LEGO NINJAGO: Kai’s Monstrous Journey is a new collection of shorts that will see the red ninja telling Wyldfyre the story of one of his darkest chapters. The team behind the new animation shares some insights into its creation and teases what fans can expect.
Three new LEGO NINJAGO shorts are coming to the LEGO website for children starting on July 31 – “Forest of Teeth”, “The Ruins” and “Queen of the Monsters”. Kai’s Monstrous Journey will be supported by additional storytelling in LEGO Magazine and in the LEGO Play app (through the characters’ ‘social media’ profiles).
The team behind the latest NINJAGO animation explained to Blocks what this new story is all about and some of the thinking behind it. It continues to explore the missing piece of Kai’s story that was first explored in the Monstrosity shorts, which were pitched at a slightly older age than the ongoing NINJAGO: Dragons Rising series.
“When we set this off as a project, it was never intended to be a piece of content that told the story from A to B,” said Senior Franchise Manager Tommy Kalmar Hørgaard. “We wanted to create something so rich in its experience that it would both cater to additional storytelling on our digital channels and in other formats, but also engage, from a comms point of view, could there be more stories tied to Kai’s journey? What happens in the content is not the end.”
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“The Monstrosity shorts you will have seen are beautifully dark and very menacing,” said LEGO Creative Producer Kate Chedciala. “We were tasked with telling a story of this land for our kids’ platforms as well, maybe a little bit lighter in tone, bringing out humour from Wyldfyre
“The story is told in flashback, think Princess Bride style. Our present day NINJAGO conversations between Wyldfyre and Kai are where the humour lands. Our first teaser is leading with the kind of comedy element of that banter.”
“There’s a dual timeline aspect here, where it’s Kai actually recounting an adventure to WyldFyre,” said story writer and animation industry veteran Matt Danner. “And using that as a tool was really helpful, because we could have Kai actually speak to his feelings and speak to the some of the more complex themes in a simple way.
“While that’s all happening, we a have Wyldfyre to comment on it along the way. When things start getting heavy, we can ratchet up the lightness a little bit. That’s where we tried to add a little bit of comedy and you’ll see there’s some funny [moments] even in the Land of Mmonsters, there’s a funny character or two, but nothing that is not natural to the order of things.”
Target audience
Unexpectedly, a question from Blocks about the thinking behind targeting a younger audience sparks a lengthy discussion about what that means in practice.
“I was not personally involved in the decision to explore Land of Monsters and at a younger age, but I can share my thoughts about it,” says Executive Producer Doc Wyatt. “We created the Land of Monsters for aged up, content where everything was jeopardy and everything was going to eat you – and we love that.
“But the thing is, [and] I can’t speak for anyone else on this call, but as a kid, I loved monsters and as an adult, I love monsters still. As a kid, Halloween was my favourite holiday, I would watch the most intense monster movie my parents would let me watch. When my dad rented Alien on VHS, he wouldn’t let me watch it, so I snuck out of bed and listened at the door as he watched Alien. So I think there’s something that’s so appealing about monsters.
“Monsters have this latitude of really aging up and raising the stakes and having so much jeopardy and danger and fear, and that’s thrilling, but we can’t forget that five-year-old Doc Wyatt loved monsters too. Let monsters be for everybody. We have the latitude in the LEGO format to tell that wide range of stories, because NINJAGO isn’t an age group, it’s a world. I think whoever initially said, ‘hey, what about aging down the Land of Monsters?’ was thinking inclusively and I think that’s exciting.”
“Let’s make it clear that aging down doesn’t mean that it’s dumbing down,” added Executive Producer Kevin Burke. “It’s thrilling. It’s exciting. It’s just for a broader audience than Monstrosity. We’re equally excited about it. It wasn’t that we took Monstrosity and thought, ‘let’s make this less exciting.’ It was just like, ‘let’s make this a slightly different tone.’ This is relatively new to us, too. NINJAGO’s fanbase is getting older and younger, and we need to address all of that, and everyone hould be able to share in some of these great stories.”
“From my perspective, for me, I wasn’t aging anything down, because I was just coming in fresh,” said Matt. “But for me, I felt like we were creating a little bit more of a bridge between the age gap. We wanted younger kids that love NINJAGO to be able to experience this and then age into the older content as well. This is sort of a way to just kind of bring everybody together.”
