Before I compose my thoughts on
hit animation The Lego Movie, you
need to know a little about me. I quite like Lego. OK, that’s a slight
understatement. You could say I enjoy Lego more than the average person. To be
perfectly honest, I’m days away from my twenty-eighth birthday and live in a
house in which the spare room is begrudgingly titled ‘the Lego room’ by my long
suffering girlfriend. I love collecting the stuff, building it, looking at it
and have even dabbled in stop motion animation. Hello everyone, my name’s Tom
and I’m a Legoaholic. Attempting to put aside my love of the brightly coloured
Danish bricks, I saw The Lego Movie
and came to the conclusion that, it. is. awesome.
Bought to life via the minds of
the wacky duo behind the insanely fun Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, The Lego Movie combines stop motion and
GCI animation. Injected with copious amounts of wit and childish humour, it’s
unleashed on an imaginative world, packed full of recognisable characters. One
of Lego’s strengths in recent years has been its ever expanding universe,
creating tie-ins with popular movie franchises. Added to the company’s long
history of inventive subjects and sets, the film is given a blank canvas to
fill with all manner of characters and creations. The movie’s central theme is
that of creativity and individualism and no toy typifies this more than Lego.
The main narrative is as unoriginal as a knock-knock joke but it’s surrounded
by a colourful universe into which all manner of surprises and joke are
crammed. Like a cardboard box surrounded by an acid trip, it’s expanded,
melted, twisted and contorted until something hilarious plops out of the
backside of a psychedelic aardvark.
