LEGO celebrates Lunar New Year annually with themed sets. 2021's Year of the Ox featured a Spring Festival garden scene, while 2024's Year of the Dragon brought us the impressive LEGO Auspicious Dragon, a bronze statue replica. 2025, the Year of the Snake, sees LEGO release three new sets: a Lucky Cat, a Good Fortune set featuring Chinese iconography (decorative fan, calligraphy set, and gold ingots), and the magnificent Trotting Lantern, the focus of this review.
LEGO Spring Festival Trotting Lantern
$129.95 at Amazon
$129.99 at LEGO Store
This traditional trotting lantern replica is far more than meets the eye. The intricate detailing is extravagant; every inch boasts decorative elements – from hanging red lanterns and gold-detailed borders to the beautifully rendered sky and cloud scenes on the lantern walls.
Building the lantern is a layered experience. You construct the core structure, then add increasingly detailed layers, creating a sense of anticipation and delight as each element unfolds. This echoes the joy of building the now-retired LEGO Carousel.
Historically, trotting lanterns, dating back to the Han Dynasty, used oil lamps to project silhouettes of paper cutouts. The LEGO version cleverly incorporates a mechanism to simulate this. An upright rod activates a light brick, illuminating a clear piece with a black-lined image, projecting it onto the lantern's side. Rotating the rod animates the image.
While the packaging advertises wall projection, the image is unfortunately blurry and indistinct. This feature feels less a selling point and more a curious inclusion. More impressive is the lantern's upper tier, which opens to reveal three charming dioramas: a dumpling stall, a decorations stall, and a shadow puppet theater. This clever design utilizes depth perception to create a delightful surprise.
The set includes five minifigures (one with a snake costume), dumplings, a red envelope, a shadow puppet, and chopsticks. The set's value depends on your priorities. While the light and rotating mechanism is neat, it's not spectacular enough to justify the price alone. However, the stunning aesthetics and hidden dioramas make it a truly beautiful and intricate Lunar New Year celebration. Despite its 9+ age rating, the complexity suggests an 18+ build experience.
For more LEGO recommendations, explore our selections of the best LEGO sets, best Marvel LEGO sets, and most expensive LEGO sets.
LEGO Trotting Lantern, Set #80116, retails for $129.99 and contains 1295 pieces. It is available now at Amazon and the LEGO Store.
