Film Promotion campaign

The Lego Movie:

Reviews:
The guardian:
The repositioning of Luddite Lego bricks as a saleable staple of the digital
gaming revolution is one of the greatest marketing coups of the 21st century.
Parents who grew up assembling brightly coloured building blocks in the age of
the Bakelite telephone were amazed to find their children playing Lego Harry
Potter for DS or Lego Star Wars for Wii, the brand name meaning as much to
their computer-literate offspring as it did to them.
Terrific to report, then, that The Lego Movie does nothing to undermine the
Danish dynamo's ongoing reputation as a purveyor of fine entertainment for kids
of all ages. While younger viewers will delight at the whiz-bang animation action
and hugely likable familiar figures, adults will laugh themselves silly at the smart
consumer satire gags and goggle in wonder at the undulating LEGOLAND vistas.
Tipping its head toward the self-aware set-up of Wreck-It Ralph (via the Tour
Guide Barbie sequence from Toy Story 2), The Lego Movie casts (un)happy plastic
construction worker Emmet (Chris Pratt) as an accidental hero when President
Business (Will Ferrell) attempts to obliterate nonconformist creativity with the aid
of an instruction manual and some glue. Teaming up with Batman, Wyldstyle and
other assorted contrarians, Emmet waves the flag for free-form invention, which
appears to be Lego's rallying cry.

The denouement may be a super-soppy sales pitch, but the surreal slapstick
sensibilities of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs writers/directors Lord and Miller
consistently undermine any corporate guff. You'll come out singing theme tune
everything is Awesome in only mildly ironic fashion .

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/16/lego-movie-review-markkermode
Rodger Bert:
Awesome as in imagine if "Toy Story" were spoofed by Mel Brooks after he
ate magic mushrooms while reading George Orwell's 1984.
Awesome as in the sort of silly yet wily kid-appropriate PG-rated
performance by Will Ferrell that you've been waiting for ever since "Elf"
came out more than a decade ago.
Awesome as in geeking out over the sight of a grim little Batman hitching
a ride on the Millennium Falcon piloted by a smart-ass little Han Solowith
a suavely plastic Lando Calrissian in a flash of a cameo.
To be honest, my enthusiastic reaction might be slightly skewed by the
fact that "Everything Is Awesome" is both the title and most insidious lyric
of a catchier-than-a-Norovirus musical number whose sweeping
camerawork over a Lego-ized cityscape is almost as impressive as the
opening sequence of "West Side Story". Somehow, the dastardly ditty has
taken up permanent residence in my brain, snaking into the cubby hole
previously occupied by the Pee-wee's Playhouse TV-show theme.
Normally, I oppose the trend of plaything-based moviemaking, especially
when the results are as brain-numbingly awful as "Transformers", "G.I. Joe"
and "Battleship". But if those uninspired efforts had featured not just
Michelangelo the Teenage Mutant Ninja but also Michelangelo the ultimate
Renaissance artist as they fight for the greater good of interlocking
mankind, maybe they would have changed my mind, too.
Besides, with so many animation powerhouses settling for easy-money
sequels lately (we mean you, Pixar, DreamWorks, Universal and 20th
Century Fox), it is exceedingly cool that a major-studio family film refuses
to simply capitalize on merchandising spinoffs by offering an oppressive
100-minute commercial. Instead, "The Lego Movie" manages to be a
smartly subversive satire about the drawbacks of conformity and following
the rules while celebrating the power of imagination and individuality. It
still might be a 100-minute commercial, but at least it's a highly
entertaining and, most surprisingly, a thoughtful one with in-jokes that
snap, crackle and zoom by at warp speed.
This surreal 3-D computer-animated pop-cultural cosmos overseen by
directors/co-writers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the talented team behind
2009's "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs", takes off from those

countless amateur fan-produced stop-motion films found online before

concluding with rather ingenious live-action interlude.
For once, an overly familiar plot is intended to be overly familiar as this
action comedy lampoons nearly every fantasy-sci-fi-comic-book-piratecowboy movie clich that has been in existence at least since George
Lucas and Steven Spielberg turned Hollywood into a blockbusterproducing boy-toy factory.

