This is pretty clever. The plastic brickwork of The Lego Movie gives us quaintly jolly entertainment that comes from parody, riotous cuteness and a throwback to 1980s stoners’ anti-chic. The Lego Movie is the proud and clumsy combination of Wreck It Ralph crossed with the headlong quest narrative of Toy Story, and while kids will dig the gabby characters — from Lego’s bricklaying stars to Batman as well as cameos by pretty much everyone else in the galaxy, including Han Solo and Gandalf — adults should find wild intelligence along this zany rollercoaster.
Emmet, voiced by Chris Pratt, left, and Batman, voiced by Will Arnett, in The Lego Movie.
Writers/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (from the first Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs) base their story on the most predictable set-up — and yet they embrace that predictability and have fun tweaking it. In the plastic world lorded over by the dictatorial President Business (Will Ferrell), an everyman Lego figure, Emmet (Chris Pratt), lives his life according to the instruction given to him in a manual. He follows rules and performs his duty as a construction worker; he sings and dances to the tune played to him by the system, which ultimately means that Emmet is a nice guy with no personality.
There’s a kick. Emmet discovers a “resistance piece” by chance, and he fulfils the prophecy of the Chosen One, or a Master Builder who will defeat President Business. Going down the rabbit hole, he teams up with Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), her boyfriend Bruce Wayne/Batman (Will Arnett, hilariously parodying Christian Bale), the Moses-like Vitruvius (the very funny Morgan Freeman), and their motley crew of dwarfed, slightly demented superheroes.
Of course, the film is an advertisement for Lego. A smart one, because it plays with the idea of finding the balance between strict interlocking precision and the joy (and chaos) of flexibility, which is what Lego is. Emmet has to prove himself a Master Builder by assembling random pieces into vehicles, weapons and thingamajigs, defying the rules set by the tyrant of symmetry.
The technique used to make The Lego Movie, more or less, seems to follow a similar approach. On the surface the film looks like an old-school stop-motion picture, with a slight staccato, start-stop movement of Emmet and friends, but in fact it’s done by computer animation that lends the whole thing subtle smoothness.
And while it’s not hard to expect that everything we see on screen is made from Lego pieces, we still have to give it to the filmmakers’ imagination, such as the strangely beautiful, plastic ocean with crashing waves on which a pirate ship sails to rescue Emmet at one point. Unikitty’s Cloud Cuckoo Palace, where an assembly of superheroes gathers, is a hyper-coloured utopia conjured up either by candy-addicted kids or LSD heads.
The idea that the deadliest weapon in this Lego galaxy is glue, which will make everything permanent and unmovable, shows that childish wit is probably the purest wit of all. Then we have Will Ferrell, who comes out to give a touch of real-life meaning to the toy land fantasy. The actor is a fitting cap to this madcap riot, and no wonder a sequel is on the way.
