The unique look of 21361 Gizmo’s face presented the LEGO Ideas design team with a number of hurdles to overcome when it came to creating the movie Mogwai.
The LEGO Ideas theme will be welcoming its 69th set next month, when 21361 Gizmo drops on October 1, 2025. The 1,125-piece creation is based on a combination of both a winning fan-designed submission from Fuma Terai and Joe Dante’s classic 1984 movie, Gremlins.
In a recent roundtable interview with Brick Fanatics and other LEGO fan media, the design team behind 21361 Gizmo talked about the development of the Mogwai movie model and the challenges of nailing one key aspect of the LEGO Ideas set, the character’s face.
“We knew looking at reference images, that deep eyelids were very important to the expression,” explained LEGO Ideas designer Chris McVeigh. “The one challenge we had right out of the gate was, okay, we know we can use this element but how do we angle it in a way that makes it go over the eye, to close the eyelid a little bit, and just to make sure that we didn’t have this super-wide eye expression.
“It was one of the things that Nathan Davis, who is a graphic designer here, but also a brilliant builder, and I spit-balled very early on, to try and get that shaping right, and to find a way to build the eyelids so that they sort of collapsed towards each other, like real eyelids.”
“Nathan worked on the eyes too,” added LEGO Ideas Creative Lead Jordan David Scott. “We don’t really have anything bigger that’s kind of, you know, rounded. You would have to go much bigger and then maybe it gets a bit too creepy.
“We found for creatures, that is one of the most important things to get right. If you get it even slightly wrong, it looks horrible and it looks really off. There were a lot of prototypes of [Gizmo] where it was just a black shield, just dead eyes, no highlights. So Nathan worked a lot on the eyes to get just the right amount of detail, where it's not overly realistic.”
With the look of 21361 Gizmo’s eyelids and eyes in place, the LEGO Ideas team then tackled the rest of the furry Gremlin’s face, which also required some specific design approaches.
“There were a couple of challenges along the way, in terms of what parts we could use and how we could use them,” said Chris, “and one of the last details that I changed was actually the nose itself. I had been looking for a way to get that sort of cored-out nostril effect and I had tried many different parts, but it's a very tight and small area, and I just felt like I couldn't crack it.
“There originally were cheese slopes for the nose and at one point I had used a bracket with an ingot on it to shape the nose. I was spit-balling with François [Zapf], who designed the Tudor Corner, and I went back to my desk to give it one last try, and I figured out a way to make the nose buildable. It was really one of the last details that I changed on the model, and I think it really helped. I think the other noses were okay, but there's just something about that cored-out nostril detail that adds to the whole cuteness of the face.”
“I think we had 22 variations,” said Jordan. “Gizmo has this kind of little pill in his mouth, but that’s a very organic shape. If you distil that into LEGO bricks, this is the most accurate and I think it still conveys that happy smile. Changing expressions would obviously have had gaps, so I think we nailed the right expression.”
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