80043 Yellow Tusk Elephant LEGO Review - Monkie Kid, 2023

A trumpeting success!

TL;DR:

• Original Price:  $79.99
• Pieces: 844
• Minifigure(s): Mei power-up, Yellow Tusk Elephant, Ink Demon, Ink General, Pigsy (ancient garb)
• Sticker Sheet: Yes
• Pros: Creative, intricate, and sturdy build; lots of great details
• Cons: Non-exclusive minifigs (which could also be considered a Pro, depending); limited poseability

Assembly: 

Bag #1 - Mei, Yellow Tusk Elephant, vehicles

Bag #2 - Torso

Bag #3 - Ink Demon, hind legs

Bag #4 - Back & sides

no photo

Bag #5 - Forelegs

Bag #6 - Ink General, head

Bag #7 - Pigsy, ears & tusks, prison cart

Bag #8 - Howda

 Leftover Pieces

• Interesting Steps:
• 12: the square-cornered 1x2 plates with tow balls are able to rotate because of the 1-plate gap between the top of the chair and the underside of the crossbeam. It's a surprising solution, but effective.

• 47: in an interesting take on "squaring the circle," we layer 3x3 round corner plates and a 3x3 corner plate on top of the brick-built torso, then further round things off with 3x3 studless round corner bricks. This makes the shoulder joints feel both natural and mechanical—mechanical for the precision that comes from LEGO circles, natural for the irregularity and the transition of angles and curves.

• 50: the turntable on which the head will be mounted is furnished with a single 1x2 reddish brown plate (underneath the 2x2 circular gold tile). The corners of this stick out beyond the circumference of the 4x4 circle and hit the shoulder walls on either side, preventing the neck joint from swiveling all the way around. Once the head is mounted on it, this becomes less of an issue, but it does have the advantage of keeping the joint in proper orientation for the next 150-ish steps until the head is put in place.

• 74: the feet are similarly both elegantly simple and surprisingly complex: two 1x1 barrel vault tiles form the middle toes, while two 1x2 plates with pin holes become the outer toes. As you can see in subsequent photos, this works pretty well; my only complaints are that the tan brackets are tan (they've been available in white since 2021) and that the pin holes of the outermost toes are visible (swapping them out for regular 1x2 plates with 1x1 barrel vault tiles in place of the pin hole portion would have looked better, I think, without compromising the overall structure).

• 218: here we see how the turntable from step 50 comes into play. 5-long Technic liftarms and frictionless half-pins are slotted onto the bar arms of the 1x2 plates underneath the round 2x2 gold tile, allowing the one to rotate the other. As I mentioned in step 50's description, there isn't any need to keep the turntable from rotating too far in either direction, as the liftarms and the head itself would prevent them from turning past a certain point, but the 1x2 reddish brown plate does indeed keep the turntable aligned until this step.

• Interesting Techniques:
• While they're used for the jet turbines on Mei's hoverboard, pairing a trans-bright green cone with a flat silver goblet like this makes for a great minifigure-scale lava lamp.

• The foreleg—here shown without the joint cowling provided by the 3x3 round bricks—does a good job of evoking the chunky muscularity of an elephant. As with most mechs, the elbow joint is immobile, built around an A-frame plate, but the Technic rotation joint at the shoulder does offset this a bit, and the tow ball ankle joint also has suitable stiffness and range of motion to accommodate many poses.

• Using dark grey mechanical arms for the top of the cage's bars gives it an interesting, almost coffin-shaped, profile; and leaving one side unclipped to the base makes it easy to open and insert the minifigure prisoner of your choice. There's enough room between the reddish brown 2x2's studs and the square bars around them for most figures to fit inside, with the possible exception of the Ink General, whose single-antistud base might require a jumper to be able to stand in the cage. The dome is a nice touch too, though if I could I might have switched the mechanical arms and clips for gold, and the bars for reddish brown: this would unify the color and make it look like the cage is made from wood and gold alone, which would also match the golden wheels it gets placed on later.

• Interesting Pieces:
• "White Panel 10 x 4 x 13 Curved Tapered with Bar Handle at Each End, 4 Studs On Side" as described by BrickLink, this quarter-balloon has organic curves but also a low enough profile to serve well as the elephant's underbelly. It's also quite large, making it difficult to know what to do with it in terms of a MOC. A sail, perhaps, or a flowing cape...New Elementary, in their review of the set, used it for a canopy over a futuristic cityscape.

