By Michael Scoular (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 19, 2014
Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip’s most popular way of sticking around for new generations is through his holiday-themed sketches. If you read Schulz’s work today in one of the collections that have been published, each covering a couple years of the comic, what’s remarkable and immediately evident is how they still act as a cynical guard against all that is popular in the so-called adult world, sincerely respecting the individual lives of children. For his annual October 31 tradition, the blanket-dependent idealist Linus would say no to door-to-door begging and decamp to a chosen pumpkin patch. Waiting, hoping for a visit from the Great Pumpkin, Linus would usually survey the field and explain why he was there and not elsewhere: it was without hypocrisy.
Films aimed at children tend to belong to the “do as I say, not as I do” world of parenting-by-proxy. Where fables were once made to frighten a moral lesson into them, the animated extravaganza based on a popular property or animal type just as forcefully pushes its younger audiences into “being” or “not being” something. In the case of The Lego Movie (like many other movies, the slogans printed in school agendas, and countless advertisements) it’s “yourself,” and woe betide those who fail to follow the lesson.
Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street), The Lego Movie is mainly different from other more forgettable pushers of the phrase in a single, but important way. Familiar to anyone who watched Clone High and its high-low play of comedy (the high-school-set animated series’ main characters were Abe Lincoln and Joan of Arc), Lord and Miller’s work has a different tone, a different energy.
It isn’t manic, though it frequently edges on that territory, because it’s deeply entrenched in a conventional heroic narrative, which it needs to deliver after every other action beat. It more closely represents the visual patterns of a well-rehearsed trivia game player, calling up licensed Lego pieces, television sitcom humour, and details of other heroic narratives (the major hits, from The Wizard of Oz to The Matrix) at will.
If anyone’s nostalgic for the look of rapid-assembled Lego commercials, this film is sure to please. If you picture Lego pieces in motion as something between stop-motion plastic and 16-bit video games with a 3D sheen, that mark is hit. Lord and Miller visually strive after the work of Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim), all zooms, whip pans, and pop-culture specificity, and mimic it at points, but their combination of mini-blockbuster action and humour is pummelled into the audience. Which wouldn’t be a problem for some, except that the narrative claims to be set against that very thing.
Liberally quoting, or unashamedly similar to portions of The Lorax, Wreck-It Ralph, Toy Story, and Finding Nemo, The Lego Movie is the story of conformative construction worker Emmett (Chris Pratt) and his voyage from unthinking compliance (in an introductory number that’s entry-level media interpretation) to confident speech-maker and leader. It handles its villain, subtly named Lord Business, in a way some are calling “anarchic” or “subversive.” Coming a year after the excesses of capitalism were already the common thread through films by Korine, Coppola, Bay, and Scorsese, among others, The Lego Movie isn’t much more than a barely filled-in portrait of generic dictatorship, as subversive as the back of a cereal box. Like The Lorax, its “topic” (not thinking for yourself) is vague and peripheral to the point of being interchangeable.
The appeal of this movie is the way it includes and flatters young adults or parents with its nods to other entertainment, while also paying kids service by including a message on parenting methods. But in its “rebelling” against being “micro-managed,” the conquering response is one of “believing you are special, because the world depends on it.” Not only is this sort of platitude useless to children a narrative that speaks of discovery rather than one that conveys the space for actual discovery to happen, but it’s as conformist and foundational as narratives get.
Lord and Miller are showing off what they can do with their own style within the confines of making a massive, licensed studio picture (expand your mind! just make sure you’re playing with these toys while you do so), but it amounts to a movie that says what it wants without having to live it for a second. That isn’t what the best children’s stories evoke, it’s more, to bring in Linus again, “Hypocrisy as far as the eye can see!”
