Like many stop motion animation fans I’m really looking forward to seeing The LEGO Movie coming out on February 7th. If you haven’t seen the trailer make sure to check it out!Looks like an amazing stop motion movie. If you look closely you’ll see that some scenes from The LEGO Movie trailer look digital, while other scenes look like they were animated using actual LEGO bricks. Some look like a mix of both. What’s going on here? In fact, not too many people are sure whether this is a digital movie or a stop motion movie. Because I was curious I did some research and found out that people have been asking the directors of The LEGO Movie about this for quite some time but the directors haven’t been very clear about it. Check out this panel from the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller answer the question in the first couple minutes of this video: I also found some tweets by Chris Miller from back in June that seem to confirm a hybrid animation style.
To curious: #TheLegoMovie is a hybrid film. CG w/ real Lego elements done in a photoreal stop-motion style. & a secret bit of live-action. — Chris Miller (@chrizmillr) June 20, 2013 Day 1 of 5-day Lego Movie live-action shoot with Will Ferrell. — Chris Miller (@chrizmillr) June 4, 2013 So the answer to the question “Is the LEGO Movie stop motion or CGI?” actually could be both! And from the sound of it the Directors don’t want to let us know exactly what parts are CGI and what parts may be stop motion. Either way it’s still pretty cool to know that at least some parts of this movie may be made from real LEGO bricks. That’s a win in my book! On the day of the movie's release, more information is coming out about the production process. Here's another tweet from filmmaker Chris Miller @DrewAtHitFix it was mostly CG with some stop motion & also some real LEGO still sets comped in. But Animal Logic made the CG photoreal. — Chris Miller (@chrizmillr) February 3, 2014
The film was made using mostly CGI. Special care was taken to ensure the LEGO world reflected the dynamics and appearance of real LEGO bricks. The creators examined parts under microscopes to better understand how they wore down over time. Animators experimented with different levels of dust and dirt on surfaces, and added imperfections to models, like tiny gaps between bricks. It's great to have confirmation of something we suspected all along. The creators of this movie were inspired by watching actual brickfilms. Here's an article in the NYT with more coverage of the production. This article at CGMeetup has a few more images from the studio. Check out the images of Emmet's expressions, video of the CGI animation process, and a real LEGO mock-up of a ship in the film in the video above! Did you enjoy this post? Learn more about stop motion with the Stopmotion Explosion Animation Kit - a complete animation package!The LEGO franchise continues to buck expectations.
When The LEGO Movie was released in 2014, it was another example of directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller doing what they do best – taking a bad idea and making it great. This week The LEGO Batman Movie hits theaters (review soon), and it seems to be continuing the tradition. But I’ll be honest – when Warner Bros said that they were working toward making LEGO an evergreen franchise, and branching out into a film about one of the building toy’s most beloved subsets, I figured that this is where Hollywood greed would get the best of a miracle moment in animation. I’d like to eat those words, at least in theory, as the first trailer for The LEGO Ninjago Movie has hit the Internet, and I’ll be damned, it looks fun, funny, and like an absolute joy. The movie has an absolute murderer’s row of talent assigned, voice acting wise, including Jackie Chan, Justin Theroux, Dave Franco, Olivia Munn, Fred Armisen, Abbi Jacobson, Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Peńa and Zach Woods, but what really shines here is the surreal and awkward humor, which worked wonders in The LEGO Movie, and continues here.
Here’s the official synopsis: In this big-screen NINJAGO adventure, the battle for NINJAGO City calls to action young Master Builder Lloyd, aka the Green Ninja, along with his friends, who are all secret ninja warriors. Led by Master Wu, as wise-cracking as he is wise, they must defeat evil warlord Garmadon, The Worst Guy Ever, who also happens to be Lloyd’s dad. Pitting mech against mech and father against son, the epic showdown will test this fierce but undisciplined team of modern-day ninjas who must learn to check their egos and pull together to unleash their inner power of Spinjitzu. Is it weird that in the year of our lord 2017, LEGO may end up being our strongest comedic franchise? The poster for the film is below, and I’m very much looking forward to it. The LEGO Ninjago Movie arrives in theaters on September 22, 2017.As gateway drugs go, “The Lego Batman Movie” is pretty irresistible. It’s silly without being truly strange or crossing over into absurdity.
