Before you can vote for cool new LEGO sets, or submit your own you'll need to sign in with or register for a LEGO ID: You're currently signed in to LEGO ID as . Would you like to sign in to LEGO Ideas with this LEGO ID? LEGO Ideas is designed for older builders. We’re sorry, but based on the birth date we have on file for you, this means we can't let you have an account here. Create and Share Galleries as a place to share your models with other LEGO builders like you. Are you sure you want to log out of LEGO Ideas?On Friday, there is going to be a movie about LEGOs in theaters. Even as I write that, it's worth pausing at the absurdity that someone greenlit a film built around a line of construction toys. But sure, we've seen Transformers come and go. We've suffered through Star Wars sequels. We're all trying to forget Battleship. Why should anyone be surprised at another toy-to-screen adaptation?The truly surprising part about the LEGO Movie, which is far more entertaining than it has any right to be, is how it looks.
For all the millions of dollars that went into producing the film, starring just about every actor you like — Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Alison Brie, Morgan Freeman, Will Ferrell, and more — the whole movie looks like it's actually made of stop-motion LEGO bricks. Emmet, the main character, is a LEGO guy living in a vividly lo-fi LEGO world. The film's animation style is purposely simplistic and jerky. Every element in the movie behaves using the same rules as if it were a real LEGO piece, even when the result is comically odd (exhibit A: Emmet's "jumping jacks" in the first trailer). Other than CG-animated facial expressions, everything has that nostalgically pleasant plastic sheen, right down to Emmet's shiny brown helmet-hair.Flame wars inevitably started online praising the film for returning to its stop-motion roots or reviling it for lying about how much CG it used, or because it's the Internet and that's just how things like this go.Don't listen to all that.
Surprisingly enough, the LEGO Movie is the latest in a long line of stop-motion animation classics that reaches back to the original King Kong up through Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to Wallace and Gromit. How is it possible that a movie that could've so easily disappeared as a failed cash grab turned into an animated marvel and homage to the playfulness and simple joys of the earliest animated films? To find out, we spoke to Chris McKay, animation guru for The LEGO Movie, who let us in on a handful of secrets behind how the film was built.The movie has a lot in common with Robot Chicken. If you have a) watched Adult Swim or b) have access to the Internet, you've probably seen a clip of Robot Chicken, a stop-motion, take-no-prisoners sendup of pop culture made with old action figures. It might be hard to draw a line between the sunny, "Everything Is Awesome" world of LEGO and a series in which your favorite cartoon characters are routinely beheaded, fked, shot, and get high. But that's Chris McKay for you.
McKay has directed several stop-motion properties including Robot Chicken. He's credited as animation supervisor, co-director, and editor of The LEGO Movie."They needed somebody who not only could be a good partner but also somebody who could run the ship, someone who knew something about stop motion and animating with toys," McKay says.McKay, a Chicago native and California transplant, grew up making movies with action figures — predominantly G.I. Joes and Star Wars characters — in his basement. Those same figures would later feature in Robot Chicken shorts, but McKay's work has always first been made with love rather than snark. The same spirit that allows him to (literally) skewer his heroes and get away with it made him a perfect match for the playfulness of LEGO.The LEGO Movie owes way more to YouTube than it does to Hollywood. "It all starts with the Brick Films, with these really funny, charming, sometimes really violent films that you can find on YouTube," McKay says. There is an entire homespun industry of stop-motion films made with LEGO bricks, charmingly called "Brick Films."
The best of these mini-masterpieces earn millions of views on YouTube and range from slices of everyday life to animated retellings of Eddie Izzard jokes and classic literature. These films were the real inspiration for the movie, says McKay."LEGOs are a really unique scale [for filmmaking]. The minifigs are 1.5 inches tall which means that you can, on your dining table, have a whole town with a police station and a bakery and a two-story building." There is also access to a wide range of properties. "You can have Harry Potter and Captain America and Superman all in the same city." The other obvious plus is that LEGOs stick to one another. It's a stop-motion animator's dream. "They also support their own weight and the joints are fairly sticky so they can hold a pose. For the most part, with the puppets we had [on Robot Chicken], we had to solve those problems with hot glue, by screwing the puppets into the set," McKay says.The whole movie really is stop motion. Okay, Internet, slow down.