Our unlikely hero is Emmet (earnestly and engagingly voiced by Chris

Pratt of TV's "Parks and Recreation"), an unremarkable construction
worker who is perfectly happy with his staid generic existence as an
ordinary citizen of the metropolis of Bricksburg. As is the custom among
his peers, Emmet doesn't just avoid overthinking. He barely thinks at all.
But after dawdling on a work site after hours, Emmet finds himself
tumbling into an underworld where a wise Obi-Wan Kenobi-type wizard
named Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman, mocking his history of movie
mentorships) mistakenly declares him to be the Special, the greatest
Master Builder of them all. Unfortunately, special is exactly what Emmet
isn't and he appears to be ill-equipped to battle the monstrous foe at
hand. That would be Ferrell's President Business, a maniacal manipulator
whose looming overlord alter-ego is a sly nod at the actor's despot in
"Megamind".
The minute that a swivel-headed henchman named Bad Cop/Good Cop
starts spouting menacing threats in Liam Neeson's Irish-inflected rumble,
you know that a "release the Kraken!" joke can't be far behind. And "The
Lego Movie" does not disappoint, as Ferrell's control-freak villain aims to
glue all the pieces of the city in place permanentlyno freeform
deviations allowed.
From there, Emmet and would-be love interest Wyldstylea tough-chick
cross between "The Matrixs Trinity and Joan Jett blessed with Elizabeth
Banks's vocal spunkenter a surreal hodge-podge universe where Lord of
the Rings-style warriors, Star Wars and Harry Potter characters,
superheroes, Abraham Lincoln and even basketball star Shaquille O'Neal
(a legacy of an actual 2003 NBA-sanctioned Lego set) join forces to foil
President Business's nefarious plan.
It isn't fair to reveal what happens next, other than to say that it continues
to be, yes, awesome despite a paucity of female characters (toothachesweet Unikitty who presides over Cloud Cuckoo Land doesn't quite count)
and maybe a bit too much crash-boom bombast.
Alas, I would be remiss if I didn't issue a heads-up to parents: "The Lego
Movie tie-ins include 17 new building sets and 16 new characters. To
ensure that your child's college fund is safe and your bills get paid this

month, I would urge you to seek out a theatre in a galaxy far, far away
from a toy store.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-lego-movie-2014
Vulture:
Im probably overselling it, but at one point during The LEGO Movie, I
found myself thinking, This is it. This is the one. This is the film that our
entire shared experience of pop culture has been building towards. I
think it was around the time we saw a council of heroes (called Master
Builders) made up of, among others, Gandalf, Wonder Woman, and
Milhouse from The Simpsons, Michelangelo, the Statue of Liberty, and the
2001 NBA All-Stars. Or maybe it was when a LEGO Batman played us his
own death-metal composition (Darkness No parents ) and
everybody nodded along to the songs edginess.
The LEGO Movie is the kind of animated free-for-all that comes around
very rarely, if ever: A kids movie that matches shameless fun with razorsharp wit, that offers up a spectacle of pure, freewheeling joy even as it
tackles the thorniest of issues. Its part South Park, part Lord of the Rings;
part The Matrix, part Idiocracy. Its a superhero team-up movie, a toystrewn dystopian vision, and a Bergman-esque inquiry into the mind of
God. And its somehow still also fall-off-your-seat funny.
The films irreverence is partly just a physical fact: It takes place in a world
made up almost entirely of LEGOs. The characters eat LEGO drumsticks,
they shower with LEGO water, their guns shoot LEGO lasers, and their
ships roll on LEGO waves. In that context, its hard not to think of
everything as parody. But writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
(who also gave us Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street)
have also designed the story to comment on its own LEGO-ness. Our hero
is mild-mannered, smiley-faced construction-worker Emmet (voiced by
Chris Pratt), a totally anonymous worker drone who happens upon a rare,
non-LEGO object, called The Piece of Resistance. An ancient (and, as
evidenced by the opening scene, totally made up) prophecy declares that
the person who finds this object will be The Special, the most important,
most interesting, greatest person of all time.
Emmet is clearly not said person. But before he knows it, hes whisked
along by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a beautiful, Trinity-like member of a
resistance movement determined to end the rule of President Business
(Will Ferrell). Formerly Lord Business, this seemingly fun-loving leader of
LEGO Land is, in reality, a despot who cant bear to see anything out of
place. Hes protected by Good Cop/Bad Cop (Liam Neeson), a seemingly
indestructible, two-faced policeman, as well as an army of giant, tentacled
micro managers who enforce his deadly vision of making sure nothing
ever changes that nothing ever gets built that wasnt pre-determined
and packaged with specific instructions.

