LEGO Ideas Otters embodies the animal's cutest feature

LEGO Ideas 21366 Floating Sea Otters is cute enough at first glance, but there's even more adorableness to uncover.

21366 Floating Sea Otters goes big on realism, moving away from the more cartoonish style of Maximilian Lambrecht's original design in the newly revealed LEGO Ideas model. That includes referencing elements of the animal's behaviour, with the addition of an otter pup lying on its mother's belly, just like it would in the wild.

One of the cutest mannerisms from sea otters, brought to the attention of the internet in no small way by Star Wars actor Ewan McGregor in this viral clip, is that they hold hands so that they don't lose each other while floating around the waves. That adorable behaviour is recreated in the LEGO set, so long as you pick up two copies of 21366 Floating Sea Otters.

"The model is made up of four different modules," explained LEGO Designer Chris McVeigh, who worked on the Ideas set, during a LEGO Fan Media roundtable. "There's a centre module with the mother, then the front, the foreground and the background, and then the otter pup.

"The foreground and the background are both separate assemblies, which you can actually pull off. If you have another otter, you can put them together and they can touch hands.

"One of the easiest things to do is to make them actually look like they're holding hands, by just pulling the arm out and rotating it 180 degrees. They can rest up against the other hand."

Being a characteristic so heavily associated with the sea otter, it was apparently something that was on Chris and the rest of the design team's from the very beginning.

"We knew people would want it," he continued, "We saw that when we announced that we were doing the project, people had said they were really interested in making sure that happened. We wanted to make sure that there was a way that this could be done, and we also wanted to treat it more like an Easter egg than an actual feature."

The technique of pairing up two copies of the set is not included in the building instructions, but the LEGO Group has included a picture of it in action in the marketing materials for 21366 Floating Sea Otters, as you can see above.

LEGO Ideas 21366 Floating Sea Otters is available to pre-order now, retailing for £99.99 / $119.99 / €109.99 from March 1, 2026.

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