Squirrel Chest

The Chima line was introduced as a stand alone licence after the success of Ninjago. It too had its own distinct characters, setting and a cartoon series that went on for 8 short volumes. The Chima theme was phased out in 2016, beginning at 2013.

 

On its own these sets are impressive. The Maula's Ice Mammoth set caught my eye and I was hooked from that moment on. I had to work fast and retro buy all the sets to catch up before they were discontinued. Its popularity was a hit and miss affair. It lacked the hard wearing play of the Ninjago licence and an easy to relate to theme of ninjas and humans. 

 

The models were very delicate due to the intricate method the blocks were attached to each other of clips instead of stud locking. Often built sets would crumble apart or just survive play as display pieces. There were many technic parts to create the framework and specific parts were used to hide these parts. The construction design was very clever mimicking the animal features found within the vehicle.

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Lego missed out on the opportunity to capitalise on its jungle theme and create trees and mountainscapes to compliment the environment of Chima. This surely would have opened up the interest of this theme to the MOC creator and AFOLS out there.

 

The above sets have been collected and are amazing to see and display. If you are lucky enough to find a few sets, grab one, build it up and just look at the beauty. The figurines are odd lego animal/dragonball z-like cartoonish figures, but after a while it grows onto you. You get this feeling you want to collect as many as possible of these little dudes and create an army of troops poised to battle one another.