What can be particularly tiresome about movies based on established toys

(as opposed to movies that merely launch toys) is an overwhelming sense
of brand management. You know a bunch of people up and down the
corporate chain at the toy company approved and oversaw what is
supposed to be, even in its most debased form, an artistic vision. (Every
time the Hasbro logo comes on at the beginning of a G.I. Joe or
Transformers movie, I die a little.) The LEGO Movie turns that whole
concept on its ear. Much of the humour in the film, as well as some of its
social commentary, comes from the toys very limitations from that
hilariously regimented anonymity that these toys can sometimes have.
Everybody in the film listens to the same radio station Rock FM.
Everybody buys overpriced coffee at the same place. Its a very LEGO
wasteland. Seriously, either LEGO executives were asleep at the wheel, or
theyre the coolest executives ever. At any rate, theyve done all of us a
service, and I suspect their product is about to become bigger than ever.
That Lord and Millers skewering manages to be so cutting without being
mean-spirited feels like a kind of magic act. But none of that quite
prepared me for some third-act plot developments that sent the film
spinning in new, surprisingly profound directions. For what starts off as a
light-hearted, ten-gags-a-second send-up eventually begins to ask some
poignant questions: What is the nature of creation? And is God a vengeful
hard-ass who asks that everything always remain the same, or a
benevolent dictator who wants his creations to realize their full potential?
Yes, Im reading too much into it, but its all in the spirit of the film. This is
a movie that takes LEGOs true ethos to heart. Take the blocks and build
something new. Find your own meaning.
http://www.vulture.com/2014/02/movie-review-the-lego-movie.html
The NY Times magazine:
Princess Leia and Harry Potter are dining in the eat-in kitchen of their midcentury modern home, sunshine bouncing off the white floors and
refracting through the enormous aquarium that separates the kitchen
from the den. I need more pink tiles for my dining room! their neighbour
Hermione calls from her rainbow-colored split-level ranch home next door,
which boasts three patios and two hot tubs.
I wish we had purple bricks, their neighbour Queen Amidala says as she
parks her yacht next to her two-seater spaceship. Maybe the Lego store
has them now.
I am powerless to those words and my daughters, ages 4 and 7, know it.
So do the masterminds at the privately held Danish Lego group. They
know how that first purchase of a small Lego brick box will invariably lead
someone in my demographic to the Star Wars Lego collection at Target,
where Ill ogle the Millennium Falcon and babble on about the
awesomeness of Ewok Village Leia. They know that my enthusiasm will

