The Lego Movie: Socialist Toys Are Just Another Brick in the WallYou might not realize it yet, but we've just set your weekend plans: Take the kids to The Lego Movie — the funniest, cleverest, most exhaustingly exhilarating animated feature in ages — then leave them to play with their toys and see it again for your own wicked amusement. A few days each year, every family deserves to be happy.To a short list of wonderful animated features about cloth or video playthings — Pixar's Toy Story trilogy and Disney's Wreck-It Ralph — add this delight from directors and co-writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. The liveliness of their Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs cartoon and the live-action 21 Jump Street hardly prepares audiences for their ability to transform blocky Lego figures, with painted faces and no arm or leg mobility, into charming or rapacious characters a viewer can instantly accept and believe in. The technique, which combines stop-motion, animation and CGI, has an aptly rough, faux-primitive look, as if some brilliant kid made a madly elaborate home movie the whole world could love.
(MORE: Richard Corliss's Review of Lord and Miller's 21 Jump Street)The story, which moves so fast that viewers should wear seat belts, begins in the super-regimented city of Bricksburg, where employees of the megalith Octan Corp. do everything they're supposed to: work in the Octan factory (this is an alternate America that still has a thriving manufacturing sector), drink overpriced beverages ($32, no $40, for a cup of coffee), watch the nightly sitcom Where Are My Pants? and follow the Instruction Booklet as their Bible. Our hero Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt from Parks and Recreation) is the droniest of drudges: he consumes the party line yet feels ignored by his longtime co-workers — because they completely ignore him.One day he stumbles upon the legendary Piece of Resistance: a toy piece that could trigger the revolution dreamed of by underground rebels, including the blind seer Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) and the prole punkster Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks). They believe Emmet could be the Special One, the Neo of the Lego Matrix, which would make him "the greatest, most interesting, most important person in the world" — basically the Dos Equis guy with a liberal agenda.
("When he proposes s single-payer health plan, Republicans vote for it.") Emmet is none of these things, at least not yet; he's friendly but a little short of IQ, which leads Wyldstyle to conclude, "It's brilliant that you're pretending to be a useless nobody." He and the insurrectionists must battle long odds to overthrow the Legoland ruler, lord and tycoon President Business (Will Ferrell).(MORE: Mary Pols on the Similarly Energetic Wreck-It Ralph)"Hi, I'm President Business, president of the Octan Corp. and the world," his genially authoritative voice booms across the land. "Let's take extra care to follow the instructions" — and he malevolently whispers, "Or you'll be put to sleep," before returning to his cheerful pitchman's tone — "And don't forget Taco Tuesday's coming next week!" Under his secret identity of Lord Business, he plans to glue the world together with a weapon known as KRAGLE (KRAzy GLuE) so that "everyone will stop messing with my stuff." To this nightmare amalgam of John D. Rockefeller, Boss Tweed, Kim Jong Il and some bratty rich kid who won't share his toys, conformity is peace and imagination is insurrection.
Like Mayor O'Hare in The Lorax and the evil oil baron in the 2011 relaunch of The Muppets, business is bad, Bad, baaad — exactly the attitude you'd expect from a company founded and based in socialist Denmark, whose name comes from the Danish phrase leg godt, or play well (with others). We expect no less from those movie Trotskyites on the Left Coast. : "The Lego Movie is the latest example of Hollywood drumming anti-capitalist messages into its youthful audience." Has the Fox News Channel chimed in yet with its jeremiads?(MORE: The Fox New and Business Take on The Lorax)No question that the movie promotes what Prez Biz would call a subversive message: Be creative with your toys. It also urges kids to venture out of the virtual world they live in and use their hands for something other than typing. But if the Lego Movie workers have seized the means of production, it's only to increase production — to sell more toys, and tickets for a film whose official title is The Lego® Movie. With a market value of $14.6 billion, the Lego Group is the world's largest toy company, and with a single, almost infinitely adaptable product.
Over the years it has produced 560 billion Lego pieces, or about 80 for each person on the planet. (Confession: I was never a Legomaniac. So somebody out there must have 160 pieces.)Sales will surely increase from this feature-length infomercial, which summons hundreds of other characters that have been franchised to Lego. Wyldstyle's boyfriend is Batman, who may be less interested in her than in his Gotham-saving rep. Instead of Christian Bale, who played Batman in The Dark Knight trilogy, Lord and Miller go with Will Arnett, who's even funnier. Channing Tatum, not Man of Steel's Henry Cavill, voices Superman. But some Lego franchisees bear the original voices: Shaquille O'Neal from the NBA All-Stars set and Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) and Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian) from the Star Wars movies.(SEE: The New Lego Set for The Simpsons — House and Family)Toward the end, the movie get pretty meta, with a live-action sequence suggesting that the most authoritarian dude in toyland could be the Dad who shouts, "Leggo my Lego."