Along the way it pulls off a nifty balancing act: It gives the PG audience its own Batman movie (it’s a superhero starter kit) and takes swipes at the subgenre, mostly by gently mocking the seriousness that has become a deadening Warner Bros. default. “The Lego Batman Movie” can’t atone for a movie as grindingly bad as the studio’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” which stars Ben Affleck as the Gotham City brooder, but at least someone on that lot gets the joke. The cast and crew of “The Lego Batman Movie” sustain that joke admirably, filling in its 104-minute running time with loads of busy action, deadpan humor, visual comedy, reflexive bits and an overfamiliar story line. It features the usual cavalcade of marquee-ready talent (Rosario Dawson, Conan O’Brien, Mariah Carey), the comic and less so, but owes much of its pleasure and juice to Will Arnett, who voices Batman. The movie puts a goofy spin on the Batman saga, but it squeezes its brightest, most sustained comedy from Mr. Arnett’s hypnotically sepulchral voice, which conveys the entire bat ethos — the Sturm und Drang, the darkness and aloneness, the resoluteness and echoiness — in vocal terms.
It’s blissfully self-serious, near-Wagnerian and demented.Mr. Arnett anchors the movie, though he’s nicely book-ended by Michael Cera, as the excitable pip-squeaker Dick Grayson, and Ralph Fiennes, who voices Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s trusted butler and operational aide-de-camp. Some of the wittiest moments happen early, before the story machinery starts humming, and involve Batman-Bruce wandering his mansion in his fetishlike mask and a silky red bathrobe, nuking his lobster dinner and giggling solo at “Jerry Maguire.” If Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” cycle suggests that Batman teeters on actual madness, “The Lego Batman Movie” ups the ante by insinuating that he has fully settled into near-Howard Hughes eccentricity. Not too much nuttiness, mind you, just enough to keep the jokes pinging and zinging, at least until the story amps up. Most of that involves the Joker (Zach Galifianakis), who’s not the transgressive opposition but a whining smiler desperately yearning for Batman’s attention.
This isn’t as funny or engaging as the filmmakers seem to think, partly because a child-friendly Joker can’t have the scariness or anarchic threat that distinguishes this character’s better iterations. (He can’t compete partly because he’s nowhere near as loopy as this Batman.) Mostly, the Joker is the master of ceremonies for the rest of the villainous horde, a motley crew of creatures that includes Harley Quinn (Jenny Slate), who’s mostly a trauma trigger for “Suicide Squad,” another supersplat.As an object, “The Lego Batman Movie” looks as good as its predecessor, “The Lego Movie.” This one is similarly shiny and bright, though sometimes as teasingly dark as Batman. Even when the story drags, which it does as the action grows frenetic, the shiny and bright bits catch the eye. As in the first movie, the character design does much of the most meaningful work because it conveys part of what’s enjoyable about Legos, including their smooth-to-the-touch plastic surfaces and knobby bits (studs in Lego lingo), which you can almost feel in your hands as you watch.
One of the satisfactions of Legos is their touch sensation, a sense memory that’s imprinted on brains, too. Basing movies on kiddie playthings is ingenious: It turns every Lego brick into a Rosebud sled, a portal into childhood. That makes resistance fairly futile, or at least tough, especially when the crew ushering you into the past is up to the task, as is the case here. Chris McKay directed this one, working from a jammed script by Seth Grahame-Smith, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Jared Stern and John Whittington. (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who directed “The Lego Movie,” helped produce “The Lego Batman Movie.”) The whole vibe is, as the first “Lego” movie insisted with its deliriously catchy anthem, awesome, so, relax, enjoy the show, go with the flow. I mean, who hates Legos? Isn’t that like hating childhood? Well, of course not, though that gets to what’s frustrating about these movies, which are so insistently good-natured and relentlessly hyped that it feels almost churlishly old-school raising even modest objections to the fact that — in addition to being, you know, fun — they’re also commercials.
It’s not new or news that movies have long sold stuff, including studio tie-ins and toys, as Walt Disney explained by example decades ago, though, like Pixar, he was also in the business of storytelling and not merely corporate-brand storytelling and building. Certainly there are worse things in life and definitely worse movies, including the “Transformers” blockbusters, which sell both toys and war.So, as far as commercials go, “The Lego Batman Movie” is just swell. But because its primary function, outside of making bank, is to extend two brands — Lego and Batman — it can’t help but disappoint. One reason that the first “Lego” movie worked as well as it did is that its novelty and trippier moments conveyed a sense of play and unboundedness, which is part of the appeal of Legos themselves. (It’s the better movie and ad.) The Batman story, by contrast, proves to be a prison, one its creators never escape. They toss around the superstuff and giggle at the legend, but they’re finally confined by the superhero story and its corporate sanctity.