THE LEGO MOVIE: Creative Imitation of a Brickfilm (Video Essay)

There are many reasons why you should watch THE LEGO MOVIE (Lord/Miller, 2014) at least once (and I am certainly not talking about the worn-out "special one" fantasy formulas). 

Some things that I keep being fascinated by are A) the film makers' total commitment to make their computer generated blockbuster look like a real brickfilm, and B) how they adapt techniques and stylistic devices of hand drawn cartoons into three dimensions in order to compensate for a conceptual lack of motion blur. And C) there is an annoyingly jolly unicorn-kitten called, well, Unikitty.

So without further ado, my latest animation analysis video essay:

(works best in full screen)

THE LEGO MOVIE: Creative Imitation of a Brickfilm (Video Essay) from Oswald Iten on Vimeo.

Note: All the video, images and sounds in this animation analysis are the property of their respective copyright holders. They are displayed for educational purposes only with no commercial intent.
This video essay was first published (and is also available) with German voice-over narration for "film bulletin" here: filmbulletin.ch/full/artikel/2017-5-2_brickfilm-meets-tex-avery/

Introducing the Animation Rules

THE LEGO MOVIE does a really great job in establishing not only its setting but also its basic animation style and premise. After a classic pre-credits scene introducing the main villain, the super weapon and the prophesy about an average Joe becoming the great saviour, we enter the main story on an extreme close-up on Emmet's eyes. Emmet is said average Joe, of course.

Here, we clearly see that Emmet's face is two-dimensionally animated and basically flat on the yellow surface of a typical minifigure head piece. In the next shot, we see a close-up of Emmet's rigid hand that tries to turn off the alarm clock which shows us right away how in this film the materiality of plastic LEGO pieces will not be digitally bent. After that, most of us will - subconsciously, at least - assume that this is a concept the film adheres to. Especially after we see that Emmet's flexibility is restricted by the available joints in his body parts...

...which work exactly like the trademark LEGO instruction manual demonstrates.

During Emmet's morning exercises, he jumps a few times:

And now we come to an observation that did not make it into the video analysis: the interesting thing here is how the briskness of the jumping motion is achieved by abstaining from inbetweens during the up and down movements. As you can see from the timecode of the GIF below, the character just goes from anticipation to the up-position and after a few cushion frames back to the down position with a "falling" inbetween.

You can also see that despite this being a computer animated film the film makers tried to animate the characters on twos whenever possible like in a real stop motion film. Most often, the characters are even animated on twos during camera movements which are naturally animated on ones:

2 poses held for 2 frames each.