Emmet’s back to save his friends
Everything is awesome in Legoland . . . again
Five years ago, everything really was awesome for the makers of The Lego Movie. Shot quietly at the Animal Logic studio in Sydney, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s clever toy brick animation was the rarest of movies – a critical favourite that was also a box-office hit.
It became an instant franchise that has since produced The Lego Batman Movie (2017) and The Lego Ninjago Movie (2017), as well as theme park attraction The Lego Movie: 4D – A New Adventure (2016) and TV series Unikitty! (2017-2019).
And even if Hollywood suspicion about it being a toy commercial meant it missed an Oscar nomination for best animated feature, The Lego Movie is widely recognised as a fresh and inventive new form of animated feature storytelling.
Firstly, it was created with millions of digital toy bricks that were aged and scuffed to look like they had been played with. Then there was the surprise twist – belated spoiler alert – that most of the story took place in the imagination of an 8-year-old boy playing with his father’s Lego in the family basement. It was a movie about play that celebrated creativity.
And it had an infectiously catchy theme song, Everything Is Awesome, that was nominated for an Oscar and a Grammy.
But when Mike Mitchell, the director of Shrek Forever After (2010), Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (2011), and Trolls (2016), was sounded out about a sequel, he had a surprising response.
‘‘I told them they should not make a sequel,’’ he says. ‘‘That first movie is my favourite film and it’s a perfect film. And you can’t make a sequel to a perfect film.’’
But Lord and Miller, who wanted to write and produce rather than direct this time, pitched a story that convinced Mitchell to take on The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.
‘‘They told me how the [boy’s sister] was involved and how they were going to leave the basement and go to all these other places and I went ‘OK, that’s a great idea’.’’
Five years after the end of the first film, an attack by Duplo bricks has turned the Lego community of Bricksburg into a Mad Max wasteland.
The still cheerfully naive construction worker Emmet (Chris Pratt) has to head on a mission to rescue Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett) and other Lego friends who have been kidnapped and taken to a universe ruled by Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi (Tiffany Haddish).
This time, the way worlds are created in a child’s imagination is clear early on. A surprise switch to live action was never going to work again.
‘‘It’s like doing The Sixth Sense 2 and Bruce Willis is walking around,’’ visual consultant Grant Freckelton says. ‘‘You’ve got to own the fact that he’s dead.’’
In fact, a Lego version of Willis is one of
523 characters in a film that fires gags out at a furious rate early on. Other cameos come from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Abraham Lincoln, Gandalf, former American basketballers Gary Payton and Sheryl Swoopes, Cleopatra, Superman, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and a barista named Larry.
The scale of the movie is bigger – it was made with the digital equivalent of more than 172 million toy bricks. And like the first Lego movie, it was a global collaboration.
Lord and Miller were based in Los Angeles
except for a stint in England producing Solo: A Star
Wars Story (2018).
Mitchell was also based in LA but travelled extensively to direct production at a new Animal Logic studio in Vancouver (316 crew members), as well as Animal Logic in Sydney (215 crew members), and liaise with Lego executives based in Denmark.
‘‘It was interesting to have people all over the place,’’ Mitchell says.
‘‘You get a different perspective in the States, a different sense of humour. Then a different sense of humour and different ideas in Canada. Then from the group in Australia, you get amazing designs and they have such great comic sensibilities. I think it made the film better than it should have been.’’
After three previous Lego movies, a major challenge was keeping this one feeling fresh. Executive producer Zareh Nalbandian says they took a different approach technically.
‘‘Lego Batman had no live-action and it was shot in a very different cinematic style,’’ he says.
‘‘It was darker, more atmospheric with much more dynamic camerawork, but it was still contained in the Lego textural world.
‘‘In Ninjago, we made a very concerted effort to bring in what we call more natural elements. We had real water and real foliage juxtaposed against Lego bricks. No live-action but real-world elements.
‘‘Then in The Lego Movie 2, you’ve got liveaction again but it’s no longer a surprise so you weave it throughout the film because it helps tell the story and set up the finale.’’
Even for an experienced animation director, learning how to make a Lego movie was a huge challenge.
‘‘I work on a lot of franchises and I like shifting from one world to the next,’’ Mitchell says. ‘‘But I didn’t know how vast this world can be. For example, you can pull in any character from any other movie. Batman in this film is not just Batman. He’s a Batman that’s aware of all the other Batmans in all the other films.
‘‘You could pull in the whole cast from The
Wizard of Oz, which we did. And technically, even though it’s all done in the computer, we had to stay true to the actual Lego bricks that exist in the real world. We couldn’t cheat with our animation. When a character is moving, it’s got to be constructed out of an actual brick.’’ Designing the Queen was another challenge. ‘‘We tried all these different designs then we just decided she should be a handful of Lego bricks that can change into anything she wants,’’ Mitchell says. ‘‘It was a challenge for our animators and designers then we worked hand-in-hand with the Lego company, with everyone working on different shapes. It was like this creative think tank of talented people.’’
There was one especially memorable moment for the film-makers when Lego delivered a package of toys.
‘‘It was these characters that we’d been animating for the past couple of years,’’ Mitchell says. ‘‘It was as if a rock star had entered the room. You’d think too much Lego would blow your mind at that point but it was like a wind in the sails of production.
‘‘When you see a completed toy for a character that you designed and figured out how to make move – and you can really build it and know that tons of kids are going to play with it – there’s something weird and special about that.’’
Overseas, The Lego Movie 2 has underperformed at the box office, which raises the question of whether, with so-called franchise fatigue, there will be any more instalments.
‘‘I think we’ve got to be careful not to oversaturate the world with Lego movies,’’ Nalbandian says.
‘‘At the same time, Lego is a medium. There are always going to be more stories to tell.’’
‘‘I didn’t know how vast this world can be. For example, you can pull in any character from any other movie. Batman in this film is not just Batman. He’s a Batman that’s aware of all the other Batmans in all the other films.’’ Mike Mitchell