But this simply reinforces the tactics and tone of the picture, which says anything goes when imagination runs gloriously rampant. Anticipating blockbuster status, Warner Bros. has already bruited a sequel. That'd be fine, but we'd like to see Lord and Miller set loose on other brands from Scandinavia. The Ikea Movie, anyone? The Lego Movie Directors: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller Genre: Animation, action, comedy Running time: 100 minutes Rated PG With Will Arnett, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Berry (Recommended) If you'd told 10-year-old me there was going to be a movie all about Legos and the world they inhabit, I'd have been in line at the theater right then. Oh, it's not out until 2014? Okay, let me just build a time machine out of Legos and travel to the future. But adult me, hardened by years of non-Lego life experience — insipid toy-to-movie adaptations like Battleship, for instance, plus a sore lack of a regular free-form building sessions — had his guard up. Wasn't necessary: The Lego Movie may be one giant advertisement, but all the way to its plastic-mat foundation, it's an earnest piece of work — a cash grab with a heart.
Made for, with and about Legos, the movie is also made for, with and about imagination, and when that association seems completely natural, it's a win all around. The movie chooses as its hero the unimaginative but boundlessly positive Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), who's just another average Lego guy living in the big Lego city going about his regular Lego day. As with most things Lego, there's an instruction manual for everything, and Emmet eats, watches and says exactly what he's supposed to. The instructions say that's how you fit in, make friends, lead a happy life — only somehow that hasn't worked out for Emmet, who doesn't really have friends yet. (There's an unsubtle critique of mainstream conformity going on here, exemplified by the transparently dumb yet incredibly catchy Lego pop hit "Everything is AWESOME," which won't be leaving your head for days after you hear it.) There's an evil mastermind bent on destroying the world, a prophecy about a chosen one and a spirited adventure to get to, but let's talk for a second about how this movie moves: When Emmet showers, the water and soap suds are Lego pieces.
When circumstances lead Emmet out of the city and across Lego deserts, forests and oceans, the land, sea and lava are all solid Legos. Animated in 3-D, but made to look like it's a stop-motion joint, the movie takes pleasure in translating how we move to a Lego-based reality and revels in the goofiness of a world operating under Lego-specific laws of physics. When you ride a horse its legs stay frozen even at a gallop; your head can swivel 180 degrees; and Krazy Glue spells immobilizing doom. Writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, charged both with balancing the needs of a brand and telling a lighthearted story, never miss an opportunity to get silly with how Legos work: When Emmet catches a mysterious woman named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) poking around the construction site where he works, for instance, the slow-motion hair flip you've seen in a thousand Hollywood romances is a clip-on hair piece swiveling back and forth on her The self-conscious, irreverent tone holds steady as the stakes increase.
When Emmet finds a strange red piece that sticks itself to his back, Wyldstyle identifies him as The Special — the smartest, most talented, most interesting, most superlative-in-everything person who's destined to save the Lego world from the order-obsessed Lord Business (Will Ferrell). Of course Emmet goes along with the idea, with Pratt lending him a can-do enthusiasm that's infectious to everyone but the movie's other characters — especially once Wyldstyle, along with sage Lego wizard Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), and a brooding, self-absorbed Lego Batman (Will Arnett) discover that he's not special at all. That doesn't stop Emmet from being pursued by Bad Cop (Liam Neeson), on orders from Business, across the diverse Lego world. (If there's a Lego set for it, they go there.) Neeson also voices Good Cop — the split personality living on the back side of Bad Cop's head — and it's a rare delight to hear Neeson depart from the growl for cheery words of encouragement. Energetically plotted and lousy with jokes, The Lego Movie succeeds as much more than a marketing ploy, not least because it understands what makes Legos so appealing and embraces the anarchic way kids actually play with them: The instructions are there, but often the most fun you can have is when you break the rules and assemble something weird and new that only you could create — whether it's a spaceship built from mountains and alligators or a double-decker couch.