We Build LEGO Shrek, Donkey, and Puss in Boots, a Plastic Homage to the Classic DreamWorks Movies

I can’t really explain to you why I was so excited about LEGO announcing a Shrek-themed set. It’s certainly not the prettiest set in the world, but I grew up with the irreverent ogre. For better or worse, the DreamWorks movies defined my sense of humor and, for a little while, my music taste. I guess building a plastic brick version of these iconic characters appealed to me as an homage to this impact. To be honest, it was also entertaining to tell people I was “busy building Shrek.”

LEGO Shrek, Donkey, & Puss in Boots retails for $129.99 and includes an impressive 1,403 pieces. It took me a couple of days to build, or, more specifically, the length of the first three Shrek movies I did in fact watch in the background. Shrek-maxxing, if you will. It’s marked as an 18+ set intended for adults, and I’ll admit it was one of the more challenging builds I’ve done in terms of small and finicky details.

The building process starts you off with the Puss in Boots minifigure. I’ll get my somewhat complicated feelings about this one out of the way sooner rather than later. Puss in Boots is one of those iconic characters you may have forgotten wasn’t even in the first Shrek. Despite the frame of all three characters from Shrek 2 on the front of the box, the rest of the set, as we’ll get into, is clearly designed around that first movie.

As such, the addition of Puss in Boots as a somewhat separate minifig feels a bit ‘tacked on.’ I’m jumping ahead of myself a bit here, but this feeling is compounded by the fact that he is so much smaller than Shrek and Donkey. LEGO definitely knows he’s a particularly popular character (let’s be honest, The Last Wish was amazing), and accurately assumed including him would attract his own level of interest in the set. Part of me just wishes he was a bigger part of it.

That said, it’s still an awesome minifig. The only slight criticism I have is that the face doesn’t feel entirely like Puss in Boots, but I acknowledge that’s a hard thing to accomplish with any minifig. In this case, it’s the accessories that make it work. Between his torso, leg, and head pieces, you’ll place a plastic tail and a fabric cape. You also get separate pieces for his sword and hat.

Once you have your minifig, find somewhere to keep him safe, because pretty much everything else in this set directly connects to each other. You build from the ground up, starting with a foundation made of grass and rocks with a little stream at the front. A small detail you place sooner rather than later is a frog in the swamp. Is this a reference to Fiona’s dad? I don’t see why not.

Once you have some semblance of a foundation to work from, you start building Donkey. Like most LEGO sets, the building process follows a general theme of ‘colorful insides’ that you layer the actual recognizable colors of the characters on top of. Most of Donkey is perfectly symmetrical, so you build each side of his legs and body in sequence.

This next stage confused me until I realized part of what I was building wasn’t just Donkey himself, but a rock foundation for his front legs to stand on. I had to fiddle with a bit with the surprisingly flexible black legs to get the positioning right, but there’s plenty of space to make his pose look natural. Once you finish those front legs you can attach the body, and you have a slightly creepy headless Donkey.

It shouldn’t be too surprising then that the next stage of the build is Donkey’s head. His lower jaw can open and close, revealing his massive teeth and a tongue, and his ears can also move from side to side. Most importantly, there’s no stickers! There’s actually not a single sticker across the entire build – all of the details are printed directly onto select pieces, saving you the hassle of painfully trying to line things up.

Before you move on to the true ogre of the hour, you work on a couple of smaller details that directly reference the first film.

You start with a duo of sunflowers. I appreciate that the flowers are angled upwards toward the ‘sun,’ and you place the stems into hinges you can mode from side to side. You also build an adorable little onion, which you can imagine has layers “just like an ogre.” The combination of these pieces reference a scene with Shrek and Donkey walking through a field after Lord Farquaad assigns them the quest to save Princess Fiona.

Then, you build a smaller blue flower with red thorns. Now, this one’s a bit of a funky reference. In the movie, Fiona sends Donkey to get this blue and red flower as an excuse for some alone time with Shrek. Little does she know Donkey is color blind, so he never actually finds the flower. Nonetheless, the brick version of Donkey appears to have succeeded in his quest.

There’s small slots for each of these smaller details to sit attached toward the back of the build, but you can also pose them with any of the characters.

Then we begin on the ogre of the hour. I was surprised to find it was actually a bit of a mystery what you’re building at any given moment with Shrek. I only recognized this sequence after I completed it, but you start with the bottom of his tunic and a ‘foundation’ for his torso before you start working directly on the ‘body.’

One thing I noticed between both Shrek and Donkey is that the ‘inside’ of their bodies use predominantly red and pink bricks. This offers variety (and clarity) in usual LEGO tradition, but at times it makes the build feel slightly… graphic. I cannot say whether that’s a good or bad thing, but I do think it was intentional.

One of the most tedious tasks in the entire build is placing 22 one-slot round pieces in a perfectly symmetrical pattern, but I admit it does give Shrek’s tunic a good-looking texture. Shrek’s legs are actually on hinges that can spin in a circle, but ultimately lock into place on the set’s foundation.

Inside Shrek’s gut, you’ll place another onion, as well as an eyeball and waffle. The eyeball is likely a direct reference to one of Shrek’s meals during the iconic ‘All Star’ montage. I can only remember waffles being referenced as one of Donkey’s favorite foods, but I’ll admit it’s not entirely unlike Shrek to have eaten it for himself.

I don’t have too much to report about the process of building Shrek’s face, but much like Donkey, his eyes and mouth are printed directly onto their respective pieces. His ears (is that the correct term?) can wiggle back and forth, and I’ll give credit to how the set uses a variety of curved pieces to create accurate proportions for his nose and chin.

The final step was actually building his arms and hands, and I’ll admit I never noticed until building this set that Shrek only has four fingers. On one of those hands, you attach a small grey piece that ends up connecting directly to an open spot on Donkey.

Now, this might not matter too much, but the instructions tell you to put an armless Shrek into the foundation and then attach his arms. I repeatedly broke things when I tried to do this, so I ended up attaching the arms first. Tiny detail, I know, but the consequences for me were disastrous.

I finished things up with the ‘Beware Ogre’ sign (still no stickers!) and some smaller details around the foundation, which, despite referencing a couple of different scenes, delineates the vibe that you’re in Shrek’s swamp.

There’s a small clear piece used to have Puss sit on Shrek’s shoulder like in the scene referenced on the front of the box. I couldn’t figure out a way to make this look cute (and kept breaking other pieces in the meantime), so I believe my point about ‘tacking on’ Puss still stands. Still a great minifig!

What I do love about this set is that it feels like a real statue. Some recent LEGO sets, like the Animal Crossing sets or The Nightmare Before Christmas build, are more like a collection of separate small sets you have to manually piece together to display. While you can detach Shrek and Donkey, both of which have a decent amount of mobility in their head and limbs, they’re fundamentally baked into the foundation in such a way that makes the set an easy display piece.

Now, how will people react to me having a rather large version of Shrek and Donkey sitting in my living room as a decoration? I have to imagine it’ll be a conversation starter at the very least. The reality is, unlike sets like the Botanical collection, there’s not much that’s aesthetically appealing about the set outside of its connection to what I consider one of the best movie franchises. However, because I do love Shrek, I’m very happy showing him off. Let’s just hope Shrek 5 doesn’t affect that sense of pride.