Official Lego Movie

[Savage Oppress]

I saw a Lego-version of Milhouse, from The Simpsons during the Master Builder Meeting Scene in the movie. How did Fox let Warner Brothers and Lego use one of their characters in the movie.

[Im a brickmaster.]

Haha!! You'll find this post ironic after hearing a certain Vitruvius line in the film.

Yep! As soon as heard that line I whacked my friend on the shoulder and said " We just did that in hour ago!"

Edited February 11, 2014 by Im a brickmaster.

[vexorian]

I saw a Lego-version of Milhouse, from The Simpsons during the Master Builder Meeting Scene in the movie. How did Fox let Warner Brothers and Lego use one of their characters in the movie.

Lego/Warner asked for permissions and they gave it?

[BrickG]

I'm sure Lego makes them a decent amount of money and it's in their interests to promote their own franchises that have Lego sets. I don't imagine permissions were a huge barrier there. Free advertising (and maybe they got a bit of the profits).

[Faefrost]

I saw a Lego-version of Milhouse, from The Simpsons during the Master Builder Meeting Scene in the movie. How did Fox let Warner Brothers and Lego use one of their characters in the movie.

Many of the big media companies are starting to grasp the concept of synergy among their properties. It was a good deal for Fox as it showed off the new Simpsons Lego stuff. It was a cute little Easter Egg for WB that did more good than harm. Much the same as

Disney's Star Wars stuff being in the movie.

[Dorayaki]

Disney's Star Wars stuff being in the movie.

As others mentioned, I' don't think it has to do with "Disney" because there wasn't any original Disney/Pixar character in this movie (Cinerella, Lightning McQueen, Dastan, etc). Perhaps it's due to the conflict of Disney and Warner Bros., or maybe TLC did'n let the protagonists enter Plack Pearl instead. I guess WB don't really care about SW, though I'm not sure of Marvel.

Edited February 12, 2014 by Dorayaki

[KingPixels]

The movie doesn't come out in New Zealand for two months, but having... 'acquired' it through other sources I have to say it was very good. If there was anything I didn't like it was the lack of Marvel heroes. Come on Disney, if Star Wars can make an appearance, why not Marvel?

I also thought the last 20 minutes were a bit unpolished, some of the dialogue was a bit forced and I'm sure about Emmet pulling a Toy Story on Will Ferrel's character.

[Faefrost]

The movie doesn't come out in New Zealand for two months, but having... 'acquired' it through other sources I have to say it was very good. If there was anything I didn't like it was the lack of Marvel heroes. Come on Disney, if Star Wars can make an appearance, why not Marvel?

I also thought the last 20 minutes were a bit unpolished, some of the dialogue was a bit forced and I'm sure about Emmet pulling a Toy Story on Will Ferrel's character.

It's because the movie was made by Warner Brothers, which owns DC. So any superheroes featured prominently would be DC's.

[Savage Oppress]

It's because the movie was made by Warner Brothers, which owns DC. So any superheroes featured prominently would be DC's.

It wouldn't make much difference. Warner Brothers let Traveler's Tales make Lego Marvel Super Heroes

Edited February 12, 2014 by Savage Oppress

[LegendsOfNinjago]

Being an long time FOL, I was astounded by the movie as a whole. Certain spots I'm the movie were disappointing...

...the destruction of Cloud Coo Coo Land...

But were very impressed with the animation.

[DraikNova]

It is, to use a phrase that will quite likely become overused as more and more people see it, awesome. Just so much lampshade hanging...Needless to say, I am quite hyped for the sequel already, and seeing what the culture of the

Duplo-oids (that's their name, right?)

will become, if the ending isn't retconned out. I predict that more "teenage stuff", like Technic and Hero Factory, will be popping up in the next movie.

[ResIpsaLoquitur]

One thing I'm wondering....

In Finn's basement, we can BRIEFLY see in the background a display shelf with Minifigures all over it. I wonder if this was supposed to be where, in Finn's imagination, where Lord Business put all the captured Master Builders. After all, who else would you put on a Minifig display except your most treasured characters? This could particularly explain why all of the Collectible Minifigures showed up in Cloud Cuckoo Land and in Business' prison rather than throughout the various themed lands. Since Finn's dad obsessively separated out the various Lego themes, it'd make sense that he'd store the CMFs on their own shelf rather than incorporating them into the various lands where they'd fit.

Thoughts?

Edited February 13, 2014 by ResIpsaLoquitur

[vexorian]

To use spoiler tags, use [spoiler]blah blah blah [/spoiler]

There's a cool theory that

President Business is Finn's father's Sig fig.

Edited February 13, 2014 by vexorian

[Lyichir]

To use spoiler tags, use

blah blah blah

There's a cool theory that

President Business is Finn's father's Sig fig.

It's possible!

My personal headcanon is that not only is it his SigFig, but it's also a sort of wish fulfillment; Finn's father may work in a large company like Octan but isn't necessarily the CEO or president.

[Tereglith]

I wrote a reaction piece to TLM on another site, and I wanted to share it here. I don't know if it deserves its own topic, so I'll just spoiler it in here. Get ready for a text dump! (I was writing for a non-AFOL audience, so there's some stuff in there that will seem obvious to you guys that wasn't to them.)

