging in the years since – Groot from The Guardians of the Galaxy springs to mind – the LEGO Group has resisted resurrecting the elements for more than a decade. Until 2022, that is.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (on Earth rather than Pandora), it won’t have escaped your notice that there’s a new Avatar film in cinemas right now. The LEGO Group has hooked its wagon to the return of James Cameron’s ambitious franchise with two waves of sets in four months, the second of which is due to arrive on shelves on January 1.

The first batch of sets – based on the original 2009 movie – are already available, and they’ve heralded the return of the longer minifigure legs after 12 long years. They’re implemented specifically for the blue-skinned Na’vi, communicating the difference in height between the Pandora natives and their human colonisers. But that solution wasn’t the first the LEGO Group landed on.

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“We actually tried out a lot of different possibilities,” LEGO designer Niels Mølgård Frederiksen tells Brick Fanatics and other LEGO Fan Media. “We tried to go with normal minifigures both for our humans and our avatars and Na’vi characters. I think we even tried also with minifigures for the Na’vi and avatars and microfigures for the humans, which didn’t really work.”

While the size difference between microfigures and minifigures is just a little too pronounced compared to the on-screen characters (can you imagine the sets designed around microfigures?), the LEGO Avatar designers knew they needed to do something to represent their unequal stature: regular minifigures for both the Na’vi and humans apparently wasn’t good enough.

“One of the things that is very clear or emphasised in the movie is this height difference between the Na’vi and avatars and the humans,” Frederiksen continues. “We also knew that there will be some tools and [equipment] like the AMP suit that also put that into focus. It was important for us to have the size difference. And we therefore landed on going with these longer legs, and then a torso also with longer arms to make it all fit.”

The LEGO Avatar: The Way of Water sets go a step further still, throwing regular and mid-sized minifigure legs into the mix to represent the younger members of Jake Sully’s clan. You can check out all five new sets, along with the five currently-available LEGO Avatar sets, in the table below.

LEGO set	Price	Pieces	Release date
40554 Jake Sully & his Avatar	£17.99 / $19.99 / €19.99	246	October 1, 2022
75571 Neytiri & Thanator vs. AMP Suit Quaritch	£39.99 / $44.99 / €44.99	560	October 1, 2022
75572 Jake & Neytiri’s First Banshee Flight	£49.99 / $59.99 / €54.99	572	October 1, 2022
75573 Floating Mountains: Site 26 & RDA Samson	£89.99 / $99.99 / €99.99	887	October 1, 2022
75574 Toruk Makto & Tree of Souls	£129.99 / $149.99 / €149.99	1,212	October 1, 2022
75575 Ilu Discovery	£19.99 / $24.99 / €24.99	179	January 1, 2023
75576 Skimwing Adventure	£29.99 / $34.99 / €34.99	259	January 1, 2023
75577 Mako Submarine	£49.99 / $59.99 / €54.99	553	January 1, 2023
75578 Metkayina Reef Home	£69.99 / $79.99 / €79.99	528	January 1, 2023
75579 Payakan the Tulkun & Crabsuit	£89.99 / $99.99 / €99.99	761	January 1, 2023

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