On the 10th of February we’re heading back into the brick utopia of The Lego Movie with Chris McKay’s superhero spin off, The Lego Batman Movie. Will Arnett returns to lend his gruff voice to the diminutive Caped Crusader, along with Michael Cera’s eager Boy Wonder Robin, Ralph Fiennes’ tenderly disapproving Alfred and Rosario Dawson’s, frankly awesome, Barbara Gordon.
The film is a dizzying rise through the brick Batverse, with the series’ trademark visual inventiveness and a rapid fire barrage of jokes for all ages. The film is a different beast to the 2014 Lego Movie. The focus on Batman gives the creators the chance to play with all of the various Bat-iterations over the years. This is done with glee and zest, the pop culture impact of superhero movies lays the perfect foundation for a loving parody.
We spoke to producer Dan Lin, director Chris McKay and star of the show Will Arnett to find out why they signed up to a Lego movie all about Batman.
Stefan Pape talks with Will Arnett – see the video above
As Dan Lin explains, the roots of the Lego love go deep, “It comes out of a love of Lego. With the Lego movies it’s about exploring creativity and imagination. My kids are buying Lego sets that are too difficult for them to finish, so I find myself in the wee hours of the morning finishing their sets. And it’s a calming, therapeutic thing – making Lego late at night.
We make movies that are funny to us, truthfully we’re all 12 year-old kids and that’s why it works.”
McKay agreed, noting his experience with the series Robot Chicken as an important step on the road to The Lego Batman Movie, “I loved LEGO as a kid, and it took me a long time to not play with toys. I literally took my toys to college.”
Maintaining this childlike affection is crucial to this particular toy story. In purely business terms the wider demographic reach of a film, the more money it brings in. It is the reason so much of our current pop culture climate is laden with revisitations of old ideas, long forgotten series or characters we’d left behind.
Speaking with the pair it became clear that the nostalgic element works alongside the central tenet of making a good film for everyone. McKay explained, “There’s jokes for kids, there are some jokes for adults, there are jokes if you’re a Batfan, there are movie-reference jokes and observational jokes – we run the gamut of sophistication to pratfalls – hopefully there’s something in there for everybody.”
Filling a world with references and quick fire puns only works if the artistry behind the scenes allows it. The visual style of the Lego Movies deliberately echoes the act of playing with the toy itself. As Dan Lin told us this was a key part to the success of the films, “The first movie was hard. We were asking the artists to do something that was counter-intuitive. We were asking CG artists and model makers to make and animate things in a different way. Most people want animation to imitate life, they don’t want to see the seams of the animation. Even if you look at a lot of stop motion, they try to make it look like CG.
“We want people to feel the weight, we want them to see the jerkiness of the animation because there’s a charm to that. What happened is that at first they were letting the computer figure out a move between two points, and we said ‘We want you to make those decisions’. So if we were talking Batman throwing a Batarang – where the arm starts and where it ends – I didn’t want the animators to plot that out on a computer, I wanted them to make each of those moves. It’s more time consuming but it gives you a more hands-on quality to the movie.”
Kerri-Anne McNally sat down with the director and producer – see the video above
You can see the full effect of this on the 10th of February when The Lego Batman Movie flies into UK cinemas. You can read our review here, and asking the pair to sum up why they loved working on the film, Dan Lin explained, “We make movies that are funny to us, truthfully we’re all 12 year-old kids and that’s why it works.”
The Lego Batman Movie is out in cinemas on the 10th of February.