Technically speaking, a huge majority of the film was made on a computer by the animation team at Animal Logic. That CG animation was created according to the rules of classic stop motion. McKay explains that in order to achieve motion blur or certain effects, they would crib cheats and camera tricks from the stop-motion playbook. "We set ourselves up with a bunch of rules and limitations with how we animated the thing, because in CG you could do anything. You have 15,000 explosions and their arms can bend and stretch but we said, 'No, we're only going to move these figures in the seven points of articulation that a minifig can move in.'"That means that if you (somehow) find a way to freeze-frame the film, you might catch stop-motion techniques, rendered digitally. "It became fun to find ways to cheat things," McKay says. "So, if you want to throw a punch at someone — this is like a classic stop-motion cheat — if you want something with a little extra oomph, you can have a wild arm leading the body.
The arm was broken off all the way so if you go frame-by-frame you can see all sorts of stuff. Honestly, it became more of a game. If we wanted [Emmet] to scratch his eyeball, let's move the camera in tight so we hide that we're moving the arm separately from his body. It's keeping the cheat away from the camera. It's a magic trick."Ultimately, despite the headaches, the goal was to "make it feel like an old stop-motion movie with a big epic scope and scale to it."Despite its visual style, the LEGO Movie also has a lot in common with Pixar. It may be odd to compare Finding Nemo, Up, or even Toy Story with the look and feel of The LEGO Movie, but it's built on similar principles. The Incredibles, that is a great style, but at the same time those guys also put rules and limitations on how they do stuff. A lot of the same things we're doing with LEGO they're doing on that movie, just they're doing it in their style." Take, for example, Wall-E and his mechanical limitations. "With Wall-E, you've got his treads, his arms, his eyes, you have to figure out a way to tell his story.
You have to animate based on that reality."The movie almost didn't get made. "When I told people I was working on The LEGO Movie, they were like, 'That's the shittiest idea I've ever heard of.' They thought it was like Battleship, and I don't blame them," McKay says. Warner Bros., the studio behind the film, had a moment of cold feet. "When I first got hired, the movie didn't have a greenlight anymore, the studio was emotionally on pause." One of the major concerns was the limitations imposed by the visual style. "I talked to a storyboard artist who said to me, "I don't think this is going to work."To help convince the studio, McKay created a short film with Emmet "auditioning" for his role. That clip helped sell the overall vision of the film, and gradually, even people who were at arm's length started to buy into the direction. "We knew this looks like the most cynical cash grab of all time," McKay confesses, but "it really was a labor of love."Stop-motion veterans Aardman worked on the film.
Any conversation about modern stop-motion animation inevitably turns to Aardman Animations, the team behind Wallace and Gromit, The Pirates, and Chicken Run, among others. Wallace and Gromit, in particular, was a spiritual successor to early stop-motion films, mixing classic technique with an absurdist sense of humor. "Some of the animators from Aardman had stop-motion characters and they also had CG characters when they needed to fill out crowds and backgrounds and stuff like that [on Pirates]," McKay says. "They came over and worked on our project. The team had artists from London, France, Italy, Canada, and the U.S. We had people from all over the world coming to Australia to work on this movie."Stop motion is a magic trick. Anyone who grew up cheering at Mighty Joe Young or Jason and the Argonauts understands the strange pull of stop-motion animation. Namely, that it will inevitably look fake. The lush digital landscape of Avatar or the blocky vistas of Up offer windows into other worlds, but they, for the most part, create alternate realities governed by their own rules.