![]() ![]() The “Lego Movie” is primarily a standard action-adventure film. (To explain why will require spoilers below.) In the final 20 minutes of the film, the Lego brand asserts itself as both a toy for creativity and a means to connect generations instead of being estranged. “The Lego Movie” builds on this tradition. Chrysler’s “imported from Detroit” series addressed the existential angst rooted in the decline of America’s manufacturing base. The original “Dove Evolution” ad showed how Photoshop distorts commercial products and spoke to the desire for authenticity in the marketplace. The famous “1984” commercial from Apple spoke to fears of conformity and loss of identity. Successful advertising appeals to a deeply-held value that resonates with its audience. In fact, the film does not deserve an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Picture, it deserves a Cannes Lion Grand Prix–the award given to out to the best in advertising. It knows its products are toys and proudly advertises its products as toys. The “Lego Movie” does not attempt any of that. Joe movies attempt to take slightly absurd character designs and translate them to live action. The new “Battleship” movie found a contrived way for aliens to be attacked by calling out grid-based coordinates. military hardware into the lineup of what the toys could become. Perhaps this is because so many movies based on toys have already been made and most of them tried too hard to insert products into the real world: the “Transformers” movie team cooperated with the Department of Defense to integrate U.S. The fact that the film is an extended advertisement or “sponsored content” for Lego products is something reviewers acknowledge without considering why it succeeds as a piece of advertising. In an environment where everything is politicized, it is pretty striking to see bipartisan and cross-ideological appropriation of “The Lego Movie.” To be sure, the film does play lip service to political tropes, but what really makes the film work is that it represents the highest form of capitalist expression: it is a commercial. It might be the most “classically liberal film in the history of film-making.” The film has elements that are “echoes of Jesus and Guru Nanak, the father of Sikhism.” Or perhaps it is a critique of both the right and left, the film’s antagonist Lord Business as “the Lego Ceaușescu, if you swap the communism for capitalism.” ![]() ![]() According to Alyssa Rosenberg of ThinkProgress, it “asks us to consider what we’re losing out in that homogenization” of the movie industry. Like the bricks from a Lego skyscraper that have been transformed into a train, spaceship, or dog house, the newly released “Lego Movie” has managed to find acclaim across the political spectrum. ![]()
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