The Lego Movie in a Post-Barbie World

As is revealed in a real-world sequence where Ferrell appears as a dad who doesn’t let his kid play with his expensive model cities, the real villain is not the self-aware company behind the product being marketed, but consumers who are overly controlling and defensive about the product. The Lego Movie is telling people who play with Lego wrong to lighten up. 

It’s difficult to tell whether The Lego Movie or the tie-in sets depicting events from the movie that Lego released are to be considered the supplement—if the film exists to encourage the merits of building and playing with Lego, was it created to promote the Lego sets that were released to promote the movie? Before we get lost in a plastic ouroboros, we can reflect on the novelty of a product film earnestly selling the virtues of the toy and getting away with it purely because its infectious fun and thoughtful themes, if nothing else, capture what we love about the product. It may not be subversive, but after a year of films like Air, Flamin’ Hot and Tetris that celebrate CEOs and salesmen over the creations themselves (especially since 2023 reminded us once again that no CEO anywhere deserves lionizing), The Lego Movie still seems like the gold standard.

The reason The Lego Movie has not been subjected to the ire that Barbie received—despite the same amount of care, heart and wit being put into it, while its commercial bent was far more naked—is threefold. Firstly, The Lego Movie didn’t prioritize an older audience like Barbie did (the PG-13 rating of the latter cuts out a lot of people who care most ardently about Barbie dolls in the here and now) and therefore didn’t inherently invite criticism from a more politically astute crop of moviegoers. Secondly, The Lego Movie wasn’t the biggest movie of the year, being beaten by forgettable tentpoles like Maleficent and Rio 2, and therefore wasn’t considered fair game to lambast and tear apart. But most importantly, The Lego Movie is a scrappy, vibrant adventure before it’s a commentary on real-world social politics. Barbie’s eagerness to engage with feminist messages attracted loud, critical backlash from the minute it dropped in movie theaters—in good and bad faith.

But just because, at the end of the day, there are more important things to do than perform close political readings on The Lego Movie doesn’t mean that the corporations that produced it get to go unscrutinized. By bankrolling a heartfelt, dazzlingly realized film about the way its product is played with, Lego invested in its own mythos, deliberately separating the emotional relationship consumers have with these bricks from the conditions of their production.

Lego has always rejected making toy replicas of firearms and military weapons…except for the many instances where it was financially beneficial to do so, or where they could bend their founding pacifist ethos by producing sci-fi or fantasy weaponry for their characters. Producing billions of tiny blocks of non-biodegradable plastic yearly is, shockingly, not a net positive for the environment, especially when Lego’s attempts to thwart killing the planet with bricks involve mining assets in the global south and abandoning plans to make them from recycled materials.

We cannot expect a sanitized commercial like The Lego Movie to meaningfully spin these uncomfortable truths into productive solutions, but they are useful for parsing the film as a form of corporate mythmaking. And even looking at the film itself, credible allegations of toxic work culture and punishing labor conditions have been recently made against Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s animation productions. When your narrative theme is that of creative joy needing to be celebrated, things get complicated when the laborers who created the film were not permitted the harmonious experience being preached.  

The Lego Movie may not have flirted with Oscar gold, but did ignite a respectable franchise—Batman and Ninjago spin-offs were followed by a straight sequel and a Will Arnett-hosted competition series. But none of them reached the heights of that first film—a film which, in the 10 years since its release, has never been the subject of as much analytical scrutiny as Barbie has received in six months. But the two films should be seen as a dyad of commercial cinema. We understand how companies promote their assets best by looking at films that are huge successes, by looking at how cinematic language and emotional drama are leveraged to present a selective narrative on how to feel about the product. 

The Lego Movie, like Barbie, asks us to simplify how we look at the product, to flatten its nuances and complications into a version that looks like it accounts for its flaws, but really just enforces the strength of the brand. What The Lego Movie introduced in 2014, Barbie has weaponized, pushing the playful-but-executive-approved self-criticism to its limits to the tune of over a billion dollars. It’s not about whether The Lego Movie is a better film than Barbie, but rather, if Barbie is an evolution of The Lego Movie, what on earth will come next?

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.