Last year it was reported that Warner Bros. would be developing a LEGO feature film to be directed by Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street helmers Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Robot Chicken‘s Chris McKay signed on to co-direct later on in the process.
It was previously revealed that the movie would be CG animated and that the studio would be working with the Australian-based animation company Animal Logic (Happy Feet, Legend of the Guardians) to develop the epic scale LEGO movie.
...we kept thinking, gosh there's got to be a way to take… if somebody wants to make a Lego movie they should make one of those on an enormous scale where you could actually build enormous, beautiful Lego sets and put a camera on the deck at mini-fig eye level and bring the kind of bravado that like the contemporary action-adventure film does, but do it on like this micro-scale. So we always sparked to that idea and it was just about trying to crack the character story to carry that.
I don't know we're exactly are going to execute it but I would say the vast majority of the film takes place in an immersive all-Lego environment. So it's going to star mini-figs and we've created these really cool characters and a really nice character story between these mini-figs. And it's going to take place in a universe that's made entirely out of Lego to the point where if there's water or clouds or like a big explosion, that will be made out of animated LEGO bricks.
/Film had the opportunity to talk to the directors on the film, and they gave a few little details on the story and revealed the title of the film which is Lego: The Piece of Resistance. When talking to the directing due they referenced films such as The Matrix, The Magnificent Seven, Time Bandits, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars, saying,
It’s pretty crazy. It involves many worlds. Basically, the least qualified Lego characters in the universe having to keep the world from being frozen together.
I imagine what this means that they are trying to stop an evil force from permanently locking all the Lego bricks in place making them immovable. They want to keep this story in a all LEGO universe, and went on to explain,
One of the challenges that we’ve given to everybody, is that they can’t move any differently than the real minifigs, so they have to have like a punching fight where they can only do this and this, Lord explained to me, demonstrating the Lego minifigs’ arm-swinging motion.
They are actually building stuff with real LEGO's to come wup with their character and vehicle designs. Lord went into some more details with Collider saying,
our character design is ‘What if we put this head on this body, and we could give it these legs from this horse.’ There are some IP characters… it’s not just all original characters, there are some from other things that you might recognize.
Does that mean we might actually get some crazy cool movie crossovers like Star Wars, Batman, and Harry Potter, all in the same film? Because that would be glorious! Now for those of you worried that this could turn out to be a big LEGO commercial, the filmmakers told Comingsoon,
The thing about it is obviously it's not a big LEGO commercial for products. LEGOs are the medium that we're using to tell a story. If you've seen any of those brick films online people make in their basement, it's sort of one of those but with a much bigger budget, as if somebody had a really big basement and a lot of time.
One of the ways we like to think about it is that it's a medium, not a brand.
It's not like they're selling clay when they do a claymation movie, so it's sort of like that. We're telling an interesting story and the medium we're using to tell it is these little LEGO bricks and these little characters
Over the next four months the filmmakers will continue to work on the character designs, story and casting for the film. I like how they're going about making this film, and there's no doubt that it's going to be one hell of an interesting movie. What are your thoughts on how Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Chris McKay are approaching this film?