The Lego Movie Review

Every element in the frame is a brick, including the water, the smoke and the explosions, and the animation is deliberately stepped so it moves like stop motion made in a garage. That single rule gives the film its texture, and it is also the joke, because this is what the toys look like inside a child's head. Lord and Miller then write at a density most comedies cannot sustain, three gags a shot, a Batman who scores his own theme music, a spaceship obsessive who is plainly us.

What lifts it above the assignment is the third act, where the camera pulls out of the plastic and finds a father and son arguing about whether the sets should be glued down. Suddenly the villain's devotion to instructions and a tube of superglue is a real position held by a real man, and the film's defense of improvised play stops being a slogan. Will Arnett and Charlie Day would carry weaker material on voice alone. The song was engineered to lodge in the skull for a decade, and it worked. A toy commercial has no business being this good.