How this didn’t even get a nomination for best animated feature will forever baffle me

The Lego Movie is still one of the best animated movies of 2014 and 2014 was such a good year for movies

The Lego Movie still remains one of my favourite animated movies, not just because I grew up with Lego, but also because it was more than just a commercial film, it was a heartfelt, well written and passionate celebration of the power of imagination and creativity that made the childhoods of countless people, including myself.

The Lego Movie understood its audience more than most. It's all in the details; the real registry numbers from the kits, Benny and his aesthetic being a callback to the first Lego Space set from the 80's, and even the blink and you'll miss it Bionicle reference.

Fun Fact: Morgan Freeman stated that the Lego Batman in this movie is his favorite incarnation of the character.

My favourite part that wasn't mentioned, is the way that "squash and stretch" animation is approached. For certain frames they just add more Lego bricks to make a certain body part longer, for example

i heard that if you paused the lego movie at literally any frame in the entire film, you'd be able to rebuild the entire image with actual legos, and i think thats just insane, really made it incredible and makes it look not fake

The most impressive thing to me was how they used real pieces for almost everything. Playing the lego games when I was younger, there were a lot of scenes that were not fully "lego". Like the floors and other materials were generic. Like a muddy floor texture to represent a jungle floor. They didn't have the iconic studs LEGO on them. The movie had these pretty much everywhere I can think of. Imagine rendering all of those pieces. Impressive

Lego may have one of the best strategic teams of any company; the way they have kept their brand fresh for so long through ever more ingenuous kits, movies, tie ins and games is staggering.

As a Brickfilmer myself, I gotta say that the animation in the LEGO Movie shines on how it captures the escence of Brickfilms, sometimes I slow down the film just to recreate the movements on it, as all articulation in the movie is loyal to the toy, is quite fluid and heavily expresive!

The lego movie has such great animation and it feels like not enough people talk about. This movie is almost 10 years old and still looks amazing.

A big part u didn't mention was the focus limits they artificially placed on the camera. Why? Because cameras have difficulty focusing on tiny objects up close! By adding extra blurr in the background or even closer characters it subconsciously implies the size of the film. All other lego animations b4 did not do this, so there is an awkward feeling where characters are being represented as nearly the size of adult humans, it gives off an odd vibe. But when the lens blurr is added to the edges it implies a tiny universe where they are the correct size that we know and love!

I remember watching this in theaters as a kid, and having been so convinced that this entire movie was stop-motion. I remember telling my mom that it was (without research, and I was a kid as well) and she was greatly amazed. But this movie is so special to me, I was never excited about a movie as much as this one.

I grew up making brickfilms, and I seriously thought this was all done in stop motion. The high I felt watching The Lego Movie for the first time, seeing my childhood hobby on the big screen, has never been matched by another movie.

The fact that into the spiderverse’s Lego part was done by a 14yr old too is wild

So... one thing about the visuals for the LEGO Movie is that instead of just being yet another CGI film, it used CGI to emulate stop-motion. Normally, when you try to use CGI to "replace" something in real life it can look a bit off, but LEGO as a medium makes it super easy to pull of as untextured plastic is practically the easiest material to render photorealistically. The bump mapping complicates things a little but it's not the same as trying to render skin.

5:03 "Every movement is one that could realistically be made by lego pieces" the clip you play while saying this is literally one of the biggest exceptions to this rule. Lego minifigures can't bend that far backwards, and they warp the hip piece slightly to keep it from clipping through the legs.

It's INSANE how the studio who made the Lego movie still had to rely on LDD instead of getting access to official 3d models directly by the Lego Group!

This was also one of the first animated movies that used a realistic color space resulting in crisp highlights that catch the edges of the pieces as well as high definition in the darker parts of the screen.

I remember making brick films with my friends back when I was a kid in the 90’s with my parents’ old camcorder. To get a frame you’d press record once and then push it again a split second later. All dialogue you’d record on a longer take so no movement while talking. No consistent frame rate and our animations were laughably bad but we had fun. I don’t know what happened to those old tapes (if they weren’t recorded over by school concerts or whatever), but I wish I still had them.

