Review: LEGO Disney Maleficent's & Cruella De Vil's Dresses

LEGO Disney Maleficent's and Cruella De Vil's Dresses 43262 New Release Review Brick Banter March 2025

Double your villains, double your fun!

LEGO is always working to develop innovative new ways to engage with varying mediums and audiences, that’s what keeps the brand popular. With the arrival of a new styled line of brick fashion models for LEGO Disney, LEGO have created a new on-the-shelf display for your home. How does this new style or the LEGO Disney Maleficent’s and Cruella De Vil’s Dresses hold up?

Maleficent’s Dress

LEGO Disney Maleficent’s dress is a stellar highlight of this set, with large impeding horn elements and wings, it’s evil as evil goes. The set also gives us 1×1 corner tiles in trans-green, a good touch of her evil magic. Although this dress gives reminders of both her live action and her animated versions, this isn’t any particular dress of hers. As mentioned in the Cinderella review, these dresses seem to be inspired by the characters rather than direct copies of their outfits.

It certainly sways more into the fashion aspect of the character – but with little to customise it feels very rigid. Fashion is about creating and making your own twist on things – and with a set of two dresses you would almost think they were interchangeable with various options. We are fortunate that there are parts of this dress we can swap around with LEGO Disney Cruella’s, but it feels underdeveloped.

Cruella’s Dress

LEGO Disney Cruella’s dress definitely strikes itself more of a modern take than that of the character. With a new printed 2×4 tile with spots, you would almost think that they are different prints all the way around. The model does fantastically well as a clear split of black and white, but part of me wishes we had more red tones. Cruella’s colour palette isn’t quite so black-and-white, and with a character based on her, I feel like were missing something alluding to her coats and scarves.

As said previously, these dresses are allusions to the characters and their outfits, but I can’t shake the feeling of wanting to be able to add more to this dress.

The Display Box

The display pedestal for the set includes a portrait of the Disney animated Cruella and Maleficent, on opposing sides of the box. Unlike the Cinderella box of this same wave, this display box exists moreover to hide the figures away when not in use. No play features, no tea party – purely storage. Although the figures of this set are indeed amazing characters, with their capes and new fur coat elements, this is the part of the set I find the most lacking.

With two sides of the LEGO Disney display base used to represent two characters, one of them is always at a loss. One dress always finds itself held up on a pedestal whereas the other is not. My solution to this would be to instead of open the lower container on two sides, instead split it in two – one half each. On display, you don’t need to see all sides, and then they feel a bit more coherent as a duo.

Verdict

At risk of sounding like a broken record, I have mixed feelings about this set. There’s a lot of potential in a fashion line like this from LEGO, and I’m all for it.

As far as allusions to characters go, these dresses are okay. LEGO Disney Maleficent feels right, but the amount of bricks in its execution tips it in her favour. The techniques used in the dresses are also fantastic, with minimal studs and clean lower dress design.

But I really feel like these display stands under the models miss the mark. With nothing more than storage and only one dress able to be displayed like this at a time, it feel underdeveloped. I wish we could have seen a way to give them both stands, or alleviate the boxes entirely. There may have even been ways to store the characters under the dresses at the end of the day. But it consumes a lot of parts for what is otherwise a collectible gimmick.

And that’s a lot to overlook for $110 AUD.