10 / 10
Official trailer
The Advert That Wasn’t
Everyone expected The Lego Movie to be a two-hour advert, and I did too. A film built on a toy line, made with the toy company’s blessing, with a theme song called Everything Is Awesome, had every reason to be cynical, loud and empty. Instead it’s a great animated film, among the funniest of the decade, and by the end it’s moving.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller wrote and directed it, after Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street. It came out in February 2014, cost around sixty million dollars and made about four hundred and sixty-eight million. It’s a 10, and I’d put it in front of anybody, of any age.
It wasn’t the only toy film of its era, but it was the only one that seemed to know what playing with toys feels like. That understanding is the whole reason it works, and the reason it’s still watched by families who never buy a Lego set.
An Ordinary Man in a Perfect City
Emmet Brickowski is a construction worker in a Lego city called Bricksburg, where everyone follows the instructions and loves it.
There are instructions for everything: how to get up, how to greet your neighbors, how to fit in, how to be happy. Everyone watches the same television show, drinks the same overpriced coffee and sings the same song on the way to work. Emmet is so ordinary that his colleagues can’t remember anything about him.
The city is run by President Business, who also runs the company that makes everything, and who has a plan for Taco Tuesday that involves a mysterious superweapon.
Emmet stumbles onto a prophecy that says a chosen one, the Special, will find the Piece of Resistance and stop him. Emmet finds it by falling down a hole, and a rebel called Wyldstyle decides he must be the Special. He isn’t. The rest of the film is about what that means.
For Writers
The Lego Movie makes its hero ordinary. Emmet has no hidden talent, no secret destiny and no ideas of his own, and the film never gives him one.
When you write a chosen-one story, the temptation is to reveal that the ordinary hero was special all along. That undercuts everything the story said about ordinary people.
Let your ordinary hero stay ordinary. Find the one quality they have that the gifted characters lack, and make the climax depend on it.
Lord and Miller
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have made a career out of taking a terrible idea for a film and making it good by being smarter about it than anyone expected. They turned a children’s picture book into Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and an old police drama into 21 Jump Street, and both were far better than their premises.
No film shows their method more purely than The Lego Movie. They were hired to make a product film, and they made a film about why the product matters to children, why building things with your hands is a form of freedom. Commercial filmmaking rarely gets cleverer than that, and the studio, to its credit, let them do it.
They also kept the tone moving at a speed few animated films attempt. Jokes arrive in the dialogue, the visuals and the editing all at once, and the film never slows down to explain itself. That confidence separates them from the studio hacks who make most licensed films.
The Joke Density
The film packs its frame the way Airplane! does.
There are jokes in the dialogue, jokes in the background, jokes in the signage and jokes in how the characters move, and it runs fast enough that you’ll miss a third of them the first time. A policeman’s face spins between Good Cop and Bad Cop. A pirate is built from spare parts, one of which is a shark. A cat-unicorn can’t suppress her rage.
It’s the same method as the best spoof comedies, applied to a children’s film, and it’s why adults keep rewatching it. On every viewing you’ll notice something new in the corner of a shot.
Batman
Will Arnett’s Batman is the breakout character. He’s a vain, brooding teenager in the body of a superhero, who writes songs about his own darkness, insists everything he builds must be black, or sometimes very, very dark grey, and treats every situation as an opportunity to be cooler than everyone else.
The joke is that he’s exactly what a child would make of Batman: every trait turned up to the maximum and every scene about him. It worked so well that The Lego Batman Movie came three years later and is almost as good. In a film full of great characters, he’s the one people quote.
Arnett’s voice, a gravelly, self-important growl, is half the joke, and he gets bigger laughs out of me than anybody else in the film. Every line sounds like it’s being delivered to a crowd of admirers, even when nobody’s listening, and that vanity is exactly how a kid would picture the coolest superhero in the box.
The Master Builders
When Emmet reaches the secret council of Master Builders, the film fills the room with every licensed character Lego could get.
Gandalf and Dumbledore argue about which of them is which. Abraham Lincoln arrives in a flying armchair. Shaquille O’Neal plays himself. Superman is trying to escape a needy Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman looks on. Later, the Millennium Falcon turns up with Lando and C-3PO, voiced by Billy Dee Williams and Anthony Daniels.
It’s a toy box turned out on the floor, and it plays like one. A child playing with Lego mixes Batman with pirates, astronauts and wizards without a second thought, and the film does the same. The joke is that the Master Builders are gifted individuals who can’t work together, and Emmet, who has no ideas of his own, knows how to follow a plan.
It’s also the funniest use of licensing in any film. Warner Bros. had the rights to DC characters and a handful of others, and instead of treating them as marketing, the film uses them the way a child does, as pieces to be mixed, argued with and thrown into the wrong story.
The Voice Cast
Chris Pratt recorded Emmet before Guardians of the Galaxy made him a star, and he gives the character a sincere, slightly dim cheerfulness that never curdles. Elizabeth Banks plays Wyldstyle as a competent heroine trapped in a story about someone else, and the film makes a running joke of it: she’s clearly better qualified to be the Special, and everyone keeps overlooking her.
Morgan Freeman is very funny as Vitruvius, a wise old mentor who admits he made the prophecy up.
