There’s a very specific joy in building something you already love, and I got a hefty dose of it putting this one together. I will die on the hill that the rescue scene near the end of Shrek 2, Fairy Godmother belting out “Holding Out for a Hero” while Shrek legs it across the kingdom to stop Prince Charming getting his kiss, is one of the genuinely great moments in animated film history. Ridiculous, sincere, perfectly soundtracked, all at once. Shrek turns 25 this year, which is a genuinely alarming sentence to type, and LEGO have marked the occasion with a proper adult-collector set rather than a cheap cash-in, which already puts it ahead of most licensed anniversary weirdness before you’ve cracked a single bag open.
Set 72423 gets you 1,403 pieces, a posable brick-built Shrek and Donkey, and a minifigure-scale Puss in Boots, all perched on a swamp base complete with a “Beware Ogre!” sign, sunflowers, and, fittingly, an onion. It’s £109.99 in the UK, and aimed squarely at the 18+ display crowd, and it looks it. This isn’t a toy you hand to a six year old to pull apart and throw at the cat, it’s a shelf piece for people who fancy Fiona more as an ogre than a human and aren’t scared to admit it.
The build itself is a genuine pleasure from start to finish. It’s well paced, never dragging in the way some big licensed sets can when you’re fifty pages deep into what feels like the same grey brick over and over, and the instructions are some of the clearest I’ve put together in a while. Crystal clear, step by step, no head-scratching moments where you’re squinting at a diagram wondering if LEGO have quietly invented a new dimension. My one bit of practical advice: get yourself some decent lighting for a few of the darker sections. There aren’t many of them, thankfully, just the odd cluster of similarly-shaded dark green and brown pieces where a dim room will have you second-guessing which nub goes where, but when they crop up they crop up hard.
Posability is where you have to manage your expectations a bit, and I think that’s true of pretty much any brick-built character model like this. You’re not getting an action figure. Shrek’s hand has a bit of movement in it, enough for a wave or a shrug, and Donkey’s mouth can be posed open or shut depending on whether you want him mid-quip or just stood quietly, but beyond that both figures are largely locked into their display stance. That’s the trade-off you make for the sculpting quality on show here, and it is properly good sculpting. The shaping, the colour blocking, the way Shrek’s bulk is conveyed without the whole thing looking like a green brick wearing a face, it all works far better than it has any right to.
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What really won me over were the small touches you don’t clock until you’re deep into the build. There’s food tucked away inside Shrek’s stomach, a lovely bit of hidden detail that serves no purpose whatsoever beyond making you grin when you spot it, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that separates a good licensed set from a great one. It’s not showing off, it’s not on the box art, it’s just there for the people who go looking. Puss in Boots, being a standard minifigure rather than a sculpted piece, feels like a slightly different animal sitting next to his brick-built companions, scale-wise he’s doing his own thing, but he’s a nice inclusion for anyone building a wider Shrek shelf and I’d rather have him in the box than not.
Worth a specific shout as well: there isn’t a single sticker anywhere on this set. Every bit of detailing, from Shrek’s face to the swamp signage, is printed straight onto the piece. That’s a small thing for some builders and a genuinely big deal for others, anyone with limited dexterity, a shaky hand, or just a well-founded hatred of getting stickers on at a slight angle and having to live with it forever will appreciate this far more than the box blurb lets on. More licensed sets should do this as standard.
Is it perfect? Not quite, I’d have liked a little more movement in the limbs, but very little at this price point in this hobby is going to give endless possibilities. This limited articulation will bug people who want to actually play with their purchase rather than just display it, and £110 is a proper outlay for what is, ultimately, a very fancy shelf ornament. But as a shelf ornament it’s a brilliant one: well paced to build, beautifully detailed, stuffed with little touches that reward a close look, and accessible to builders who’d normally get filtered out by fiddly stickers. This is a love letter to the film built one brick at a time, and it mostly sticks the landing, no stickers required.
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