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And I mean, huge. The box office will be much bigger than I imagine most industry observers are anticipating. Its distributor Warner Bros. knows they’ve got a hit of some sort on their hands, so much so that they’re already started laying the groundwork for a sequel. The studio has released loads of clips ahead of the film’s release, perhaps to make clear that this is not standard-fare family CGI. The film’s humor skews older than the typical PG animated movie, and I expect it will attract neglected teen audiences who have aged out of the stream of tonally indistinguishable CG pics pumped out by other studios. The quirky visual approach to such unquirky material as Legos can be attributed to the film’s directing duo, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who have carved out a unique niche in Hollywood without being identified for any single project. Unlike animation creators like South Park’s Trey Park and Matt Stone, or the ubiquitous Seth MacFarlane, Lord and Miller aren’t known for any particular style.
In fact, their two most significant animated projects prior to The Lego Movie could not be more different: the Teletoon/MTV series Clone High and Sony Picture Animation’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. In between those, they’ve also worked as writers and exec producers on the TV series How I Met Your Mother and directed the successful live-action feature-based-on-the-TV-series 21 Jump Street. The Lego Movie may be the clearest expression yet of Lord and Miller’s stil-evolving voice as animation filmmakers. Celebrity voices, franchise cross-overs, rapid-fire jokes, and Legos-this film has it all, but what has been lost in the discussion is the film’s exuberantly original animation style. Many films have attempted to break the Pixar-by-way-of-Disney animation mold by suggesting a more stylized approach to animated movement, among them the Madagascar series, Wreck-It Ralph, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. Lego Movie pushes further than any of those films with a consistently inventive style of movement (the key word being consistent).
The clip below shows what I’m talking about. I especially love the workout scene with its staccato movements that are accented with held poses. The acting is funny and goofy because of the way it moves, which is something that almost never happens in feature animation nowadays. Even though the film was computer animated, the filmmakers treated the articulation of characters as if they were actual plastic Lego pieces. “Those kinds of limitations are fun,” Miller told Film Journal International, “because you’ve got to find creative ways to solve them—like, there’s only seven points of articulation on a mini-figure, so how do you choreograph a fight sequence with a character who can’t wind up to punch someone? We were really inspired by a lot of the short films that people make in their basements and post online where they come up with such clever solutions to those limitations.” Limiting the articulation of characters had the counterintuitive effect of opening up new creative possibilities.
It allowed for an animation style—naive, imperfect—that aspires to the charm of stop motion animation more than the mechanical flawlessness of CG. Not surprisingly then, the film’s animation director, Chris McKay, is a veteran stop motion director of the TV series Robot Chicken and Moral Orel. He was the director stationed alongside the animators at the Australian animation studio Animal Logic (which also produced the animation for Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole and the Happy Feet movies). From what I’ve been able to discover about the film, McKay played an important in following through on Lord and Miller’s concept and maintaining the film’s stylized approach to animation. Lord, Miller, and McKay deserve massive credit for conceiving an original, expressive vision for computer animation, and more importantly, managing to push it through the conservative studio system. Yes, they had the benefit of working with a unique source material—Legos—but it’s easy to imagine the animation in this film going in any number of less interesting directions.
Other studios will try to dissect the successful elements of The Lego Movie, things like its toy-based origins, off-beat voice casting, and cross-branding. Hopefully they won’t overlook one of the major components that distinguishes this film from the pack: its funny and unconventional approach to animation.I’d say our style has been pretty consistent,” says Phil Lord on the phone from his publicist’s office in Beverly Hills. “I’m not sure we made each film so much as got away with it.” “Like those Jump Street movies,” offers Christopher Miller, his writing and directing partner of 16 years. “I can’t believe they’re out there and made money.” “When we’d got so far in this business that we were making something called The Lego Movie and were getting to do very strange jokes in the middle of it… that’s, like, why we get up in the morning,” continues Lord. "Our career sometimes feels like a big, all-encompassing prank.” Clearly the directors of the aforementioned films, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, and the forthcoming Han Solo spin-off movie in the Star Wars cinematic megaverse aren’t getting by on cheek alone.
Also on their plate are an animated Spider-Man movie they're writing and producing for Marvel, a Flash movie for Warner Bros, several TV shows, and not forgetting the three Lego Movie spin-offs and sequels currently in development. But even their greatest admirers – of whom, full disclosure, I’m one – may have arched an eyebrow when it was announced last month that the twosome would be a star turn at this year’s Bafta Screenwriters’ Lecture Series, alongside such hallowed international auteurs as Kenneth Lonergan, Maren Ade and Park Chan-wook. The pair are both 41 years old (they’ve been friends since university), but seem somehow spiritually suspended in mid-20s-hood: you’d less expect to see them declaiming from behind a lectern than sliding on their knees at the back of the hall. That’s largely because they’re funny – a bias Miller both recognises and bridles at. “Sometimes comedy feels like the kid brother of drama, trying to get attention by being the class jokester.