Will Ferrell is Lord Business, all furious corporate bluster. Liam Neeson, as Good Cop and Bad Cop, with a face that literally spins between the two, gives the best supporting turn. Alison Brie, Charlie Day and Nick Offerman fill out the team of misfits, and every one of them gets a laugh.
The voice cast works because nobody is playing to the children. Everyone performs as if they’re in a real action film, with real stakes, and the comedy comes from that seriousness colliding with plastic bricks.
The Kragle
Lord Business’s weapon is the Kragle, a tube of superglue with half its label worn away, and the relic Emmet carries, the Piece of Resistance, is the cap from that tube. His plan is to glue the entire world in place, so that nothing can ever be moved or changed again.
It’s the kind of detail that only makes full sense after the twist, and the film is full of them. The instruction manuals, the micro-managers, the worship of following the steps, the villain’s museum of household objects treated as ancient relics: all of it turns out to be a boy’s view of his father’s rules.
For Writers
The Kragle, the Piece of Resistance and the manuals all make full sense only after the twist. The film plants its real story in plain sight as jokes.
A reveal that reframes everything leaves readers feeling cheated if the clues weren’t there. They feel delighted if they were and simply didn’t notice.
List five details your reveal will explain, then disguise each one as a joke, a prop or a piece of scenery in the early chapters. Check each works both ways. My piece on foreshadowing digs into this.
The Man Upstairs
Late in the film, Emmet falls out of the Lego world and into ours. He finds himself in a basement, where a boy named Finn has been playing with his father’s enormous Lego collection. The father, played in live action by Will Ferrell, builds perfect sets exactly as the instructions say and glues them together so that nobody can touch them. Lord Business is how the boy sees his dad.
I didn’t see it coming the first time, and it turns a very funny adventure into a story about a father and son. The father looks at what his son has built, messy, impossible, mixing everything together, and slowly understands. It happens in about five minutes, without a false note, and it changes the meaning of every scene that came before.
The twist also explains the film’s look. The filmmakers designed the animation to resemble stop-motion Lego, with every piece a real brick that could be built, and the slightly jerky movement mimics a child moving figures by hand. The Man Upstairs reveals why the whole film looks like that.
For Writers
The live-action ending doesn’t add new facts. It changes the meaning of the facts the audience already has, and every earlier scene becomes a boy’s game with his father.
With a late reveal, you don’t have to surprise the reader with information. The strongest reveals change how the reader feels about what they already know.
Before writing your reveal, write one sentence about how the reader should feel about your opening scene afterward. Then write toward that sentence.
Everything Is Awesome
The song arrives early, as the whole city sings it in unison on the way to work, and it’s funny, catchy and a little sinister: a hymn to conformity sung by people who don’t know they’re being controlled. Tegan and Sara and The Lonely Island recorded it, and it was nominated for the Oscar.
By the end, what the song means has shifted. It comes back, stripped down, as a song about everyone mattering, and it’s still impossible to get out of your head. The song does to you exactly what it mocks, and it does it so cheerfully that you don’t mind.
I’d call it the smartest use of a song in any animated film of the decade. The same tune that mocks mindless cheerfulness in the first act comes back as an honest celebration of a world where everyone gets to build something, and the film justifies the turn. It’s built to be catchy, and I resent how well that works on me.
The Oscar Snub
Oscar voters didn’t even nominate The Lego Movie for best animated feature. It’s still a strange decision by the Academy, and a much-discussed one. The directors responded with good humor, and the film’s reputation has only grown since.
Part of the problem may have been the category itself. A film this funny, this fast and this commercially successful can look lightweight next to more solemn competition. I think the Academy blew it. The Lego Movie has more to say about childhood, creativity and parenthood than most of what got nominated that year.
Watching It With Children
Children love The Lego Movie for the jokes, the speed and the bright, busy world, and most of them take the live-action twist in their stride. To them it’s simply true: the toys in the basement really are having adventures. The film respects that, and never mocks the way children play.
For parents, it’s a different film. The twist works as a gentle challenge to anyone who has ever told a child to play properly, keep a set together or follow the instructions. It’s rare for a children’s film to address the adults in the room this directly, and rarer still for it to do it this kindly.
What The Lego Movie Gets Right
It works for children and adults at the same time, and not in the usual way, with a few jokes for parents over the children’s heads. The whole film targets both, and the ending squarely targets the parents. It asks every adult watching whether they’ve become the sort of person who glues things down so nobody can touch them.
The question is gentle, and a film full of talking bricks asks it, so it gets past people’s defenses. That’s the achievement. The Lego Movie made a toy commercial into a film about what toys are for. It’s funnier and wiser than it had any right to be.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Inside its fake story, The Lego Movie hides its real one. The adventure about the Special is a boy’s game in his father’s basement, and once you learn that, every earlier scene means something new without a word being changed.
In a story with two layers, the inner story has to work on its own terms, or the reader won’t care enough to feel the outer one.
Write your inner story as if it were the whole book, with real stakes and real jokes. Then decide where the outer story breaks through, and let it arrive only once.
The Verdict on The Lego Movie
I give it a 10, and I don’t have a complaint worth raising. It’s funny for children and adults at the same pace, Batman gets me whenever he opens his mouth, and the basement ending will reach anybody who’s been a child or a parent. That covers most of us, and it’s why I’d put this on for any family I know.