You can choose to fight a medium or you can embrace it. Lego as a film medium has so many limitations, and every CG Lego film up to this point choose to pretend every single limitation didn’t exist.

The more I learn about this movie, the more bitter I get that this wasn’t nominated for Best Animated Feature. And I was already pretty bitter to begin with. I do love Laika and The Boxtrolls, but man, did this film deserve its spot if we really must limit the nominations to 5 entries.

5:02 "every movment is one that could realistically be made by lego pieces" . Shows scene where lego figure bends backwards over 90 degrees when in reality roughly 70 is the limit

This is my number one favorite animated film. Fun Fact: Lord and Miller also worked on the Spider Verse movies.

I was honestly amazed when the movie came out. I never expected anyone could make a LEGO movie that takes the feeling of playing with LEGO and runs with it, but those guys really did it. It had all the nostalgia, the childish excitement and wild imagination a movie like this should've had. And it did everything without making fun of the actual LEGO fans - something a lot of other movies based on toys or cartoons repeatedly fail to do. Absolutely love the movie to bits.

I think the achievement is more in the artistic use of technology rather than a flat-out technological breakthrough. So much of what makes good CG good, comes more from art direction than the actual technology being used.

As someone who grew up on the brickfilm genre and made quite a few stop motion animations myself the Lego movie felt like a return to form to the films that the community was making at home.

Liam Neeson & Will Arnett were fucking hilarious in that movie. Comedy GOLD

Oh the nostalgia. I love this movie just as much as I did when I was a kid

I think that this is still one of the best movies of all time, from animation, heart, humor, i think that this movie is practically perfect

The Lego Movie shows what Lego should be about and should be aiming for. Meanwhile we get more and more collectibles even in the playsets it is hard to find the parts to rebuild or create something new.

I also like how can people turned the way they made the movie in maya and just made a capable way to made it in another program ( blender ) which give you the ability to create quit looking like the movie using some addon like ( mecabrick , epicfigrig , mecaface , mecalizer ) and ofc supporting the people who made it !

The Lego movie had all the potential to be a corporate product. It's still a miracle that something so groundbreaking and incredible could actually come to exist.

My favorite part of this movie - and you can see it at 5:16 - is the way they use Lego bricks to create smear frames. It would have been so easy to just make normal smears, since you don’t even see it long enough to really notice in theater, and yet it’s so incredible that they put in the effort to use bricks to make them.

The thing with "Lego Movie" and other, even the ones made this year, Lego movies are that the "Lego Movie" was 100% made of bricks, while on all the other (movies and games) there is a lot of not lego elements. Also the animation of the faces is very good.

As a past brickfilmer, i really appreciated the effort put in the animation.

I liked how in lego dimensions characters from the lego movie and lego batman movie had animations reminiscent of the stop motion type thing they have in the movies, and everyone else is animated traditionally like rubber

Stellar. Excellent video! I'd also like to note the use of REALLY shallow Depth of Field while rendering, simulating that of a real camera, shooting macro on such *tiny* little pieces. That REALLY helped to illustrate the scale, in a way that most might not notice! And the subsurface scattering of light, just like real plastics! The whole movie was such a visual treat! 💛

Remember seeing this when it came out, and for a second, I thought they had actually stop motioned the thing. Such amazing animation

That bombad bounty clip at the start brought back a lot of memories! I used to live that film

Lego Movie came out at a critical time for me. I was a teenager in high school, and it married my waning childhood passion for Lego with my growing appreciation for good filmmaking. This is just about the perfect Lego-themed movie you could ask for-one made with clear passion and understanding of what it’s like to be a child imagining a whole world and story in their head. They completely nailed the aesthetic too. It looks like this could have been fully stop-motion animated.

It's already 9 years old? I remember seeing it in the cinema.

