Grab your golden tickets and learn about how the minifigures of 21360 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory were chosen and designed, from the LEGO designers behind the new LEGO Ideas set.
What goes into creating the characters for a LEGO set? Graphic Designer Crisy Dyment, Senior Model Designer Laura Perron and Design Manager Jordan Scott share the process of getting the minifigures just right in 21360 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
For some fans, minifigures are the highlight of any LEGO set, but for almost all fans they truly bring a model to life — who would want a ship with no captain to steer it? And in the case of a set based on a classic movie, they also give fans the opportunity to get some of their favourite characters in LEGO minifigure form. So when it comes to choosing the characters for a licensed set like 21360 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the LEGO designers had their work cut out for them.
As 21360 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a LEGO Ideas set, the LEGO designers did have a solid foundation to work from, laid by fan designers Roberto Ceruti and Jody Padualno. Their original project included Willy Wonka, two Oompa Loompas and all five children (un)lucky enough to win a golden ticket. But even with that strong starting point, one of the first things the LEGO Ideas team did was add another character: Grandpa Joe.
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“I think Grandpa Joe is so integral to Charlie’s story,” shares Design Manager Jordan Scott. “I mean, he’s the one that encourages him to spend the money and get the chocolate bar, which gives him the ticket. All of the other parents go off with their kids. Grandpa Joe stays there until the very end. So I think he’s quite integral to Charlie’s story and was a nice additional character to be able to include.”
With Grandpa Joe’s inclusion sorted, the only other debate about the roster was the number of Oompa Loompas to put in the set. There are countless Oompa Loompas in the film, which unfortunately can’t be recreated in a LEGO set if there’s any hope of keeping the price reasonable. But the sheer number of them was a point of consideration when the team was deciding how many to include.
“You need at least two because otherwise it doesn’t really make sense,” Jordan explains. “Just having one would be a bit odd. So this way, you’ve got one to drive the boat and one to stay on the shore with the sugar sack and peek through the little hidden door that they come through. So yeah, it was important to include them as they’re very memorable.”
Then when it came time to design the characters, Graphic Designer Crisy Dyment studied both the 1971 film and its props to ensure the minifigures are as accurate as possible.
“I’ll sometimes research auction sites where they’re selling the actual costumes and props to make sure I’m getting it right,” she says. “Sometimes on the screen, the colour looks odd. But if you can actually find the source material, it’s really helpful to inform what the design actually looks like, being able to zoom in as much as you can. So a lot of research.
“And in researching the film we saw that the Oompa Loompas were both male and female actors, and wanted to make sure we were authentic to that. So we have a male and female minifigure. One that has eyelashes and one that doesn’t.”
“One point of feedback that we had gotten was to give them a more serious second face, too,” adds Senior Model Designer Laura Perron. “I love their second face. So they’re just like a nonsense sort of face, but that’s where we work really closely with the partner to make sure everyone’s on board with the decisions we make.”
Big decisions with the Oompa Loompas didn’t stop there — there were considerations made about whether or not to depict their socks via leg printing.
“It’s just a matter of making sure it looks like a LEGO figure,” Crisy says of the decision to leave the legs unprinted. “It’s something that we try to find the sweet spot for when working. And sometimes we’re limited by certain technologies, but at the end of the day, we try to make sure it still feels cohesive within the rest of the set and that there aren’t certain details that draw your attention too much, especially if some characters have leg printing and others don’t.”
The end result is a roster of minifigures that feels accurate to the 1971 film while fitting firmly within the LEGO brick style. And there’s plenty for them to explore in the set, cruising along the chocolate river in the S.S. Wonkatania.
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