lead my daughters straight to Heartlake City, the girlie Lego fantasy land
thats filled with bakeries, beauty salons, high schools and horse ranches
(but no trains or traffic lights or firefighters or cops Or civic infrastructure
of any sort). And once were all caught in the tractor beam of the Lego
stores Pick A Brick wall, with its breath-taking kaleidoscope of specialty
bricks and tiles for $14.99 a bucket, thats when those Danes have us in
their whimsical Scandinavian clutches forever.
No wonder I feel guilty as Im driving my children to see The Lego Movie.
I should be taking them on a long hike or handing out aprons and baking
cookies. But we arent doing those things; instead we spend our weekends
hunched over expensive plastic bricks, and now were going to watch
them on the big screen. I have filled my daughters empty minds with a
blind devotion to an indifferent commercial empire.
The movie begins. Its about a Lego minifigure named Emmet, whose
empty mind has been filled with a blind devotion to an indifferent
commercial empire. Thanks to the evil mastermind known as President
Business (and later, Lord Business), Emmet watches the same stupid TV
show and listens to the same insipid pop song over and over again
(Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when youre part of a team!)
And spends his weeks hunched over plastic bricks at his construction job.

Its hilarious and unnerving. The movies cheery-dystopian tone, a giddy

hybrid of Idiocracy and Team America, is perfectly calibrated to appeal
to me and my children. And even though Emmets life seems hopelessly
superficial, the hook to Everything Is Awesome! coaxes us into
complacency. But by the time Emmet meets up with revolutionaries
dedicated to seizing control of the means of production well, actually,
the piece of resistance, a mysterious block that holds the key to
defeating their corporate overlord I feel wary. Where does the secondlargest toy company in the world get off offering up a Marxist parable
about the mind-control perpetrated by corporate profit mongers, like the
second-largest toy company in the world? The realization that Lego
anticipated my wariness and addressed it in the movie makes me even
more wary.
But then Batman shows up, and so do Dumbledore and Han Solo and a
bionic pirate and Lando Calrissian, and they build spaceships and
submarines and double-decker couches and, well, everything is awesome!
Branding may have finally reached its Mannerist phase. Where the oldfashioned brand earnestly embraced a core message that verged on
religious doctrine (Apples Think Different, Nikes Just Do It), the new
brand is aggressively self-aware, exaggerated and self-referential to the
point of collapsing in on itself; rather than imbuing the product with
magical qualities, it embraces and undercuts those qualities in one swift

gesture. The effect is to subvert consumer prejudices and preconceptions

and make us forget that were caught in a commerce-focused undertow.
Its a counterintuitive sleight of hand: By acknowledging that their central
message is unbelievable or at least exaggerated, the branding
masterminds gain our trust and bolster our faith in the brand. Will Ferrell,
for example, promoted Anchorman 2 and Dodge at the same time by
appearing on talk shows as Ron Burgundy and declaring that Dodges cars
were terrible. Dodge sales spiked. (Ferrell also voices President
Business.) In New Zealand, Burger King ran YouTube ads of two guys
eating Burger King while complaining about YouTube ads. Nearly every
Super Bowl ad this year referred to the fact that it was a Super Bowl ad.
The brand and the TV ad, the movie and the fictional spokesman is
hyperaware of its own fictionality and thus earns the right to
simultaneously denigrate and elevate itself as divine.
These acrobatics can be found in Legos trajectory from maker of humble
toys to a multibillion-dollar cross-platform marketing empire. First, a
simple product primary-coloured interlocking blocks is expanded to
include a universe of specialized pieces and wildly popular faces from Star
Wars, Harry Potter, Spider-Man and Dora the Explorer. The Lego empire
has since grown to include (among other things) six LEGOLAND theme
parks, more than 50 video games, Lego Modular Buildings (complex
models aimed at adults), a programmable brick called Lego Mindstorms
and something called Lego Serious Play, a radical, innovative,
experiential process designed to enhance business performance, which
seems to boil down to making adult co-workers play with Legos.
Legos imperial domination isnt complete without its core message, the
religion of play, which binds this multifaceted galaxy together. Play is
an absolutely essential need, not only for children but also for grown-ups,
Mads Nipper, the chief marketing officer of Lego, says. Sounding more like
new-age gurus than businesspeople, Nipper and other Lego executives
repeat the word play over and over, reverently, taking a basic source of
human happiness and placing it at the centre of their brands religion.
The brilliance of The Lego Movie lies in providing every piece to the
modern branding puzzle, including the surface-level subversion. Not only
does the movie effectively celebrate its own enormous, diverse and
endlessly seductive universe, not only does it rejoice in the importance of
play and creativity, but it also mocks the faux-positivity of modern
corporate schlock (Everything is awesome!). Eventually, Legos core
brand message is threatened when President Business transforms into
Lord Business, a manipulative mastermind who preaches the religion of
Awesomeness to distract everyone from his dastardly plans to make
creative play impossible.