Aww this was so much fun to watch and learn about! Thank you~

Very good video but y’all missed out on one of the important parts, technology advancements that allowed for the level of detail (ACES color system) compared to other animations

on top of all this, the Lego movie was animated in a new rendering engine that has higher F stop options for the “camera” which created the incredible depth of field, detail, and allowed for amazing lighting all around

The Lego Movie will forever be timeless.

I miss The LEGO Movies so much, I'm also thankful Lord and Miller are so heavily involved with the Spider-Verse movies

I remember most of those clips of the lego animations prior to the lego movie. - Watched them ondemand on the lego tv channel. Miss those days!

When I saw the Lego Movie in theaters, I swore it was stop motion, not CGI

Lord and Miller are truly the animation pioneers of the 21st century

What I loved best about this movie is that it centers on how kids view their parents when they’re concerned about financial money troubles regarding their children using up their parents cash for their own self benefit, and the 10-year-old boy Finn who Emmet meets at the end of the movie as he enters the human world we discover remodeled the villain of the story Lord Business after his father. That’s the beauty of it. Both characters are played by Will Ferrell, and the animated counterpart of the boy’s father was just him kinda projecting his craving desire to build more sets in the basement but his father wouldn’t let him because the money he spent them on was leaving him broke with his own job so he restricted his son to play with the sets as punishment by gluing the pieces back in place so they couldn’t be moved when touched again. And it’s not until the end of the movie when President Business warms up to Emmett after he returns to the Lego world to save his friends that we see Finn do the same with his father, suggesting that he agreed to put his father’s money to good use making wiser decisions instead of for his own self benefit. Even the second one covers similar underlining plot devices regarding brother and sister issues. I love how in both movies the real conflict is a family issue all along but they don’t show it until the very end and the only clue we get is the conflict the characters in the Lego universe are facing like judgement day or the apocalypse that awaits them. Such a neat metaphor made by the animators. I give praise to Warner Brothers animation studios for that! 😎👍👌

It's amazing how far Lego animations have come, and from voiceless characters to fully voiced characters, it's nice that things are always looking up for it.

Thank you Lego Team and Nerdstalgic, lovely video and movie!!!!!

This movie really pushed Lego to the next level and has not come down from it since.

Something which nobody has mentioned yet is that The Lego Movie was rendered in ACES (I believe it was the first animated movie to use the engine) which allowed for a much higher dynamic range in the image. So the lighting is almost perfectly real, dark areas of the image are properly exposed and still show detail with contrast, and bright areas influence the rest of the scene, even as far as to calculate what that light would do in the lens of the simulated camera to give a real impression of lens-flare. Others have also mentioned that the simulation also runs in real Lego size, so close up shots simulate the depth of field of a real camera filming one of those classic brick animations.

i was taught by the guy that was in charge of lego mold r&d for the lego batman movie and the lego movie 2 (i think) in animation school, really chill guy and a massive music nerd

It's shocking it took them this long to come up with making lego CGI look like this.

I agree! Plus the dialogue is just awesome. Not mentioned, but equally important is how the sound effects are done with human voices as if they ate being played with.

oh my god the exclusive lego star wars cd from being a lego magazine subscriber just brought back mad memories that

When this movie came out, it actually had me fooled thinking it was fully stop motion animated. They really captured the style of that genre of animation so well, including smaller details like lots of hard lighting and shallow depth of field, together with believable surface imperfections, low framerates and believable movements, everything just worked.

I had two classic space men, one blue, one red. They had the exact same rub-off of the logo on their torso and both their helmets were cracked exactly like Benny's. Although mine obv had no face left😂. To see this beat up and played with character brought to the screen tells you that these guys get it.

honestly i would imagine this movie would be one of the things that amazed a little kid who watched this and developed an interest in making lego films and now, is that 14yo who animated the lego section of across the spiderverse

Its crazy that I've never once asked a question like this and yet I need to watch this video right this second

ONE OF THE BEST ANIMATED FILMS FROM WB ANIMATION SINCE IRON GIANT, and i wouldnt be surprised if the moment 7:30 became a reference for Mario movie when encountering a similar creature by saying hello

I don't know how this movie went past my radar, but it's cool to see the inspiration for stuff like recent Spider-Verse and Puss in Boots embracing the more creative approach to animation. Great video.

