Bionicle Animations 2015: My Review

[Master Inika]

Coming off the heels of my Hero Factory reviews, this seems like the next logical step.

A Bionicle revival really should have been a slam dunk. We Bionicle fans have basically been conditioned since childhood to empty our wallets when we hear the code phrase "Unity, Duty, Destiny" or "Six Heroes, One Destiny." It's almost impressive how underwhelming G2 ended up being, how skillfully LEGO avoided appealing to any of us.

OVERVIEW

There are 18 installments of the 2015 animated webisodes, each one 90 seconds long. This comes out to roughly 27 minutes, but this doesn't correspond narratively to a single 22-minute television episode and then some. Each webisode is still supposed to be a standalone story, resulting in the stories being incredibly rushed. The first few focus on a single idea (the Toa land on Okoto, or the Toa go to where their Golden Mask is hidden) and just show each of the six Toa/Protector duos doing that very briefly. I understand the idea of letting kids fill in the blanks with their own stories, but it can't all be blanks. The fans can't write the dialogue, build the world, determine the character interactions for you, LEGO.

Watching these 18 episodes in one sitting, as I did tonight, creates an even more jarring and inconsistent feel. With largely the same budget, LEGO could have made a satisfying series of three shorts, 10 minutes each, but instead every scene is interrupted by the intro/outro (which does get repetitive quickly). Making it even more of a bore to marathon through, each episode opens by recapping the last one. It's just an extra second or two, but still, it adds up.

If I could compare these animations to anything, it would be Monster High. I don't know why but short webisodes really exploded in popularity in this era. The difference is that Monster High tries. It's nothing groundbreaking, they're just good. They're cute, funny, and I can tell the characters apart. Draculaura doesn't do or say anything Cleo de Nile would do. The Bionicle webisodes suffer from the same thing as later Hero Factory, where virtually any piece of dialogue could be said by virtually any Hero.

The Monster High webisodes were also episodic. You could watch them in any order and they made sense. It was more about getting to know the characters than advancing the plot. Trying to tell a story based on Bionicle 2001 in this format just sucks the life out of it because it loans itself well to mundane character interactions, not larger-than-life adventures. Pretend you are a seven-year-old boy and you just learned about a new LEGO line, set on a mysterious island with volcanoes, snow-capped mountains, deserts, underground caves, jungles and oceans; inhabited by six elemental tribes. I imagine you would have some questions, such as:

1) what kind of work do the tribes perform?

2) what challenges does living in each environment offer?

3) how do the tribes interact?

These are all questions G2 has zero interest in answering.

INDIVIDUAL EPISODES

The Legend - I actually liked this one. The Ekimu/Makuta setup felt like one of the few times G2 was willing to deviate from the pattern and offer something new instead of giving us an infantilized version of G1.

Prophecy of Heroes - The problems begin almost immediately. The prophecy is just vague and meaningless in a way I feel like even children could perceive.

The Arrival - I really can't get into the comedy. Much like the B1 battle droids in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, skull spiders are just too cute and pathetic for me to feel any kind of urgency when they're attacking and I just feel sad for them watching them get squished and defeated.

The Protectors Fight Back - I like the detail that Narmoto's blaster is explicitly mechanical and makes a modern clicking noise when it runs out. It gives Okoto its own sense of scale for technology and what they're capable of.

Team of Heroes - We don't know Tahu anywhere near well enough to be invested in how he interacts with other characters. I also don't particularly like Kopaka that much, either. Every Toa feels like a painfully condensed version of their G1 selves (except Pohatu, who is mean for some reason now). I liked the visual gag of Onua physically turning Kopaka and Tahu so they can look at something offscreen. That was a funny visual gag. So far, Onua is the only one who can pull off intentional comedy like that in G2.

Lord of Skull Spiders - This is just the first time it happens, but there's quite a few episodes that consist of the Toa fighting alone, failing, then realizing "we need unity!" and immediately winning. The 90-second format makes both the Toa come off as amnesiac, forgetting this every time it happens, and the villains also just passively stand around until attacked most of the time.

The next few episodes focus on the abandoned City of the Mask Makers. They're still not good, but they're bad in an interesting way. I've had so many questions about how Okoto functions that no one who worked in G2 has been interesting in answering. Are the Skull Creatures actually dead or just corpse-themed villains? Why do they live in tombs if it's just a gimmick? If they are dead, what were they like when they were alive? They're much larger than Okotans, but we're led to believe Okotans inhabited the city in the past. What is Skull Slicer? With him in particular it seemed there is the implication that he is a more tragic character, like he died playing that game and is fighting because he does not know what else to do.

I'll identify the flashback episode as the worst one. It's exceptionally lazy and this show did not need a recap episode. For a bit of a nerd history lesson, recap episodes were a real staple of 90s anime, back before on-demand entertainment or YouTube meant you could easily watch and rewatch whatever you wanted--if you missed it on TV at 5:30pm, you missed it. A YouTube webisode series does not need this.

The end of this series is... actually kinda good. The show does a good job conveying early on that, as in G1, the Toa are significantly weakened without their masks, and this is the only piece of Bionicle media to depict Toa continuing to fight maskless. It's a surprisingly impressive move that, if I was more invested in these characters and this world, would have been a pretty good ending.

INTERESTING NOTES

The skull spiders never take over anyone's bodies, nor try to. I thought that was one of their main play features, so I'm surprised it wasn't featured here.

This is another reason the 90-second format doesn't work, but Narmoto disappears from the story early on and I feel like he and the Protectors should have been brought back in somehow a the end. Narmoto is arguably our POV character in the beginning, and there is an attempt to up the stakes by removing him from the story when it shifts to the abandoned city. The series forgets that (theoretically) awakening Ekimu is about restoring hope and peace to him and the villagers, so not having them react to seeing him again feels like a missed opportunity.

The one voice actor is doing his best. I like that he has Pohatu pronounce "lever" differently than the others, that was a nice extra flourish.

 

Sorry if this one feels a bit more ramble-y. The fact is, even more than Hero Factory, these webisodes don't feel made to be talked about. Much like HF, I actually like the 2015 sets a lot and think there was a LOT of potential here. I actually bought all of them and for me, the badness of most of these webisodes is extra palpable because the toys look like they should inhabit better-made advertisements. As I'll repeat from my HF reviews, "22-minute toy commercial" isn't necessarily a bad thing. The best "toy adverts" are just good stories.

P.S. Remember how Templar had a mandate from LEGO against showing the Toa directly striking any other living creatures with their weapons, leading to all sorts of creative world-arounds, like Kopaka fighting the Muaka invisible, Gali fighting the Tarakava underwater, or Onua and Lewa fighting in the dark? These animations throw that rule out the window. The scene of Pohatu bonking LoSS in the face struck me as so odd and I couldn't figure out why until I realized that.

Edited July 19, 2025 by Master Inika

[TahnokTrapper]

I think the 2015 webisodes (this is partially inspired by a take I heard somewhere) would've worked best as story recaps, similar in function to the Wall of History animations - something that could give you at least a surface-level understanding of the story and would act as supplementary material for longer-form storytelling media. Since the tone and format of the 2015 shorts seemed to be tailor-made for younger viewers, they could've been used to lure in new fans of Bionicle, who could then learn more through other media (perhaps a TV show or more widely available novels), which we wouldn't get until the second and last year...