But it’s actually really hard to tell a story while also making people laugh. It’s like trying to do two jobs at once.” Lord mentions a bone of wisdom that was recently slung at him by Lawrence Kasdan, the venerable Star Wars and Indiana Jones screenwriter with whom they (and also Kasdan’s son Jon) are collaborating on the Han Solo project. “Larry said once, ‘I never did a movie that I loved that wasn’t funny.’ By which he means, the best dramatic movies all have a sense of humour. Gosh, even Schindler’s List has one laugh in it. A sense of humour is never a handicap.” Working on the Han Solo script with the Kasdans, they agree, has been something of a masterclass. “We’ve been trying to get the script to a stage where it reflects the tone and vision that the four of us have for the movie, and it’s really been the four of us figuring out what that voice is together,” says Miller. A new resource proved unexpectedly fruitful: the creature designers at Lucasfilm, whose ideas for the film’s various nonhuman characters gave Lord and Miller comic ideas to riff on.
Lord recalls visiting the department one day and realising how potentially funny one alien’s movements might be – “so we got excited, and talked to Lawrence and Jon about it, and were able to fold that into the scene.” Their enthusiasm for sharing credit was there from the opening title card of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in 2009, which read: “A film by a lot of people”. “All of our movies are collaborative efforts, and movies like this one take so many people to realise, and that work doesn’t happen in isolation,” says Miller. “You’re always talking about the story, and those ideas constantly affect it.” The Han Solo film seems likely to continue the new Star Wars tradition of cast diversity: alongside Alden Ehrenreich, who plays the role Harrison Ford immortalised in 1977, and Donald Glover as a young Lando Calrissian, three actresses of colour – Tessa Thompson, Zoë Kravitz and Naomi Scott – are rumoured to have been shortlisted for the co-lead.
/HlteYut6m0— Chris Miller (@chrizmillr) May 4, 2016 Did they write diversity into the script? The answer’s yes, though in a very different way than you might imagine. “The needs of the story come first,” says Miller. “However, when we’re crafting a character we’re also trying to work out what the most specific, least generic, non-stock-version of that character might be. Then we start to talk about gender, ethnicity, their look, how they dress, and so on. Sometimes we might write with a specific actor in mind, and sometimes you know the character will just be her own thing, and trust you’ll find an actor who can fit it. And then when you cast, you can go through the script again and tailor the dialogue to them.” “We try to stay as open-minded about casting as possible,” Lord continues. “When you’re getting things down on paper, you might even avoid writing down a name, let alone if they have blonde hair or this or that, to stop. The great ideas start flowing when you stop thinking about the obvious way of doing it.”
That freedom is a standard part of the Lord and Miller Method. “We uncoupled the critiquing process from the creation process early on,” says Lord. “Creation is loose and open-minded, then come the moments where we’re much more self-critical.” Having each other as sounding boards helps. “Our advantage is that I’m not just trying to make myself laugh, I’m trying to make Phil laugh too,” says Miller. “And when something you put on the page is something we both stand by, when we go up against the Forces of Moviemaking, that have a tendency to shear the edges off things, we can be a little more insistent that we do it our way.” That became particularly useful during the making of The Lego Movie – a best animation Bafta-winner in 2014 – which the two were determined shouldn’t feel like a corporate branding exercise. “We were keen that it felt like the people who were making this movie didn’t necessarily have permission to do it,” says Lord.
In the end, they sold Lego on that hard-to-pitch aesthetic by showing them clips of unauthorised, fan-made Lego animations – “stuff that people had made in their basements because they were inspired,” Lord continues. “It became less about selling the toy than selling what the toy stands for. Engineering and creativity and” – he laughs, probably at the sentiment's swelling grandeur, but he’s right – “even democracy.” Those are serious aims for a film that in anyone else’s hands would have probably turned out to be a feature-length toy advert, but Lord and Miller learnt early that the wrong way to do things often turned out to be the best one. Their first big break was the short-lived animated series Clone High: a spoof of American high school dramas starring teenage versions of resurrected historical figures, including Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln. Lord looks back on the gig as “a hard show that tested our friendship”, and notes that the pressure they felt manifested in their work in increasingly odd ways.
In show 10 (of 13) they killed off the conquistador Juan Ponce de León, voiced by Luke Perry, and set out to make the aftermath of his death “as serious and chilling as possible”. To that end, the pair borrowed stretches of dialogue “almost verbatim” from the episode of the (entirely serious) teen drama Dawson’s Creek in which Dawson’s father dies: “lots of trauma, sadness, angst, pain and cosmic irony,” says Miller. The best way of skewering the show’s absurdity turned out to be copying it. “So there’s a good screenwriting tip,” adds Miller. “Why don’t you steal the work of other people?” Though neither can pinpoint a particular moment when they realised their writing partnership was going to last, they agree that Clone High episode was the one that confirmed they were on the same wavelength. “I wish I could say that the many iterations our scripts go through are a steady march towards excellence,” says Miller. “That’s a good title for your tell-all Hollywood book,” suggests Lord.