The Philosophy of The Lego Movie

I don't know that philosophy is the right word, but this movie definitely has ideas about Lego, and as someone who's had occasion to think more deeply about these issues than anyone probably should, I want to write a response.

The central conflict of The Lego Movie has been positioned by many as a simple conflict between freewheeling creativity and hard-line instruction-following, as if these two are diametrically opposed. The Dad is in many ways a Straw AFOL, a man so exaggerated in his Lego fascism that even the most rigidly purist of collectors who goes to the movie will be able to laugh and say "hah, I'm not as bad as that guy!" Nobody glues their Lego together. At least, nobody sane does. Only a few collectors fetishistically display their minifigures isolated and alone the way the characters in the Think Tank are, and I've never understood them. But it's still clear that, even outside of his more extreme practices, he represents a more common ethos that we are meant to instinctively find repulsive.

Curiously, the most common complaint among the crustier and more out-of-touch of AFOL circles is that it’s the Kids These Days who are all about following instructions and building their ninja turtles and their mindcrafts without ever being creative, while back in the Good Old Days when the author of the complaint was a kid, they never got instructions and always built creatively, and instructions are crushing the creativity of the new generation and ruining their brains etc. etc. Like almost all claims about cultural decline from the halcyon days of the author’s misremembered youth, such claims are unfounded and erroneous, but it is also persistent. Some of this generational antagonism is present in the opening scene, where Lord Business launches into a tirade filled with typical hackneyed “self-esteem generation” complaints that would have been most topical like eight years ago (when the scene is set, so they’re in the clear there), but it’s ironically flipped around from the normal online conversation in that the older generation is decrying the fact that kids can build any old crap and get praise for it, while he holds himself to a higher, instruction-following standard.

***

In theory, I would agree that the most rewarding activity one can pursue with Lego is the creation of new, original sculpture. But my shelves currently contain fourteen sets assembled with minimal modification from the instructions (two of those based on The Lego Movie itself!), and only two spaceships that I’ve designed myself. What gives? How am I not a hypocrite?

My tortured and overthought justification goes like this: I've long thought of Lego as a medium of art, just as valid as paint or clay. There is a huge, almost unlimited palate of elements from which to choose, all universally connectable, from the biggest baby-ready Primo piece to the fiddliest of Technic gearboxes. They can be shaped and connected into any form imaginable with practically infinite variation. They can form high art or pop fanart, showcasing skills ranging from the freewheeling scribbles of a toddler to the restrained subtlety of a virtuoso artist.

That makes following the instructions akin to a paint-by-number kit. You are given a blueprint and a paintset perfectly tailored to what you see on the box. It is up to you whether you use those paints to follow the instructions or not; if you are a skilled painter, you might produce something better than what the numbers could tell you anyway. If you are inexperienced, a young child or someone new to the hobby, you can try to strike out on your own, but following the numbers will produce a more technically proficient and prettier work. And those colors are limited in individual kits – you need to buy quite a few of them before you have a large enough palate to produce larger or more varied works at all.

My dad, who is a tireless creative (he's working on his comic strip right now) scoffs at this metaphor, not just because he would never do a paint-by-number, being a skilled painter himself, but because he has a different view of the models that come out of Lego box. He played with Lego back when the official designs were simple and boring and easy to exceed with a bare minimum of skill and creativity - in short, they were weak paint-by-numbers. But in the past decade, the designs have taken an incredible upturn in quality. If you want a nice, displayable model of any given vehicle from Star Wars, or a ton of other franchises, Lego is your best bet. The designs display finely-honed aesthetic sensibilities paired with great engineering acumen at skill levels unattainable to the average kid or even adult. The paint by numbers have gotten better - so good, in fact, that it's easy to see why you would want to follow them. They produce art that's often better than what you could make on your own, especially if all you wanted was a nice painting of an X-Wing.

***

Despite the simplistic dichotomy that many non-fans perceived in The Lego Movie, it actually understands these subtleties quite well. Emmett just follows the instructions, and neither he nor the audiences stops to think about where these instructions come from. It’s not until the third act that it’s revealed that they come from the minds of the captured Master Builders, just as real-life Lego instructions come from the Master Builders on Lego’s payroll, those special few individuals whose skills with the brick are so great that they can make a career out of it. Instructions are not demonic, creativity-destroying received wisdom that comes from a wellspring of unoriginality, as the rabbling nostalgia crowd seems to believe. Instructions are someone else’s creativity.

Know what else is someone else’s creativity? Everything you read or watch. Moving away from the paint-by-numbers metaphor I just set up, from this perspective, putting together a model by the instructions is the akin to reading a book and reconstructing the same mental image that the author had as he wrote it. I would certainly hope that nobody decries children reading and wishes they would just write all the time instead, especially since the only way to become a better writer is to read! I would argue that the only way to become a better builder is to first follow the instructions on a few sets as well (or a few dozen).