“Just to add to the mix of this, if you look at the main content that is the main driver of this bold attempt to create something that is really, really aspirational for the older audience, [that is] much more edgier,” said Tommy. “When we were into, ‘how do we actually create this tapestry of different sort of iterations or expansions of the very same content?’ I’ve had so many conversations with the folks on this channel and in this team, to say, ‘how do we translate that to that audience?’
“And I think probably, instead of using the term ‘aging down,’ it’s probably just about fitting for the channel. Yes, the examples that we just saw were also for the very youngest ones. You know, the comic, is more simple on that Wyldfyre story. But take the example with Ameet, we also had to fit that for their format.
“[This] thing has really been an exercise of saying, let’s keep the essence of Monstrosity, the story DNA intact and make sure we make the proper translation aesthetically, because some creature production is pretty edgy. It’s probably the most edgy stuff we’ve ever done, so you can’t really copy and paste that to any format.
“It’s much more about adaptability – that’s why we had Doc, Kevin on board to make sure the DNA is intact. We’re actually looking at several platforms, several sorts of audiences, and then [making] the proper fit, because that’s the beauty of it with Wyldfyre is that she is actually representing the present narrative, and in that sense, our younger audience. But of course, with Kai, we can go back, and we can go deep, and then the younger audience can then get recruited into that experience.”
Action, comedy and tone
“We wanted to keep this thing really action packed, which I love doing as someone who really likes doing action and comedy,” Matt explained. “But we really just wanted to tell a story from Kai’s perspective, a chapter on his growth as a ninja while he is mentoring Wyldfyre. From a story standpoint, we really wanted to challenge him in a way where he had to face his own demons. What better place than the Land of Monsters? So we developed the story based on that, Doc and Kev came in and did their magic. It was a pleasure working with them on this.”
“We got outlines from Matt, we had a place to start this,” Kevin said. “Having written the Monstrosity shorts, which were very adult, one thing we’ve noticed is that LEGO [media] has all age groups, very young fans that are growing old with this. We wanted to make some content for them, but we also wanted to tell this story that we had intentionally left out of Season 1 of Dragons Rising. There was always space to tell more of this story. So we got these outlines and we got to dig deeper into it and find out what Kai went through here in something that’s a little more accessible, a little fun, tonally a little bit different than the Monstrosity shorts.”
“Being able to build out the world of the Land of Monsters is a real blessing for us,” Doc continued. “It was created for the Monstrosity shorts, but as everyone knows they are in canon, so that means that we’ve now named one of the 17 realms we don’t have. We have a limited supply of realms. To get a chance to touch that again, to broaden that, to deepen that, to world build in the Land of Monsters is exciting as writers.”
Contributions from influencers
Despite this being aged at a younger audience than Monstrosity, some of the adult social media influencers with the biggest followings were invited to tell the creatives what should be included in Kai’s Monstrous Journey. DuckBricks, Bricks By Mind, Parachuting Kitten and Masters of Brickjitzu were asked to input into what should be covered by the content.
Some of the ideas they had were:
- “Making everything about this realm evil including the natural world.”
- “Look at a different animation style.”
- “Include a character from NINJAGO lore.”
- “Look at impact of negative influences on mental health.”
“Matt and the Liquid team and Doc and Kevin took these notes away to build this story,” said Kate.
A character from lore has indeed been incorporated into the new shorts. “We don’t want to reveal too much, but I would say that without giving too much away, there might be plans for the character in the future,” said Animation Director Rachael Walker. “I think that there’s a lot of potential for this character.”
“The way that that we were introduced to that character in the first place was very mysterious and that character will continue to be mysterious, but you’re going to get a lot more of a glimpse into who this character is and what they’re all about, which is going to be really interesting,” Matt elaborated.
“And just to add, it was me that added to the mix this haunting character that we’ve seen very, very little of,” Tommy contributed. “It has always been the intent that when we do these extended storylines we want them to matter. We want them to add something to the bigger tapestry of our canon.”
Even though Kai is a LEGO minifigure traversing a Land of Monsters, the team took the idea of ‘negative influences on mental health’ seriously – so much so that Matt brought up the topic of the age that the new shorts are targeted at, again:
“The negative influences, with mental health and things like that, we wanted to actually explore how these characters could deal with that kind of stuff. So there are deeper themes. Again I know from from an overall audience standpoint it’s a much wider net, but I feel like we were able to handle some very mature and, not adult, but I’ll just say, more sophisticated themes with these characters. What better place, you know? And so that’s sort of from my perspective.
