The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part might not have the surprise factor of the first LEGO film, but it’s equally awesome. It also really is everything this time. Kid movie, adult movie. Animation, live action. Space adventure, screwball romcom.
In this installment, Emmet, Lucy, Batman and the rest of the Bricksburg crew are living in an apocalyptic wasteland and are mostly concerned with LEGO DUPLO invaders from outer space, led by Queen Watevra, a multi-coloured DUPLO shapeshifter played with glee by Tiffany Haddish.
It's very meta. The puns are deliciously terrible and repeated over and over again. The end credits sequence is better than the entirety of some animated movies. And there are so many celeb voices stuffed into two hours that you forget Nick Offerman is the pirate.
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As you’d expect, for close to two hours your eyes and ears will be willingly assaulted by gag after gag after gag, most of them brilliant. Only a handful of times are the jokes given more than a second’s room to breathe and when they are, it’s magic. As Matthew Ashton, VP of design at LEGO and executive producer on The LEGO Movie, The LEGO Batman Movie and The LEGO Movie 2, says, “There’s so much going on. I’ve seen it hundreds of times in development but every time I watch it, there are little bits the animators have added that I didn’t even notice.”
This time around, on top of the songs and dinosaurs piloting spaceships and triple decker couches, quite a lot of running time is given over to both more imaginative, unconstrained forms of play and, to put it bluntly, ‘girl’ stuff. That’s not a coincidence.
“The kind of building we’ve done happens in emergency scenarios like escaping from the Systar spaceship,” Ashton says. “Here Queen Watevra takes on that kind of role, not necessarily of the Master Builder, but a different way of building, more shape-shifting and transforming – that’s a big part of the story.”
"Rather than banging people over the heads with ‘building, building, everything’s about building,’ we decided the first movie was more about master building but the second movie is more about creativity in various different ways,” he continues. “This super sassy, shape-shifting alien queen is the epitome of LEGO values in a way.”
The LEGO design chief hopes that the new and returning female characters – Lucy, UniKitty, General Mayhem, Queen Watevra – will appeal to all kids as much as mysterious spaceman Rex Dangervest. The producers have also made an effort to include more conventionally ‘girly’ elements, but without stereotyping. “Harmony Town is based on what people have come to expect from certain traditional girls’ toys,” he explains, “and we really balanced that out with a lot of quirky, brick-built characters like the Banana and the Ice Cream Cone, things that just make you laugh or are just super impressive and kickass, as well as General Mayhem.”
This was a driving feature of the new film. “We wanted to show that girls are equally as creative as boys,” Ashton says. “Bianca, the little sister, is at an age where her imagination is running wild and she’s coming up with these crazy adventures whereas Finn [the main ‘real-world’ character in the first film] doesn’t want to play as much. It was really important that Bianca’s imagination was really reflected through the characters and vehicles in her world.”
The packaging of the movie tie-in LEGO sets intentionally avoids gender stereotypes so as not to form a barrier to young girls who want to go for the action heroes and young boys who might be interested in the princess aesthetic. In the Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi’s Build Whatever Box, instructions are included to recreate specific models from the movie but there’s also an inspiration poster to encourage kids to go off-script.
Cynics might point out that this is all a surefire strategy to sell more sets and make more money. But in the case of The LEGO Movie 2, what’s noticeable is how (mild spoilers ahead) the attempt to include something for all tastes results in much more than a forgettable, pink-hued side mission as often employed by family animated movies. The big space adventure simply doesn’t work if you take away the romcom finale, such that it’s all melded together – at times quite literally – in the glorious way that only LEGO could pull off.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
