movies: the lego movie

Everything is awesome
Everything is cool when you're part of a team
Everything is awesome, when we're living our dream

I double, triple, quadruple dare anyone to go and see The Lego Movie and not walk out with the Everything is Awesome song wedged firmly in their brain.

I saw the movie around nine hour ago at this point, and it's still going around and around in my head.

If ever a song completely summed up a movie, then Everything is Awesome absolutely sums up The Lego Movie. It's also one of the few movies that I think was absolutely made for 3D. You're dealing with something that exists in the real world as a three dimensional object, so seeing it up on the movie screen in 3D just feels right to your brain.

And 99% of everything in this movie is made of Lego... the logos at the beginning, the sky, the clouds, the smoke and explosions, water... the whole deal.

According to Warner Brothers they only used real Lego bricks in the movie, and there are a total of 3,863,484 unique Lego bricks, including 183 individual minifigures, on screen. And it looks and feels like a stop motion animation movie... even down to the occasional hint of a fingerprint on the minifig bodies and scratches here and there. Benny, the blue 1980's spaceman, even has bite marks in his helmet, which always happened when you were trying to get a helmet off that was too tight. But amazingly, it's all CGI.

And created right here in Australia too, which is awesome.

There was also a massive feeling, for me at least, like I was watching one of those movies that's just packed with "blink and you'll miss them" celebrity cameos... there are a LOT of the collectable minifigs as background cast... from the Statue of Liberty to the Yeti, the Doctor to the Bandit and the Surfer to the Magician... they pop up all the way through the movie, which I loved.

It's definitely a movie to watch multiple times just to check out everything that's going on in the background.

What I wasn't really expecting from a movie as funny as The Lego Movie was that it would make me cry. I really don't want to give anything away, because it was something I had no idea about, but it was beautifully moving, and it was definitely designed to speak specifically to a certain type of adult Lego collector.

The voice cast is stellar... I mean, any movie that's the first to get Morgan Freeman to voice an animated character is definitely doing something right. Chris Pratt is perpetually upbeat as Emmet, the main character, and it was great to hear both Anthony Daniels and Billy Dee Williams voicing the Lego versions of their Star Wars characters.

And Will Arnett does great work as Batman.

There are a ton of great moments, but for me, almost anything including Metal Beard the pirate mech was fantastic... as was Benny and his spaceship and Angry Unikitty.

As a Lego fan, I may be a little bit biased, but I can already tell that this movie is in the running for my pick for best movie of the year. There is no bad here!

yani's rating: 5 Kragles out of 5