Anyone who hasn’t built a model out of the box since the 80s or 90s might not understand, but in my past few builds I’ve run into moments where a particularly creative construction, or a stunning concurrence of angles and ratios, has made me go ‘wow’ the same way a dazzling turn of phrase or a blindsiding plot twist might. The way the marquee is attached to the mini Café Corner, the inverted construction that allows for a hexagonal body on the X-wing - these are miniature engineering marvels that have their own type of beauty and ingenuity, that taught me ways of building I wouldn’t have otherwise understood. My dad doesn’t have time to build anything with Lego these days, but if he did, his creations would be untutored and basic. I may have followed the instructions more than he ever did, but that means I now have more functional knowledge.

Surprisingly, The Lego Movie even appears to understand this intricacy of the relationship between instructions and creativity. The Master Builders are a lot like my dad, filled with ideas and tirelessly creative. But because they reject all outside influence, never following directions or liking anything popular, they have no real engineering or planning skills, and their submarine looks like crap and falls apart instantly. It’s difficult for them to learn any technical skill to wed to their creativity. Emmett, meanwhile, has spent a lifetime following instructions with no inventiveness whatsoever, but he has been picking up technical skills the whole time, and when he does learn creativity, it’s not an uncomfortable match for him. He can exceed the Master Builders by applying the skills he learned from the instructions – the skills he in fact learned from their brethren in the Think Tank.

This is all heady stuff, especially for a story that ostensibly emerges from the mind of an eight-year-old, albeit a precocious one with pretty incredible building skills. There’s a reason that all of this analysis, despite being the true point of the film, remains subtext: because Finn has not yet verbalized all these thoughts he’s having about the nature of creativity and instructions. Clearly the issues are weighing heavily on his mind as he experiences great friction with his stressed-out dad, but he has no way of working through them except through play. That’s what the entire story is, from the very beginning – what is Vitruvius’ prophecy, after all, if not a set of instructions for the future? Lord Business refuses from the very beginning to legitimize the prophecy, denigrating it from the start as ‘made up’. Whether the prophecy is legitimate preys on the minds of the two main characters throughout the story. When they think it’s worthless, it’s their nadir. When they realize that they can build that future whether or not the instructions for it are legitimate, it’s a triumph.

This points us to the true core of the film then. It’s not a conflict between freewheeling chaos and rigid order, not by a long shot – if anything, that issue will be covered in the sequel with the Duplons. The villainy of Lord Business and of The Dad is not in prizing order and technical skill over disorder and blind creativity; he’s actually got a point there. The reason that the resolution takes the form of ‘everyone can be The Special’ is that this view is anathema to LB/The Dad’s point of view. He decides to ONLY legitimize official LEGO instructions, to ONLY take the Master Builders as the exclusive authors of his totalitarian rulebooks, to ONLY accept prophecies and views of the future that aren’t just ‘made up’. The reason we are repulsed by the Kragle is because it is the ultimate in validating one design over any other. It says that only the designs of the official designers deserve to be assembled, and any other purpose those bricks could ever serve is inferior. Nobody else gets to decide how the future should be built.

There’s nothing wrong with following the instructions at all, as long as you don’t care whether the instructions come from a Master Builder or another Lego fan or your own brain. It’s when you prize one or the other, following the instructional orthodoxy of Lord Business or the fundamentalist antiauthoritarianism of the Master Builders (and the online anti-instruction crowd) that your creations and your creativity suffer. Despite the fact that the song is satiric and kind of evil, it also reflects the <i>real</i> theme of the movie: when it comes to creativity, everything is awesome, whether it’s creativity grown at home or imported from Billund.

[The_Chosen_1]

Excellent writeup!! I think you nailed it in terms of what message the film was trying to get across.

[Gremer]

Were there any legged Managers in the Movie? I didn't see any.

[TNT apples]

Were there any legged Managers in the Movie? I didn't see any.

I think there were a few in the battle at the end, plus the Micromanager that put Ma & Pa cop into position for glueing had legs.

Edited February 13, 2014 by TNT apples

[Brickstarrunner]

Personally, this has got to be my favorite line said by Biznis Unikitty thus far.

[TNT apples]

Personally, this has got to be my favorite line said by Biznis Unikitty thus far.

Her face when she says 'numbers' is just adorable :wub:

[TNT apples]

Her face when she says 'numbers' is just adorable :wub: ,also, another great line is 'The walls are crying!!!' when the submarine breaks

And "You don't know me, but I'm on TV so you can trust me" from Wyldstyle

Edited February 15, 2014 by TNT apples

[Brickstarrunner]

Her face when she says 'numbers' is just adorable :wub:

I seriously want to see more of Unikitty somewhere, like maybe in a short one minute sketch or something.

[TheOneBrick]

Watched it in cinema with entire family today, best animated film (not including Disney films) in a long time. Really enjoyed it, as did my little brothers, sister and my parents.

[horizon]

Saw the movie today. And well... Everything was awesome.

[Aethersprite]

The amount of AFOL references in this movie is staggering! I kept laughing at all the little tidbits here and there, while my clueless family kept going, "what's so funny?"

Edited February 16, 2014 by Lockon Stratos