“Then we got monsters. There are lots of monsters. Everyone wanted more monsters – they’re going to get more monsters.”
Another of the prompts that was tricky to incorporate was the idea that even the nature would be monstrous. “I think one of the challenges I remember was making the whole world like infected with evil,” says Kate. “I remember us discussing the trees, how dead they’d be. Would anything organic be there in the Land of Monsters? What would a forest look like? We went with spiky. We went with a bit dead and spiky. Those were interesting conversations you don’t expect to have on a Monday morning – ‘how dead is this tree? Could it be a little bit more dead, please?’”
Animating the episodes
“It has been so much fun making these three episodes,” said Animation Director Rachael Walker. “We built and animated the entire project in Unreal Engine. Last year’s Wyldfyre: Return to the Wildness project was in Maya, so this has been a really awesome experience for the whole team to see what we can achieve in UE.
“It was still important to us that the Land of Monsters felt like a deeply unpleasant, desolate, dangerous place, home to various gross and grotesque creatures that are all out for Kai.
“The top story spans two timelines and it was crucial for us creatively that the two locations and the mood between the two locations felt really distinct, stylistically but also emotionally. Kai is in two really different head spaces, and so we’ve used lighting, colour and texture to clearly differentiate the two worlds.
“While we’re technically using the same model [for Kai], we’ve updated his outfit to be the same outfit that he’s wearing in Monstrosity. Even though it’s a broken up timeline, this is all happening at this same place in time for Kai, even though it’s a slightly different style and different stories.
“In the present timeline, we return to the monastery and library. The colours are warm and golden. The lighting aligns a lot more with Dragons Rising. Even though Kai is really reliving painful memories in these moments, it’s like a safe space, so we wanted to make sure that was visually clear.
“For the style treatment of the Land of Monsters, I was subtly influenced by Japanese wood block prints and you can definitely see that in the sky, particularly in some other areas that show the background mountains, we’ve kind of done an overlay of paper, a textured overlay over everything that has these subtle nods to Japanese wood block prints.
“By sharing his journals with Wyldfyre, Kai isn’t just helping her understand him better. He’s confronting parts of himself that he has been keeping hidden. In that way, it’s sort of self-therapy for Kai. We wanted the present timeline where Kai is opening up to Wildfire, even though it’s a bit of heavy subject matter, to offer levity, some humor, some humanity – and Wyldfyre is always really, really good for bringing that out.”
“Land of Monsters has a lot of potential. We feel like we’ve only scratched the surface. I love that there’s this whole world that Tommy and the LEGO team have out there that we can delve back into now and explore what this place means emotionally for Kai during this time.”
Multiplatform storytelling
Beyond the animated shorts, the story will be told in other formats. “Another thing that is really exciting about working on this project creatively is how all the different storytelling devices, whether it’s the animated comic, the NPCs, static posts, the social videos, they all work together to tell one cohesive story,” Rachel said. “It’s really great because it allows viewers to delve in as deeply or as surface level as they want, you can go and find every bit of content to do with this story or you can just watch the episodes.”
“Last year we had Wyldfyre and this year we have Land of Monsters [in LEGO Magazine],” said LEGO Magazine Content Strategist Julie Sondergaard. “What was really interesting for this one is that we have two versions of the magazine. We have the four to seven for the youngers and we have the eight plus for the olders. Sometimes we do it for all ages. Sometimes we would only do it for the olders, sometimes for the youngers. For this one, we really wanted to do it for both ages, to try and tell the story in two different ways for two different age groups, which was difficult, but we did it.
“We worked a lot on looking at the script, I think Kate’s prompt was ‘the four to seven needs to be a little bit more Spidey and Friends,’ which I think was a good was a good prompt for us, ‘it needs to be a little bit younger.’
“You can see we sort of hint a little bit to Kai’s journey, but we don’t say anything too scary. That was my main prompt: ‘don’t make it too scary.’ But it still tells a really nice journey and emotional development through throughout all this between Kai and Wyldfyre.
“Then the eight plus version is three pages, which we haven’t done for a very, very long time. The kids keep asking for longer comics. We’ve aged it up a little bit more from the 4+. We tell the story a little bit closer to the older content as well. It’s a little bit scarier, but not too scary. The other challenge we had, just because of the magazine timeline, is that we work way, way in advance, which meant we have to hint at little things, but also had to tell the story. I think we ended up in a really, really good place with the comic.”
