For a friend’s birthday a couple years ago, he got us tickets to see “The LEGO Movie” as a joke because it was showing at a theater an hour outside of the city. I had only seen it once before when I was younger and so I was not expecting much. If anything, I was expecting a movie that was simply silly and targeted towards kids. While it has many jokes, The LEGO Movie also gets deep, somehow, and provides a truly resonant message about creativity and anxiety about artistic expression while also being a solid critique of the capitalist system, all through the lens of a man and his son playing with a lego set in their basement. This is puzzling to me, because for a medium made up of cheap overpriced plastic toys, the movie still manages to tell a full, complex story with a powerful message. By all accounts it makes no sense, and yet, the movie exists nonetheless. This incenses me.
But it does not stop there. “The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part,” aside from having an incredible name, carries on the themes of the first movie and expands on them. The ability for the minifigures to contain deep and powerful emotions in their little plastic faces confounds me constantly. And the LEGO Batman movie gives us an incredible character study of the Caped Crusader himself that also acts as a love letter to the character and intellectual property of Gotham City. There is, of course, the LEGO Ninjago Movie, but we’re gonna pretend like that one doesn’t exist for right now. I love it just because it sucks so much, so pretend it’s not there when I say:
Despite the overall quality of Legos as a product, the creative potential to use them as a message art in multiple different stories lends it the kind of power that the story of Pinocchio has been proven to wield time and time again. Art, burden, creation, control, freedom. The LEGO movie franchise is very good, and it really did not need to be. But it was, and I love them for that reason alone
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