Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Lego Movie
2014 · Phil Lord · The Lego Movie on Sightlines
Look at the water. In The Lego Movie the ocean is not a fluid simulation. It is a heap of blue plates, thousands of them, tumbling over one another in waves, and every one is a piece you could buy. Smoke is bricks. Fire is bricks. Explosions are bursts of clear and colored parts. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, working with the animators at Animal Logic in Sydney, set themselves a rule that sounds like a gag. It turned out to be a method: nothing appears on screen that the toy could not actually build.
The rule is also the story. Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt) is a construction worker whose whole personality is the instruction manual. His city, Bricksburg, runs on instructions too. Against it stands Lord Business (Will Ferrell), who wants to fix the world permanently in place with a superweapon called the Kragle, which is a tube of Krazy Glue with some letters rubbed off the label. Glue is the end of play. The villain dreams of a world nobody can take apart.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, can help us see why the look and the jokes are one idea. He begins with a distinction about movement. Older arts caught motion in privileged instants: the pose, the climax, the ideal form a statue or a painting freezes. Cinema does something humbler. It samples motion at any-instant-whatever, one ordinary moment after another, none of them more important than the rest. Deleuze then makes a claim that sounds odd at first: the cartoon belongs fully to cinema, because animated drawing does not give us a finished pose. It gives us a figure that is always in the middle of being formed.
The Lego Movie sets those two kinds of movement against each other. The minifigure is pure pose. It has a turning head, shoulders, hips and claw hands, and the animators mostly refused to cheat those joints, so Emmet moves with the hinged stiffness of a figure set down by a hand between exposures. Every gesture is a fixed position. Then a Master Builder looks at the scenery around them and a vehicle starts to exist, brick by brick, in one unbroken move. The editors, David Burrows and Chris McKay, cut these sequences as rapid montages of parts snapping into place. No single frame is the finished machine. The machine is happening. That is Deleuze's figure-in-formation, and the film turns it into a moral position. The manual stands for the approved shape. Building stands for the moment that was never planned. Lord Business wants the whole universe to be a privileged instant, glued.
There is a second trick here, and it touches the oldest argument in film theory. André Bazin held that a photograph carries a guarantee: something really stood in front of the lens. This film has no lens. Yet Pablo Plaisted is credited as director of photography, and the virtual camera behaves like a macro rig inches from small plastic objects, with shallow focus, soft edges and backgrounds melting into blur. It jitters slightly, the way a nudged tripod would. The surfaces carry scuffs, dust in the crevices, fingerprints. The aim was a still frame you could mistake for a photograph of a real build.
So the film fakes Bazin's guarantee, and it does so out of love. Its model is the hobbyist brickfilm, going back to The Magic Portal (1989), with its pose-to-pose minifigures, visible studs and short, jerky camera moves. Here is a question worth carrying into the theater: why render a fingerprint? A fingerprint is the trace of someone who played with this. It is evidence of exactly what the villain wants to erase.
In its bones the plot is classical. Deleuze would call it a large-form action-image: a global threat presses on a world, a resistance gathers, and a decisive act is awaited. It is built on a duel, the ordinary man against the tyrant. But every part of that structure arrives already used. Emmet is mistaken for the prophesied “Special.” The chosen-one beats come straight from The Matrix. Deleuze described a consciousness of clichés in American films after the war, characters who drifted through a world of ready-made images and half knew it. Lord and Miller take that literally. Clichés here are prefabricated pieces, and the film neither escapes them nor mourns them. It snaps them together into something new. Whether that answers Deleuze or dodges him is a good argument to have after the credits.
The frame works under the same discipline. The city shots pack in buildable detail, closer to a Richard Scarry page than to most feature animation, and each world keeps to the real palette of molded Lego colors: the pastel overload of Cloud Cuckoo Land, the industrial grays of Lord Business's tower, the dust of the Old West. Each frame is a closed system with a rule, and the rule is what makes it rich.
The narrative moves at the speed of assembly. McKay came from Robot Chicken, and that show's grammar is everywhere: abrupt shifts of tone, gags that rely on knowing the source, sincerity used as a punchline. The film often cuts away before a joke has finished landing and trusts us to complete it. We end up building the comedy ourselves, a beat behind the cut.
The lineage is a parts bin. From Star Wars comes ILM's “used universe,” models scuffed and greased until they looked lived in, and the Millennium Falcon, kitbashed from spare parts, which is the literal template for Master Builder improvisation. From Toy Story comes molded-plastic shading and the discovery that a toy's limited range of motion can be a performance. From The Matrix comes the empty construct where objects rack into existence on demand. From Shrek comes the house style: pop songs as punctuation, star voices cast against their figures, and a second layer of jokes pitched over the child's head at the parent. Forward from it come The Lego Batman Movie, which McKay directed, The Lego Ninjago Movie, The Lego Movie 2, and a whole cycle of animated features built on brands.
Its significance is that it shouldn't exist. It is a toy commercial, openly, and it is also a satire of a company's urge to control how its toys get used, and the brand owner signed off on a villain whose plan is to glue everything into the configuration the manual approves. It showed that intellectual-property filmmaking could hold a critique of intellectual property and survive.
So when you watch it, watch the joints. Notice when Emmet is posed and when the world around him is being formed. Count the bricks in a wave. And ask of every frame whether it is a finished figure or one still under construction. The film is betting on the second.
Concepts in play
- any-instant-whatever — Master Builder sequences where a vehicle materializes brick by brick out of the surrounding scenery in one unbroken move, cut as rapid montages of parts snapping into place, so that no frame is the finished figure.
- privileged-instants — Minifigures animated within their fixed joints (turning head, shoulders, hips, claw hands) with stepped, hand-posed movement; Lord Business's Kragle plan to glue the world into permanent, manual-approved configurations.
- action-image-large-form — A global threat (Lord Business and the Kragle) presses on the Lego universe while a resistance gathers around the supposed 'Special' and waits for a decisive act.
- binomial — The duel between Emmet, the ordinary conforming construction worker, and the tyrant Lord Business.
- consciousness-of-cliches — Chosen-one prophecy beats quoted from The Matrix, the 'Special' mistaken identity, Robot Chicken-style jokes that rely on knowing the source, and sincerity used as a punchline: clichés treated as prefabricated parts to recombine.
- symbol — The Kragle, a tube of Krazy Glue with letters rubbed off, condenses the film's organizing relation between instructions/fixity and building/play.
- the closed set (cadre) — Densely packed, buildable city compositions in a Richard Scarry vein, and each world color-keyed to the real palette of molded Lego colors (Cloud Cuckoo Land pastels, the grays of Lord Business's tower, Old West dust).