Lost the Plot? LEGO® Star Wars™ recaps & original scenes

A long time ago in a galaxy known as the late nineties, the LEGO Group met Star Wars™ in a Cantina, it was love at first sight and we went on to make over 400 highly collectible LEGO® Star Wars sets together. Okay, that may not be exactly how it went down, but twenty years later and we’re not just proud of our lovely LEGO Millennium Falcon™ sets and cool models, we are also rather in love with the popular miniaturized content tributes and additions to the epic space saga.

There’s just something about seeing the Star Wars stories in LEGO form that is really entertaining. Which is why there have been so many amazing Star Wars plot recaps, retellings and funny scenes using LEGO stop-motion or CGI, made by talented brick-film-making fans, and also by us.

So why are these brick-film recaps and re-imaginings so perennially popular? It could be because LEGO minifigures are badass, iconic and also somewhat cute at the same time. That’s right, we just called LEGO Darth Vader cute.

It could also be because animating all that studded LEGO brickiness and those chunky little characters is pretty restrictive, so ‘the Force’ is in the enForced creativity. Seeing a familiar story being re-made in a limited way is fascinating, funny and cool and lends itself to the spoofiness and warm parody that we love in LEGO Star Wars content. THE LEGO MOVIE™ Production Designer Grant Freckelton talked about exactly this when explaining the choice to make their film in a stop-motion style. “Characters that have limitations force you to find solutions and ways of doing things in different ways.” (To find out more about how THE LEGO MOVIE was made, click here)

Anyway, far be it for us to hark on about our own content. That would be immodest. Instead, we asked LEGO Star Wars veteran, the heroically-named Jake Blais, Creative Specialist at LEGO Agency and producer of many of our LEGO Star Wars animations, to share his top ‘staff picks’ from our library of videos.

“My favorite shorts are the series of Star Wars episodes in 2 minutes. Told from the perspective of a kid and recreated in either stop motion or stop-motion-style CGI, these are just such a fun way to encapsulate the Star Wars universe.”

“For the launch of the LEGO Star Wars Microfighters, we created a series of short animations including Bantha Shakes which stands out for me, because it really scaled-up the attitude and humor element of that fun new product line.”

“When Star Wars Rebels launched, we created an epic and energetic animated short called Rebels Ghost Story that introduced kids to the exciting characters of Star Wars Rebels and the new cool ship, The Ghost.”

“At the launch of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, we created a really fun short that was the opposite of animation. It was a still diorama scene of the Battle of Crait, suspending the moment in time and taking a fly-through to give fans a view of a LEGO Star Wars battle they otherwise could not see.”

“During the launch of Solo: a Star Wars Story, we created a video where Han lost his co-pilot Chewie, and fans needed to help find a replacement. These were very fun little animations allowing us to imagine what would have happened if Chewie and Han hadn’t joined forces in the first place.”

“We also created some amazing long-format animation. My all-time favorite, The Freemaker Adventures, is a 2-season series following the adventures of three sibling salvagers as they cross paths with some of the heroes of the Star Wars galaxy. The series is available on Disney+.”

“Of course, there are tons of fan-made stop-motion films out there that are just as amazing, if not even more exciting than those above. One recent one is The Skywalker Saga, made as an awesomely creative collaboration between 34 animators.”

Thanks, Jake. If you haven’t seen them already, what are you doing reading this article? Check out his links and our library of LEGO Star Wars animations here.