In this way, The Lego Movie graduates to a new skill level in the game of
branding, an approach thats at once more grandiose and more pernicious
than ever. Because by the end of the movie (without spoiling anything),
Lord Businesss insistence on tyrannical control over his empire yields to
the wildness and unpredictability of a childs imagination. All of those
sophisticated constructions and celebrity minifigures and universes within
universes are nothing, we learn, compared to a simple box of (noncrossplatform promotional) colourful plastic blocks in the hands of a child. That
box of blocks proves that, even though you might feel average and emptyheaded, in fact you are the most important, most talented, most
interesting, most extraordinary person in the universe.
Completely accurate, but let's be fair. Maybe you are immune to the value
of the Lego message, but I am not and neither are my kids. SoIt should
probably be a red flag that the most memorable line from The Lego
Movie is pretty much the central message of any great marketing
campaign: This product will deliver you from averageness. But somehow it
still works. In the movies final moments, big tears stream down my face. I
am weeping over a 90-minute infomercial.
In the new branding world order, you can introduce us to the man behind
the curtain, be he Mads Nipper or Lord Business, and still deliver your core
message without apology. And then you might be lauded as subversive for
it.
Consider how The Lego Movie itself has been marketed and discussed.
After earning almost $70 million in ticket sales over its opening weekend
(Warner Brothers is reportedly already setting a sequel into motion),
garnering critical praise almost across the board (96 percent on Rotten
Tomatoes) and inciting cultural pundits to predict that Legos are going to
be huge in the coming months, many critics are arguing that The Lego
Movie is much more than a 90-minute toy commercial. According to a
critic from The Los Angeles Times, the movie is brilliant and postmodern
thanks to a rare case of corporate latitude even though the movies
message couldnt be closer to the core message of Lego. Fast Company
reported (somewhat breathlessly) that the producer Dan Lin and the Lego
executive Jill Wilfert put together a manifesto that they sent to everyone
the filmmakers, the studio, the company, everyone. And in that
document is the line, We are not making a commercial for the toys.
Then what happened? The filmmakers spent some time with the brand
designers in Denmark. And, according to the article, they thought about
how to translate the principles of the brand into a story.
See how this magic works? Not only can you make an elaborate
infomercial that appears to (but doesnt actually) undercut your corporate
message, but you can also talk openly about translating a brand into a