I remember doing a brickfilm when i was 10 or 11 for a short film competition with my primary school class in the early 80's

Actually, there *is* Motion Blur. Its just made with extra bricks! Freeze frames of the movie and you’ll see what they use to create the blurs.

I kinda wish you added this when talking about the motion blur. Instead of making it blur, they uses more chunky legos in the color and shape of the mini figs to represent them flying at high speed. The best example is when Benny builds his space ship. You can clearly see he turns into regular bricks when jumping around to build

Immediately from the comparison at the beginning, I noticed they started making the characters move a little more like you'd imagine a Lego would, with the pieces and stuff

5:05 does this scene triggers other like it does for me? “Every movement is one that could be realistically made”

The fact that this movie even has lego smear frames is so good

Saw it twice in theaters in 2014 and still adore this movie today.

*_Everyone's Spaceman had a cracked helmet eventually._*

4:51 Spiderverse also had Lord and Miller working on the film as well.

It's also well worth watching in 3D precisely because of its animation. If you don't have a compatible bluray player, it is possible to play the 3D bluray disc in a PS4 and use a Playstation VR to watch the movie, like I did. I wish I knew more alternates to watch 3D Bluray discs, but I don't.

I watched this movie with my GF father for the first time back in 2018 and we would build like the most complex structures. Me and his daughter are no longer dating but when ever I get a home break from Uni I still visit him. Gained a wonderful mentor there

It never even occurred to me that the movie wasn't stop motion until I watched a Corridor Crew video talking about it.

The ocean scene is so amazing to look at

ive watched the movie 4 times and im not gonna stop untill they make part 3

I believe it also was one of the first to use the aces colour space which is now widely used not just in the Lego franchise.

In the Lego ninjago movie, when garmadons minions are building his shark mech, you can see them peeling stickers of of a peice of paper that are supposed to be the mechs screens and controllers and it's honestly one of the best visual gags I've seen in films.

As someone who enjoy brickfilm, I was so happy to the direction that they went through in this movie. This still one of the best animated/Lego movie that I watch.

Wait I thought this whole movie was stop motion? Dang and I really thought it was just as impressive

I like your videos so much and great video dude :]

I say it everytime i see it, i cant believe the quality of the light in the movie. It looks like real light

My absolute favorite animated movie of all time. Glad its animation is being praised here because it's so spectacular.

I agreed with the premise of this video so much that I anticipated the subscription plea by 12 seconds.

I'm still pissed this film didn't even get an Oscar nomination for "Best Animated Feature"

Definitely my favorite movie. This was so cool to hear!

this is such a good move and the part where they said " i want people to run home and make the most random thing with lego " or somthing like that is really true my little brother took a single look at the lego movie 2 while it was playing ran down the hallways yelling "IM GOING TO GO PLAY WITH MY LEGO" lol

They failed to mention the revolutionary colour space it used in order to look so realistic.

I made stop motion Lego movies for like 8 years and have never heard the term ‘brickfilm’ before.

When referring to 2's and 3's and how it would be used latter, Spideyverse was shown; which Lord and Miller also did.

this movie is practically as ingrained into my brain as my name is, i watched it so many times as a kid, maybe thats why i'm so creative and like to think outside the box, the lesson really stuck with me I guess.

Nice video! Have you played hot wheels unleashed on the ps5? Everything you say in this video can be applied to that game as well!

Now I wanna use PartDesigner and Blender to animate stuff. Maybe I can incorporate Rust to automate some stuff.

I remember when my younger self thought that the whole Lego movie scenes was stop motion. It shows how dedicated they are to make it look life like.

7:14 They absolutely succeeded. I have seen the movie so many times I've lost counts, but I can say it all verbatim while watching it, and now I can't even watch it without a tub of Lego to build and play while the movie goes.

thanks nerdstalgic, knows everything!

The lego movie also used an experimental extremely realistic lighting software that only a few movies used for cgi and stuff.