Bara Nui, The Lesser Spirit
"On a barren desert planet there wanders a massive figure, its sand blasted body towering over the clouds. Billions upon billions of insects driven by some unknown force link together forming its muscles and sinew. The lonely giant lumbers across the land, its purpose forgotten."
This is a sequel to my build of Mata Nui, the Great Spirit.
This August the designer of the GSR instructions, Giikei, released a new set of instructions for the counterpart of the GSR known as the Prototype Robot and the folks over at Ali Express almost immediately made a kit availableĀ¹.
This project was much more intensive than the GSR, which took me just under a week to build and paint. For this one I got the parts at the beginning of September, and only now in mid October is it complete. Now, my life has been a bit hectic as of lateĀ², but overall this was a much more complex project than the GSR.
I suppose first I should explain exactly why I, a person who is very open about my distaste for lateĀ³ Bionicle's story, would invest this amount of time in a project like this. The answer is simple: Bugs.
Much like my previous coverage of the Voya Nui arc, while the final story that we got is pretty bad, there were originally some very interesting ideas there. The thing that drew me in the most about this other robot was this early idea where it was essentially puppeted by bugsā“.
Uncountable numbers of bugs formed together in to muscles to allow this skeletal robot to move. It was this alone that made me consider doing this project. But I wanted to go a bit further, the image of this skeletal robot corpse being controlled by some sort of bug gestalt consciousness just took hold.
This document also features the name I like: Bara Nui, which I've dubbed the Lesser Spirit Robot, or LSR.
To briefly review the kit itself, it was a lot less overwhelming than the GSR, as the final model is significantly smaller than the GSR there was a smaller volume of parts.
The kit didn't include the large green energy parts, but I didn't know what they were for so it didn't affect me. Oddly the 2x2 blue dish was made in to a 4x4 one, but again it was for functionality I didn't require, so I'm not bothered.
Unlike the GSR there were no 3D printed parts this time. They did include the wrong type of flexible tube though. Luckily I had a piece the exact length left over from the GSR.
The kit also comes with the allspark? I really have to emphasize I don't know anything about the story for this arc.
My one real criticism of the model is the legs. The ratchet joints were very stiff with this kit, in fact one of them later snapped just from trying to bend it so now one of the legs is fixed in place. As opposed to the GSR model where the legs had a very sturdy Technic core, the legs here are much more fragile. The lower legs are primarily brick built and the thighs are stacks of round Technic parts held together with pins, so it was quite easy for these assemblies to start working themselves apart when trying to pose the model.
Overall I felt like glue was much more of a necessity here compared to the GSR, who really only needed it for the head and various decorative parts that could be knocked loose..
I just want to take a moment to acknowledge what a good job they did with designing this build. Whereas the GSR was much more firmly establishedāµ the LSR is different in every piece of media it appears in. It even varies panel to panel, so they had their work cut out for them here. They did a good job combining the various references and being distinct from the GSR build while still sharing some design elements.
Once I had the whole thing together I started doing some rough planning for how I would zombify it. I wanted it to be asymmetrical, and have a lot of damage and missing parts.
I had decided the best way to get the effect I wanted was to make long strings of beads and glue and wrap them around the body. To this end I bought around 20,000 beads and spent many hours making long strings. You can see why this project ended up taking so much longer... Each string of beads was around 2 metres long and I must have made around 20 of them. Its really quite distressing how quickly a 2 metre string gets used up while being wrapped around a tiny plastic arm. I used up 3 whole tubes of glue attaching the beads, the smell was so strong I had to store some parts outside over night.
Timeline wise I finished doing the beads this time last week, so about a month to get that done. Not solid workā¶, but quite a lot of time in any case.
In an attempt to give it a bit of unique texture compared to the GSR I added some sand to it, the idea being it had been partially buried in the sands for years before the bug mass took over. I had some left over beads too, so I made that and some spare parts in to a little bit of scene dressing.
And then over this weekend I gave every part about 6 full coats of various paints and varnishes, and then went in with washes and other hand painting. It took a lot of time to paint in every single bug. After all that it was ready for final assembly!
During which I realised I made a terrible mistake and had been a bit over zealous when placing bugs in and around the ankles, and now the feet wouldn't go together!
But after some emergency surgery and slight bug removal it all worked out.
I'm very happy with the final result. Makes all the work worth it.
I was tempted to add in some rust, but I really wanted to keep it very distinct from the GSR, and in the end I'm really happy how it turned out. The hours of picking out all the bugs with paint were worth it, it took 40 minutes just to do a single foot!
While working on it it felt so huge, but then comparing it to the GSR really put it in perspective.
I just thought I'd quickly mention also, on the topic of the GSR, that the creator released a 3D modelled head designed to go with their build. I printed it out to have a look, but I've already kinda fully committed to the brick built head, and honestly I really appreciate how much functionality they built in to it. Also the new head requires parts not in the original kit, and since bricklink is now dead, it would be a massive headacheā·.
Happy Hall'o'Ween! It wasn't intentional, but its quite fitting I finish this bug zombie model in October.
Ā¹-To repeat what I said in my original GSR build, I bought the instructions from the creator, so either I'd make one purchase of some perfectly fine bricks on one website, or make half a dozen purchases of other bricks with a certain logo on them on another website, for 2-3 times as much. Ā²-and full of tragedy Ā³-Late being after May of 2002. ā“-I want to take a moment to talk about the movie like object Bionicle 4, as I felt it didn't really fit in the main post. The "movie", for all its many various critical flaws, does pay respect to the power of bugs.
Dark shapes can be made out underneath this large robot part these guys are moving with chains and ropes, and the sound effects would seem to point to there being a massive layer of beetles helping to move these parts. Its not really focused on so it has to be inferred. Though they were able to drag an entire arm out of the ground just with ropes and vines with no help from the bugs so who knows how much they really helped.
There's also a scene where a lot of bugs form in to a large man, so clearly these ideas weren't completely forgotten.
āµ-outside of things like....this.....
ā¶-I did watch the entirety of Better Call Saul in that time frame too. Also 100%'d Super Mario Galaxy. Fully. 121 stars as Mario and Luigi. ā·-pune
