Under the Sea... Not Quite.
Set #41050 Ariel’s Amazing Treasures: When I first heard about Disney Princess’ I was excited. The LEGO Disney offerings have been largely very successful and include a load of interesting builds and characters in Minifigure form. Prince of Persia, The Lone Ranger, Cars, Toy Story and now Star Wars has the Disney logo on their boxes. It’s been an impressive offering, and for a line dedicated to the princesses of Disney movies I was quite hopeful. These sets do not disappoint and I’m going to explain why with this, my first official review of a LEGO Disney Princess set.
Box/Instructions
Box: LEGO Friends gave us purple coloured boxes that were designed specifically for the Mini-Doll line. With Disney Princess they gave us boxes with the same curved design in pink. This is the smallest set from 2014 and it does an excellent job of showcasing this set. The box will really attract your attention. The sparkly patented Disney magic print on the box is really impressive as well.
Instructions: The manual works perfectly, the steps are easy to follow and in the back we have your customary cross-promotional images. There are some Friends images and a set checklist that showcases all of the mini-dolls from the first wave. It’s a very nicely designed and constructed manual, as all LEGO manuals tend to be.
Parts
Pink and purple sloped pieces are the name of the game here, along with gold cheese wedges and some nice pearlescent gold gates. A clam, a transparent purple starfish and some nice underwater grass pieces are what you’ll find in this set, very useful for parts here.
Minifigures
Ariel: A brand new mini-doll print, the first one to have a seashell bikini, and it’s going to be seen many times over. The lower torso is a mermaid tail that is hinged, I like that, it does mean Ariel has a tough time balancing when not attached to anything, however her tail will work great when playing with Mini-Dolls. Her hair is a brand new piece with a brilliant red colour matching the colour of the character from the animation.
She’s a great Mini-Doll. She also comes with her friend Flounder, a new animal sculpt that doesn’t include the silly holes to attach bows too, which is great because bows on him would just look stupid. The printing on Flounder looks brilliant too.
The build
This is a very minimal build for the set. It’s not much of an interesting model as you build it, it looks like something out of the Atlantis theme, or perhaps one of the similar underwater themes. There are no tricky steps to the build, and considering how many pieces are in the set I am slightly disappointed in it.
The completed model
You’ve got three sections of an undersea cavern, a big golden gate that leads into Ariel’s grotto (not accurate to the movie) and a small pedestal with a treasure chest on it and a little piece of scenery with underwater plants and a starfish.
Honestly I understand how LEGO needs to make some decent play value out of their sets, however when you consider the scene they are attempting to replicate here Ariel’s grotto just doesn’t look very nice. The gate makes no sense since she had a small cavern with a rock for the opening and the mini models of undersea plants and the spot where the treasure chest is resting just doesn’t work nicely.
It would have been much better to include a small rocky area that had a music box build, a few knives and forks in a brick built candelabra and maybe some other treasures. Because the contents of the treasure box… A musical sheet printed tiles, a pair of golden binoculars and a blue jewel do not match anything Ariel had in the movie.
It’s terribly unfortunate that the LEGO designers chose not to include a better model representing the film better than this one.
Overall opinion
Mildly recommended if you’re looking for Ariel and Flounder, or a bunch of nice parts for MOCs. The model is fairly weak and doesn’t actually fit the movie scene being replicated here, certainly not like the larger set with Ariel and Eric. The Undersea Palace set from 2015 looks like a much better set to represent the movie compared to this one also.
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