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Why The Lego Movie Looks Different Than Other Lego Content
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Jul 16, 2025
When the Lego Movie was first announced, no one thought it would have the cultural impact it did. Not only did the Lego Movie exceed audience and critic expectations, it actually changed the animation industry forever. But how exactly did the creators make the Lego Movie look so, Awesome?
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0:00
This is an official Lego short film from 2010
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Introducing the double-decker couch, so everyone could watch TV together and be buddies
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And this is the Lego movie that came out just four years later
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The differences in quality are immediately obvious. No movie, Lego or not, had ever looked quite like this one
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It permanently redefined how other Lego media is created. It helped bring the brand back to full financial power
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While your first instinct might be to attribute this impact to the movie's humor or its heart
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the LEGO movie's true legacy will always be the technological feats it achieved through animation
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That's great. You can't do anything better. There's no reason why you should move. Pa, you just moved and you just wrecked it
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You wrecked it! Official LEGO movies, shorts, and video game cinematics had a very distinct look before 2014
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At a glance, you can see that these were clearly meant to evoke the idea of LEGO bricks and toys
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You've got the iconic C-shaped hands, real LEGO accessories and playsets being used as props
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and actual LEGO pieces scattered around various scenes. On closer inspection, however, things don't feel quite right
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The textures are smooth, the facial expressions are uncanny, and the animation is overly fluid
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It's as if these LEGO figurines are made of flexible rubber instead of hard plastic
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In a way, this makes sense. Why would you constrict yourself to the rigid and limiting movements of a real Lego
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when the limitless possibilities of animation are at your fingertips? That is literally the dumbest thing I've ever heard
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Please, file style, let me handle this. That idea is just the worst
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Well, Lego content is typically made for children, after all. And so it seems reasonable to copy the more popular 3D animation styles
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found in other children's media. This method of thinking permeated LEGO animation projects beginning with the 2001 Jack Stone short until the LEGO movie made its debut To the Batmobile Dang it To the invisible jet
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Dang it. Everyone who has seen even a single frame from the Lego movie understands what kind of film it is
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Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who are best known for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
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and 21 Jump Street at the time, have said that their goal was to... Take a very homemade brick film and try and make that as cinematic as possible with lighting and camera angles and the type of things that you would do on a big budget live action movie
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With the help of an incredible team of animators at Animalogic, led by Chris McKay and Aiden Sarsfield, they definitely achieved that goal
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In that quote from Lord and Miller, you might have noticed the use of the word brick film
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The term is used among Lego hobbyists to describe fan-made movies that use Lego characters and sets to tell their stories
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Traditionally, these tend to be stop-motion animated, and it's where the idea of Lego movies originally began to take hold
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Decades before Lego had even considered making their video content, fans were creating their own
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If anybody has black parts, I need them, okay? I only work in black and sometimes very, very dark gray
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As is pointed out in this Vox documentary, brick films were a definite inspiration for the official Lego movie
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There are a number of direct nods to these early fan works in the film
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The choppy animation style is meant to replicate traditional stop-motion, even though it's almost entirely computer-generated
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The magic portal Finn plays with is named after one of the most well-known brick films ever created
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and a scene in the movie even plays snippets of fan-submitted shorts. But there's another major influence that amateur brick films had over the LEGO movie
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and it can be distilled down to its most basic elements, creativity and imaginative play
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That's what truly fueled the LEGO movie. That the driving force behind the toy it based on the theme of its story and the reason it looks so awesome You the most important and most extraordinary person That you right Uh yes That me Essentially everything you see on screen
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is constructed by digital representations of real LEGO bricks. Actual LEGO models were often built during production
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so that Lord and Miller could see them up close and give feedback. The animators used a free brick building software
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LEGO Digital Designer, to create assets and then recreated them in Maya
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a 3D graphics program, in order to animate them. We built a system that really utilizes real Lego bricks
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All of the things that you see on screen are 100% Lego blocks. That means that practically everything you see in every frame of the Lego movie
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can actually be built by someone in the real world. The movie also follows the laws of stop-motion animation
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Wait, what did he just say? It was animated on twos and threes
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meaning instead of having fluid motion for 24 frames per second, They only animated 12 or as few as 8 frames, a technique that would be used by other studios to great success in later years
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Animal Logic also decided to omit any kind of motion blur, lending an even greater sense of realism to the effect
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And, of course, every movement is one that could realistically be made by Lego pieces
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Jumping jacks, hit them! One, two, three. I am so pumped up
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However, since this was all done through CG animation, the details could be pushed even
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further. Some pieces, particularly the figurines of the main characters, have visible scratches
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fingerprints, and cracks. There are creases where you would see them on pieces made with real-life
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molds, little imperfections in the plastic, and differences in texture. Look no further than the
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well-loved 1980s-era spaceman, Benny, who was based off of Miller's childhood toy
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This level of real detail had never really been considered in previous Lego projects with their almost unnervingly smooth 3D models When combined with everything else it all made for a highly stylized and incredibly beautiful film What I see are people inspired by each other
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People taking what you made and making something new out of it
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Even just the intro, when Emmett is getting ready for his day, is almost overwhelming in its detail
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When Emmett showers, one-by-one round bricks come out of the showerhead and froth up to actual Lego bubbles
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Stunning effects like the interior of the magical portal, smoke and steam, explosions, and even massive ocean waves
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are all made from thousands of individually rendered bits of Lego, and they're all animated to look like they're moving in stop motion
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It's a stunning technological achievement that had never been done before. Even nine years later, it still holds up
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It holds up so well that several more Lego movies and shorts have been made since then
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which emulate the iconic style. And in that time, it's become synonymous with the Lego brand
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I think I got it. But just in case, tell me the whole thing again
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I wasn't listening. None of this would have been possible without those basic elements of creativity and imaginative
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play on the part of the movie's creators. It took a lot to make believe in forging new creative paths to make the Lego movie look
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the way it does. And it was done to stay as true to the core of Lego as possible
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The Lego movie is about as close as you can get to playing with Lego without
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actually pulling out the pieces. Nobody said it better than the directors. Our dream was that you
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would turn the movie off and then run home and then build the most silly, ridiculous Lego thing
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you could. Lorde and Miller and the animators at Animal Logic pushed creative boundaries with the
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Lego movie. They let their imaginations run wild and created something that inspired play through
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sheer aesthetics. Everything from the stop motion-like animation style that pays tributes
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to its early inspirations, to the individual bricks that make up every frame of the movie
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to the fingerprints on Emmett's helmet hair were done with purpose
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