There is also an animated version of the comic, not to be confused with the actual animated shorts – it’s more of a picture book come to life. “This is very, very exciting,” Julie said. “We have never done this on our platforms. We have always wanted to do it, one, because it’s cool, and two, because it’s a just a new way of getting kids to look at the comics. It’s a really nice, accessible way for maybe either kids that don’t read or have issues reading.”
Returning to the topic of age groups, Julie noted that the younger version of the comic had to avoid certain creepy crawlies. “I feel like I’m representing the very, very young ones. Because our youngest readers are around four or five. We took big learnings actually from Wyldfyre. We get a lot of comments from kids about what they like and the Wyldfyre comic last year, one of the big comments was actually that the spiders were too scary. When we went into this, we said, ‘we want to tell the same story, but we don’t want the kids to be too scared.’”
“Kids will be able to follow that emotional turmoil or story between Kai and Wyldfyre, not just in the comic and in the animated comic, but also on the LEGO Play app,” said Senior Kids Content Strategist Victoria Deborah. “And I am incredibly passionate about what is possible for us on the LEGO Play app, because it’s unique.”
On the LEGO Play app, children will be able to develop a parasocial relationship with the fictional characters. “The unique opportunity that we have here is that we can let them speak in their own words. We are posting from the Wyldfyre and Kai profiles as the series goes on. The difference in the LEGO Play app is that you hear Kai and Wildfire speak from their own perspective.”
What’s really incredible and unique is that Victoria and her colleagues don’t think about Kai and Wyldfyre as characters existing in authored stories, but as people in a real world that just happens to be being filmed.
“While you see Kai and Wildfire do things and speak as if they’re filmed by an invisible camera, on the core show, in the cartoon or comic, as well as in the shorts, on LEGO Play they have their own profiles, similar to what they would have if they were humans and had social media profiles, and they can post from these profiles as if they are real humans.
“This year, especially, we’ve tried to delve even more into their authentic tone of voice. We are working with character cards that we have internally for our writers who write these posts to focus on what this character might talk like, because, as you can imagine, when a camera is filming the events that are happening and when they’re acting out in front of the other characters, they might be very different to when they are posting online. The image that we’re trying to portray as humans online is a different one than what we might look like walking around in our normal everyday lives, and that task is a really fun one for this project. We have more posts scheduled than ever.
“We’ve tried to really get into their brains and think about, how would they communicate? How many spelling mistakes would Wyldfyre do? How many words would Kai post versus Wyldfyre? What kind of images would they select if they had the chance?
“This is unique because the app is the only platform where kids can see these characters come to life all year round, no matter where they’re at in the core show. That is a really cool opportunity for us and a great way of extending the lore and the storytelling. Our ways of extending the lore in this space go back all the way to 2021, where some of you might remember the ninja vlogs, where we had Nya and Jay posting and making some mistakes in their setting up of polls in LEGO Life. All of that has resulted in what you see here today and we are constantly building in this space.”
“We start with Kai and Wyldfyre. They’re both posting about an event that happens, you’ll have to tune in to find out more, but an event that happens that sets off some tension between them,” added Associate Content Strategist Sarah Rolufs.
“Wyldfyre isn’t paying enough attention in her training and Kai gets frustrated with her as he is this mentor character. We’ll lead you through the story on LEGO Play, Wyldfyre and Kai will encourage kids to both take part in the story, but also the interactive elements, like journaling to express their feelings, because that’s a large part of the story. It will be this continuous conversation that leads directly into kids seeing these episodes and understanding why Kai is feeling this way.”
“Even after the shorts finish on August 14, the story will continue, because we haven’t seen the end of the story yet. So until from July 15 to August 22 this will be a whole story that is additionally played out on the LEGO Play app.”
Returning to the topic of the Monstrosity shorts that came before, the change in focus for this new collection of shorts was not due to a lack of success and there may be more content for older children in the future.
“The Monstrosity Legend shorts were trying something new,” says Kevin. “It was hugely successful creatively. We loved it and everyone seemed to love it. So hopefully we can do more in that direction, but we need to acknowledge that NINJAGO covers a lot of territory and that we need to acknowledge all those fans and allow them in that space, Land of Monsters. I mean, who knows where we can go with this? But, yeah, we recognise we have older fans and younger fans watching all the same stuff. And it has always been the challenge, but the exciting thing to make it resonate for multiple age groups, for all ages.”
“Forest of Teeth”, “The Ruins” and “Queen of the Monsters” will start streaming on LEGO.com from July 31, with a new short dropping once a week.
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