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 Call
it the February surprise.
The Lego Movie had so much going against it. First off, it’s a movie inspired by
a system of interlocking plastic blocks. Second, it’s a branded entertainment—an
ominous category if ever there was one, all but guaranteeing a clamorous action
infomercial shoddily intercut with a formulaic “human” story. It doesn't at all
feel like the extended toy commercial you might be fearing. Instead, it's the
smartest, funniest and most dazzlingly inventive children's movie to come along
in years.
Chris Miller and Philip Lord, the creators of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
and 21 Jump Street, along with the highly regarded but short-lived animated
series Clone High, have gone and done it. They’ve made a clever, vividly
imagined, consistently funny, eye-poppingly pretty and oddly profound movie
about...Legos. Miller and Lord do not grovel before their corporate overlords,
and at times even appear to be conveying the subversive message that, when it
comes to Legos, less may be more (or at least that a random bucket of unsorted
blocks may be preferable to a brand-new boxed set).
The Lego cosmos as envisioned in this story is divided between two sets of
principles. On the one side, there’s order, conformity, and stasis, as embodied
by the perfection-obsessed, freedom-stifling President Business (voice of Will
Ferrell). On the other, there’s chaos, individuality, and change, represented by
the rebel movement that’s attempting to find a mysterious lost object called the
Piece of Resistance, which will stop President Business before he can unleash
the Kragle, a weapon that threatens to freeze the dynamic Lego universe into a
perfected but lifeless tableau.
But the majority of the inhabitants of the eternally-in-construction city of
Bricksburg live their lives blissfully unaware of this ideological divide:
They’re interchangeable molded-pla stic working stiffs, square pegs in square
holes. Squarest of all is Emmet Brickowski (voice of Chris Pratt), a
go-along-to-get-along construction worker who’s naively psyched to repeat the
same dull day over and over again, building the same brick towers while
obediently bopping to the same state-mandated No. 1 pop song (Tegan and Sara’s
irresistible ode to vacuity “Everything Is Awesome”) and buying the same
overpriced cups of takeout coffee. (A running gag about the ever-rising price of
that commodity is one of the movie’s many jabs at consumer culture.)
When Emmet accidentally comes into possession of a strange item that seems to
come from outside the Lego universe, resistance member Wyldstyle (a sort of Goth
biker-chick mini fig voiced by Elizabeth Banks) becomes convinced that the
thoroughly unremarkable Emmet is the Special—a long-awaited figure of prophecy,
who will be “the most important, most interesting, greatest person of all time.”
Half against his will—though he is, understandably, bewitched by the tough and
glamorous Wyldstyle—Emmet gets swept up in the rebels’ plan to disarm the Kragle
and take down President Business’s reign of spontaneity-crushing terror.
Joining Emmet and Wyldstyle on their mission are Vitruvius, a glowing-eyed
wizard figure voiced by Morgan Freeman, whose dubious nuggets of wisdom and
muttered expressions of annoyance are priceless send-up's of the long Morgan
Freeman-as-shaman voiceover tradition; the square-headed pink kitten Unikitty
(voice of Alison Brie), whose bubbly optimism conceals a deep well of repressed
rage; a blustering pirate figure (voice of Nick Offerman); and a chipper
’80s-era spaceman slightly dinged from wear (voice of Charlie Day). When he can
drag himself away from his buddies, they’re also joined by Wyldstyle’s
boyfriend, Batman (voice of Will Arnett), hilariously conceived as a
post-Christopher-Nolan “bad boy” bent on impressing the world with his
death-metal songwriting and brooding cool.
But President Business—who, as the mini figs’ journey takes them through a
sprawling Lego multiverse Emmet never knew existed, reveals himself as the even
more diabolical Lord Business—has some fierce allies on his side, including the
fearsome Bad Cop/Good Cop (voice of Liam Neeson), who enacts both sides of the
familiar law enforcement dichotomy simply by rotating his head to alternate
between scowling and happy expressio ns.
All this precisely orchestrated silliness unfolds against the background—or
sometimes, given the crisp-looking 3-D, in the foreground—of a lovingly
imagined, insanely detailed, and kaleidoscopically colorful universe made up
entirely of Lego pieces. Nearly 4 million unique bricks were used in filming,
and though the stop-motion animation is liberally augmented with computer
effects (to a degree that it’s impossible to tell where one technique leaves off
and another begins), there’s a chunky sense of real-world volume to the moving
shapes and figures onscreen. There’s also a lot of Lego-based humor that you
don’t have to be a 10-year-old collector to appreciate—gags, for example, about
the inefficiency of those C-shaped claw hands, which can clutch only cylindrical
foods like chicken legs or sausage links. The overall sensation (enhanced by
Mark Mothersbaugh’s playful electronic score) is one of being whisked from one
trippy Lego environment to the next—the trippiest of all being Unikitty’s
homeland, a conflict-free pastel Shangri-La known, in what I’m going to wager
will be the only Aristophanes reference in a toy-based movie this year, as
“Cloud-Cuckoo Land.”
The last 20 minutes or so of The Lego Movie contain a big conceptual twist, one
that threatens at first to drag down the zippy kinetic energy of the film’s
first hour. But stay with it, because it’s in this perception-shifting last reel
that the movie really sets itself apart, not just from most branded
entertainment, but from most films for children, period. As Lord and Miller
skillfully balance an impressive array of narrative and thematic spinning
plates—order and chaos, adults and children, practicality and magic, the real
and the imaginary—it becomes clear even if this anarchic celebration of the
creative capacity of play centers around the struggles of
one-and-a-half-inch-tall minif igures, it’s built on a distinctly human scale.
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