Warner Bros has reportedly dropped its opposition to a Greenpiece parody video in which characters from the hit Lego Movie are slowly drowned in oil. The video, made to highlight the Danish company's relationship with Shell, has reappeared on YouTube after being withdrawn last week following copyright complaints from the film-makers, according to The Wrap. Greenpeace reacted to the ban by moving the video, which had picked up more than 3m views, to a rival site and taunt on Twitter. "Did we offend someone? Banned from YouTube, back up on Vimeo," wrote the environmental group. Greenpeace's film is intended to highlight Lego's $116m (£68m) sponsorship deal with Shell. It shows a gloopy black substance slowly enveloping polar bears, owls, small children and even Santa Claus to the soundtrack of a downbeat cover version of the relentlessly upbeat song Everything is Awesome, from Warner Bros' hugely successful film. The Lego Movie is a pop culture-fuelled tale of an evil corporate behemoth named Lord Business who forces everyone in the Lego universe to "follow the instructions" and avoid non-conformity of all types.
The villain even runs a fictional oil company named Octan, and the irony has clearly not been lost on Greenpeace. The short, titled Everything is NOT Awesome was created by London-based creative agency Don't Panic for Greenpeace, and used 120kg of Lego bricks. It is intended to pressure the world's largest toy-maker into dropping a partnership that sees its products distributed at Shell petrol stations. Greenpeace is also using the film to highlight its new campaign targeting Shell's ambitions to drill for oil in the Arctic. Lego said in a statement last week that it was "determined to leave a positive impact on society and the planet that children will inherit". The statement continued: "Our unique contribution is through inspiring and developing children by delivering creative play experiences all over the world. A co-promotion contract like the one with Shell is one of many ways we are able to bring Lego bricks into the hands of more children." • This article was amended on 15 JUly 2014 to reflect the fact that Lego Movie studio Warner Bros, rather than Lego, made the complaint over Greenpeace's parody film which caused it to be removed from YouTube.
• News: Greenpeace urges Lego to end Shell partnership • Blog: Lego told 'everything is not awesome' in viral Greenpeace video The LEGO Movie, reportedly “poised for one of the best February openings ever,” can be seen as, among other things, Hollywood’s belated move into the “brickfilm” business. You have probably seen a few brickfilms, even if the term is new to you: They are movies made with LEGO bricks, typically animated with stop-motion techniques. Some brickfilms recreate scenes from and trailers for other movies; many tell their own tales. Over the years, a very active brickfilm community has developed online. And while brickfilms are perfectly suited to the YouTube era, they predate the Web video age by several decades. Indeed, it is widely believed that the short movie below, titled En rejse til månen (Journey to the Moon), is the earliest known brickfilm. It was made by Lars and Henrik Hassing in 1973, when the two cousins were 12 and 10, respectively.
They made it, Lars says on YouTube, where he uploaded the movie last year, as a gift for their grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary. He and his cousin were inspired by NASA’s Apollo program. Hassing makes no mention of Georges Méliès, whose Le Voyage dans la lune seems like another possible inspiration. Maybe the minds of innovative filmmakers just naturally drift moonward. The cousins were eventually able to show their film to Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, president of LEGO (and son of the company’s founder). “He liked it and had a copy made. We, in turn, got a LEGO factory tour and got some big sets to take home.” En rejse til månen was “filmed in Super 8 without sound,” Hassing explains. “Most of the film is stop motion animation, but there are also scenes with movement using a fishing line.” Lars’ little sister Inger, 10, helped “with the landscapes of papier-mâché.”It’s not every day a U.S. Senate election includes conspiracy claims over an animated children’s movie and a staffer dispatched to visit an opponent dressed as "Lord Business."
It felt like something we should check out. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, took hits from bloggers in May 2015 after criticizing "The Lego Movie" for pushing an anti-business message. Amid a contentious election that could swing the balance of power in the Senate, challenger Russ Feingold has repeatedly revisited Johnson’s statements, including June 3, 2016, at the state Democratic Party convention in Green Bay. Amid one of many reminders that he had visited all 72 Wisconsin counties, Feingold said this: "Something else I didn’t hear around the state is that, as Sen. Johnson said, that ‘The Lego Movie’ — he said this — that ‘The Lego Movie’ is an insidious, anti-business conspiracy. I didn’t hear that. My grandkids don’t even think that." Did a sitting U.S. senator claim Hollywood is in cahoots with anti-business forces elsewhere to bring their insidious doctrine to the masses? "The Lego Movie" — which was released in February 2014 and brought in almost $500 million worldwide — follows the exploits of an extraordinarily average Lego construction worker named Emmet.
The Washington Post described him as "an unthinking worshipper at the consumerist temples that President Business has erected to distract his citizens from Business’ evil plan to freeze them into a state of perfection." In short, President Business — later revealed to be the sinister Lord Business — is trying to glue all the Legos together to keep everything in its proper place, and Emmet and his team of master builders want to maintain freedom and creativity. We eventually learn the plot stems from the imagination of a young boy playing with Legos belonging to his businessman father, who plans to, yes, glue them together to keep everything in its proper place. So what did Johnson say? , a small group in Cedarburg and in a since-deleted blog post on his official Senate site. In the various comments, Johnson made multiple references to leftist control of education and the media and repeatedly referred to "The Lego Movie" as anti-business, though not in those direct words.
, phrased it in a May 28, 2015, post, Johnson "lamented what he called a ‘cultural attitude’ that ‘government is good and business is bad,’ giving as an example the animated ‘Lego’ movie, in which the villain is called ‘Lord Business.’ "That's done for a reason," Johnson told the site. "They're starting that propaganda, and it's insidious." Johnson noted in his blog post the same day that his comments were inspired by a Wall Street Journal column criticizing the anti-business tone of the movie. So Johnson clearly called the movie ‘insidious’ and implied it was anti-business, but there’s no conspiracy claim. (Merriam-Webster defines a conspiracy as "a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal.") When questioned on the "conspiracy" claim, Feingold’s campaign provided a dozen links to stories on Johnson and "The Lego Movie," but no evidence that Johnson had called it a conspiracy. A Feingold spokesman noted only that Johnson mentioned the movie to the Leader-Telegram two days after describing to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce how "the radical left" controls the university system, education system, news media, entertainment media and "more and more of our courts."
The coverage of that talk also did not include any more direct reference to a conspiracy. And the conspiracy claim was notably absent when Feingold’s campaign hammered Johnson on "The Lego Movie" several weeks before the Democratic convention speech. The campaign issued a news release May 14 and even sent a press assistant to Johnson’s Milwaukee office dressed as Lord Business, asserting he and Johnson were friends. The character offered to endorse the senator if he supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement backed by the Obama administration. As long as we’re on the topic, are Johnson and other commentators right to call the movie anti-business? However you summarize the plot, it is a feature-length piece of product placement, which seems a curious frame for anti-business propaganda. And while being "anti-business" is an opinion, it’s worth noting the creators at least didn’t intend it that way. Philip Lord, who co-wrote and co-directed the movie, described it as an "anti-totalitarian film for children.