story, making it crystal clear that this is the films central purpose while
directly denying that this is the films central purpose.
Theres no more drinking or not drinking the Kool-Aid, in other words. The
Kool-Aid is raining from the skies and seeping into the groundwater. You
can argue that the worlds most entertaining and subversive infomercial is
still just an infomercial, but it will only make you sound like a spoilsport.
(Isnt Star Wars really just an ad for toys, too, in the eyes of Lord
Business?) Maybe most of us no longer care about such distinctions. Movie
or toy ad, critique or paid advertisement, party or promotional event, its
all the same, so why bellyache over such trivia?
Or as Emmet tells Lord Business: You dont have to be the bad guy. You
are the most talented, most interesting, most extraordinary person in the
universe. With enough cleverness and induced vertigo, the mad geniuses
of branding never have to be the bad guys again. All they have to say is:
You are special. The overpriced plastic blocks prove it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/magazine/the-brilliant-unnervingmeta-marketing-of-the-lego-movie.html?_r=0
Think progress:
This post discusses the plot of The LEGO Movie in extensive detail.
At the beginning of Phil Lord and Christopher Millers 21 Jump Street, their
2012 cop comedy that was a repurposing the television show that ran
from 1987-1991, Deputy Chief Hardy (Nick Offerman), explains to two
young cops (Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill) that theyre being assigned
to a unit in which theyll be impersonating high school students to
investigate drug crimes.
Were reviving a cancelled undercover police program from the 80s and
revamping it for modern times, Hardy says. You see the guys in charge
of this stuff lack creativity and are completely out of ideas, so all they do
now is recycle shit from the past and expect us all not to notice.
It was a very funny acknowledgement of the main objection that most
people had posed to the very concept of a 21 Jump Street. But Hardys
grumpiness also set a bar for the movie so low that Lord and Miller could
leap over it with even more glee than an apocalyptically high Channing
Tatum diving through a gong. If 21 Jump Street was proof that Lord and
Miller could make a terrific, funny movie within the confines of
Hollywoods constricting business model, their follow-up, The LEGO Movie,
released last weekend, proves something more ambitious: that the two
men can take their industrys obsession with pre-existing properties,
sequels, Chosen One narratives, and overhyped emotions and make a
surprising soulful movie out of all these tacky little pieces of plastic.

The plot of The LEGO Movie is as follows. Emmet Brickowoski (Parks and
Recreations Chris Pratt) is a happy, brainwashed construction worker
LEGO who lives and works in Bricksburg, a city run by President Business
(Will Ferrell). Business is a dictator who has homogenized culture to the
point that theres only one television show, an idiotic sitcom called Where
Are My Pants, and a single hit song, the admittedly amazing Everything Is
Awesome, made conformity the norm, and reduced his citizens identities
to their interests, be it in cats, surfing, or sausage. He also happens to be
a super-villain whos stolen a secret weapon called the Kragle, over the
objections of a stoner-sage wizard with the evocative name of Vitruvius
(Morgan Freeman), and plans to freeze his entire society in place,
thwarting a secret society of LEGOs known as the Master Builders, whose
wild creativity threatens Business vision of perfection. And Emmet is
unwittingly drawn into this conflict when he comes into contact with the
Piece of Resistance and meets another LEGO named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth
Banks), a pretty, creative Master Builder who, along with her boyfriend
Batman (Will Arnett), is part of the resistance.
But it has another layer as well: the movie shifts into live-action when
Emmets story turns out to be the creation of a little boy whose father
(Ferrell) has created an exquisite LEGO universe in the basement and
forbidden his children to play with it. The Kragle is actually the Crazy Glue
the man plans to use to cement his creation into place, ending the
possibility of infinite rearrangements that are exactly what make LEGOs so
endlessly amusing. President Business is a stand-in for the boys father,
whose appropriation of childrens toys and determination to strip them of
their anarchic creativity is actually a kind of death.
As much as President Business stands in for industry, its not for
capitalism in general, but for the movie business in particular. The LEGO
Movie never pretends that the products of mass media arent
outrageously entertainingthat would be a wilful denial of reality. Instead,
it asks us to consider what were losing out in that homogenization.
Almost everything in The LEGO Movie functions on multiple levels.
Everything Is Awesome is genuinely a beautifully-constructed earworm,
made lovely by Tegan and Sara, and funny and silly by the Lonely Island.
But as many times as its possible to listen to the song on a loop, it feels
like an awful waste that this is the only song well ever get to hear by
these collaborators. Who wouldnt want to hear more of what they could
do together? And finally, the song is a perfect expression of the formula
thats subtext in so much Hollywood advertising and text in internetoptimized headlining style: if every possible thing elicits the same reaction
at the same pitch, how can we have meaningfully different experiences?
Awesome isnt the only thing to value.
Similarly, its highly entertaining to have Batman bopping around Emmets
quiz, showing up with conveniently-timed Batmobiles, and tossing

