Animal Crossing

Julian's Birthday Party

A tiny slice of Animal Crossing charm with a genuinely clever big-headed villager figure.

Brick Rated Score

3.9/5

Set 77046 · 2024

Pieces170

Minifigs2

Year2024

Set number77046

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The verdict

The first time I clicked Julian's big round head onto his body, I laughed out loud, LEGO actually built a whole new figure style just to get that snooty purple alpaca right, and it works.

This is a small, sweet set built around one moment, a birthday party you're throwing for Julian, and it nails the feeling of the game more than its piece count suggests it should. It's not a set that will challenge an experienced builder for long, but for the price and the size it delivers real charm. Animal Crossing fans and parents building alongside kids are exactly who this is for.

Best for: Animal Crossing fans and parents looking for a quick, charming build with their kids

The full review

What it is

I'll be honest, when I first heard LEGO was doing Animal Crossing, I wondered how they'd pull off those huge round villager heads in brick form. Julian's Birthday Party is where that question gets answered, and it answered it well. This little set drops you into one of the game's cosiest rituals, throwing a birthday party for a villager, and it captures that same warm, low-stakes joy. Julian himself, the vain purple alpaca everyone either loves or side-eyes, gets his own dedicated figure here alongside your player character, and the cake centerpiece is doing a lot of emotional work for something built from so few pieces.

The catch

Where I'll level with you is on scale and time. At 170 pieces this is a short build, closer to an afternoon coffee-break project than a weekend one, and if you're coming from the bigger Animal Crossing sets like Kapp'n's Island Boat Tour, this one can feel like the smaller sibling. The piece count leans heavily on small decorative and figure-building elements rather than a big structure to sink into, so builders looking for engineering complexity should adjust expectations before buying.

Who it's for

This one is for Animal Crossing fans who want a piece of the game's world on a shelf, and for parents wanting a quick, satisfying build to do alongside a kid without committing a whole day to it. If you want a meatier build or a bigger diorama feel, look at one of the larger sets in this wave instead, but if you just want Julian, grinning at his own birthday cake, this does the job with real warmth.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

The build moves fast and stays playful the whole way through, you're stacking up party decorations, snapping together a compact cake, and finishing with the two figures that are really the heart of the set. There isn't much structural complexity here, it's more about assembling a scene piece by piece than solving any tricky technique, which makes it a relaxed, satisfying sit rather than a puzzle.

The standout is unquestionably the villager figure format LEGO developed for this theme, an oversized round head on a small body that somehow reads as instantly, correctly Animal Crossing the moment you see it on a shelf. Getting Julian's specific coloring and expression right in that format is the kind of small design win that fans of the source game notice immediately. The cake build uses a few sweet colored pieces to sell the birthday moment, and while nothing here is a rare or printed showstopper, the parts all pull their weight toward one clear, cheerful scene.

Fun facts

01Julian's Birthday Party was part of LEGO's second wave of Animal Crossing sets, released alongside other villager-focused builds like Bunnie's Outdoor Activities and Isabelle's House Visit.
02Julian is one of the most recognizable villagers in the Animal Crossing games, a purple alpaca known in-game for his vain, self-absorbed personality, which made him a natural pick for his own dedicated LEGO figure.
03The Animal Crossing LEGO theme introduced a distinctive oversized-head minifigure style specifically to replicate the games' rounder, more stylized character proportions rather than reusing the standard minifigure head.
04The set is designed as a standalone scene rather than a modular piece of a larger connected set, keeping the birthday party moment self-contained on a small base.