So I’m writing about a kids’s film…how fucking weird is that?! Those that know me realize that unless it’s Pixar or Hayao Miyazaki, I don’t tend to get excited about new releases from the “PG” catalog, and I regularly flee from the likes of Disney and Nickelodeon (I.E. I have no interest in watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, and I actively call Spongebob Squarepants an overrated piece of garbage). You can call me shallow, but I honestly think that most other people that read novels by William S. Burroughs tend to have similar feelings. That said, my editor insisted that I write a review for this season’s first big animated film/toy-advertisement, The Lego Movie, and after a few seconds of hesitation I finally gave in…and it was worth it! This is a kids movie that actually gets it right!
The plot…I won’t get into. Come on, it’s not like you’re expecting this to be Charlie Kaufman!
But yes, on a technical level the film is all aces! The animation style in The LEGO Movie really does earn the mark of the age-old adage of “looking like nothing else out there”, and it holds some of the most consistently impressive CGI work to date. It’s a film that simply will not, and cannot stop with animation that’s constantly on the go, and comprised of just about every action-set-piece that a movie about talking toys should have. Chase sequences, gun fights, martial-arts battles and the obligatory stakes-raising-epic-final-battle climax are all present and accounted for, certain to delight the bejeezus out of kids, but also remind their parents about what fun really means toward being a child too. The film really does look like it was built by hand and animated through stop-motion tactics, rather than being computer generated, and yes the movie does actually look like the most expensive, elaborate and official brickfilm (term used for film made with Lego bricks) ever made!