National Film Vault

FILM NOTES

Warner Bros. Pictures released The Lego Movie in February 2014, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. The film arrived as a genuine surprise, transforming a toy brand into a sharp, visually inventive comedy that earned widespread critical praise and strong box office returns. Shot digitally but rendered to mimic the texture of physical stop-motion animation, it represented a distinct moment in studio animation and demonstrated that unconventional source material could yield genuinely ambitious filmmaking.

This 35mm cell, titled Emmet Brickowski, captures the film's central character standing within a LEGO cityscape, photographed from a low angle with tall brick-built buildings rising behind him. The three frames are near-identical, offering a clean, sustained look at Emmet in his everyday urban environment before the story pulls him elsewhere.