Batarangs at strategically placed buttons. But The LEGO Movies version

of Batman reminds us of just how much our tonally homogenized
superhero movies and their failure to move beyond origin stories have
cost us. This Batman has all the same attributes as Christopher Nolans or
Tim Burtons, but in different quantities: hes an arrogant showboat who
composes deep metal tracks for Wydstyle, even though he doesnt
actually know her real name. When, at one point in the movie, Batman
seems to ditch Emmet, Wyldstyle, Vitruvius, and the mission against
President Business to go hang out with Han Solo and Lando Calrissian, its
entirely keeping with his character, and its the gesture that follows that
reads as a surprise. Superheroism is a small part of The LEGO Movies
pastiche, but their interpretation of Batman is the freshest weve seen on
the big screen in several years.
And even its larger narrative, The LEGO Movie casts a gimlet eye on the
Chosen One stories that have so dominated both young adult literature
and the big screen in recent years. In these stories, young people tend to
be targeted because they possess special powers, or to discover, once
theyve been chosen for a school or a contest, that the abilities theyve
previously applied to normal tasks are actually a portent of something
larger.
But Emmet, after accidentally discovering the Piece of Resistanceor not
really discovering it, it gets stuck to him after he falls down a holedoesnt
turn out to be the Special, as the Chosen One in Vitruvius prophecy is
called, or even particularly special at all. Hes a bit of a bland guy with
some silly dreams that turn out to be useful in an emergency. And
Vitruvius ultimately confesses that the prophecy is bunk, a propaganda
tool he dreamed up to keep his cohorts going in the fight against President
Business. When hes freed up from the burden of being highly unusual,
and singularly responsible for Business defeat, Emmet actually becomes
a more productive member of the team. And his fellow questers are freed
up to use their talents without feeling like their skills are somehow inferior
or getting in the way of Emmet realizing his greatness. The abilities that
Emmet eventually learns are available to all LEGOs, and the citizens of
Bricksburg eventually rally in defence of their city, unleashing joyful,
creative chaos in the fight against President Business. Its a nice inversion
of the idea that the super-villain advances The Incredibles that When
everyones super, no one will be: in The LEGO Movie, when creativity is
available to everyone, the things they create turn pleasure and joy into a
kind of infinitely renewable resource.
In The LEGO Movie, that conflict plays out on two levels. In the LEGO
world, Emmets adventures bust President Business monopoly control of
creativity, and blows up the idea that you have to have any particular
abilities to become a MasterBuilder. Given the opportunity, everyone is
awesome. In the live-action segments of the movie, the young boy

reminds his father that theyre both capable of building extraordinary

things, and that his fathers static vision of his dream universe isnt the
only way for something to be exceptional and fascinating. In a nice twist,
and an important comment on the terrible state of gender equality in the
entertainment industry, the father tells his son that he cant just give the
little boy a chance to play. They have to invite his younger sister down
into the basement, too: the movie ends with her creations from the Planet
Duplo mounting an invasion of Bricksburg.
And on a third level, Lord and Miller are almost certainly talking about
themselves. Working together, theyve produced three delightful
franchises from unexpected places: their surprisingly good 2009
adaptation of the essentially plotless picture book Cloudy with a Chance of
Meatballs, which earned a sequel last year, 21 Jump Street, which theyre
reprising later in 2014, and now The LEGO Movie. But for all the box office
success of these projectsthe first Cloudy made $243 million, 21 Jump
Street brought in $200 million on a budget of just $42 million, and The
LEGO Movie made $69 million in North America this weekendit would be
easy for Hollywood to treat Miller and Lord as an exception to be
tolerated, rather than as a potential business model to be emulated. Its
true that its hard to recreate wildly singular visions: Pixars present
struggles are evidence of that. But with The LEGO Movie, Lord and Miller
have filed not just an impressive addition to their resumes, but an
eloquent brief on behalf of filmmakersand film loverseverywhere.
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2014/02/10/3271191/lego-movie/