• Pain Points:
• While the trunk looks cool, and the pentagonal plates on the sides are a good compromise between needing flexibility and also looking like it's covered in white hide, there is one main problem: it's floppy. The black 2x2 plates with tow balls keep it resting in a suitable curve, but the joints themselves are just Technic axles through pin holes and therefore frictionless. Adding some resistance would have given builders another limb to pose dramatically for play and photos—just as if the forelegs' elbow joints were also mobile. Unfortunately, I can't think of a solution that would work with the current design, since the axle hole and pin hole portions of the trunk joints are each just one plate wide, so a standard half-axle, half-friction Technic pin wouldn't fit. Still, it could be worse, and at least there is some moveability to the trunk, even if it can't technically be posed.

• Play Features: 
  
• There are stud shooters on the elephant's back and trunk, and the elephant itself is poseable...but the biggest play feature is the Transfromers-style mech, which can fold into the back of the howdah to become a throne for Yellow Tusk Elephant to sit upon. The steps are rather complicated and tricky (just like in real Transformers, at least the ones I grew up with) and the instructions—just three images across pages 184-186—don't make it super clear what's going on. So I'll explain it here:
1. This picture shows the elephant and mech in their separate states.
2. Remove the howdah (floor and sides) from the elephant and Yellow Tusk and the weapon from the mech.
3. Swing the mech's arms backward (as described in "Interesting Steps" 12 above) and seat its rump on the 2x2 dark grey jumper plate. There should be ample room for the legs in this position, thanks to the empty space created by the elephant's two curved side pieces.
4. Replace the howdah.
5. Return Yellow Tusk to the throne and give him back his weapon.
6. Fold the articulated clip thingy at the rear (with the purple 2x2 slope piece) into place against the mech's back to hold it more securely.

• Overall:  Unlike the previous set I reviewed, Monkie Kid's Lion Guardian, this one feels like a great value for the price. And according to BrickEconomy, the fans agree: the prices for a used copy of this (originally $80) set range from $94.69 to $145.40! According to BrickSet, both sets were designed by the same designer, Xiaodong Wen, who was definitely honing his skills in the two years between these sets, and it shows.

While the transformation of the mech and elephant from separate vehicles to one vehicle, and vice versa, can be a bit tricky at first, it is not impossible to learn. It's also great that they not only included the mech but designed it to be thusly integrated. Having tow ball joints at hips and ankles and shoulders and elbows—as well as the shoulder pivots used in the transformation—make this one of the more flexible mechs I've seen. Though the elephant can be a bit visually busy, it does a good job of using color to tie things together visually.

There are a lot of interesting and useful parts in this build, and a great many decorative stickers that could be used in other builds (for example, perhaps the white curved pieces could make for a bannered balcony, perfect to watch spaceship races from)...but the set's overall design is so nice—and the build itself so long and complicated—that I'm tempted to leave it intact. It would look great in a glassed-in display cabinet, especially when grouped with other Monkie Kid sets like the Legendary Flower Fruit Mountain.

None of the minifigures are exclusive to this set, which can be a good or bad thing depending on your point of view. With as excellent as the Pigsy and Yellow Tusk minifigs are, I'm glad they're not exclusive to this set (though to be fair the Pigsy one is only available in the even more expensive Monkie Kid's Team Hideout set), unlike the Ninjago dragon form minifigs.

I still hope for another season of the Monkie Kid show, especially if it manages to tie up all of the plot threads of Season 5, and sets like this really prove just how valuable that series has been in terms of pushing the creativity of LEGO's design language and build quality. They have captured the dynamism and creativity of the show and brought it to reality.

While this set was a more reasonable $80 when it was available at retail, I'd still say it's well worth picking up (though maybe not for the highest re-seller price of $150) and provides both instruction in complicated techniques as well as opportunities for narrative play. 

Score (out of 5 🧱):

• Price: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱
• Process: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱
• Presentation: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱
• Play: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱
• Pieces: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱

• Total: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱

Official Instructions: here