We’ve spent the past few years crying out for anything original, as Hollywood continues to dole out sequel upon prequel upon expanded universe upon toy adaptation, and so on and so forth until either AI replaces the whole darned thing or we all die. So we guess we really shouldn’t complain when Hollywood does bless us with something truly unforeseen like, we don’t know, a Pharrell Williams animated Lego biopic, for example?
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Luckily for the ten or so people in the world who were really clamoring for a Pharrell Williams animated Lego biopic, the news about the Pharrell Williams animated Lego biopic is actually real. And we cannot stress this enough: it’s a Pharrell Williams animated Lego biopic.
At least the film, cheekily titled Piece By Piece, seems pretty self-aware. “You know what would be cool is if we told my story with Lego pieces,” a Lego and very meta Pharrell figurine asks in the film’s trailer, to which a Lego-fied director Morgan Neville responds, “Seriously?” “Just be open,” responds Pharrell, which we will also try to be from here on out.
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“When I was a kid, I knew I was different,” Williams narrates over the familiar tune of “Happy,” while imaginative Lego scenes of oceans and spaceships play out on screen. “People would say, ‘Oh, that’s an odd child,’ and that crushed my spirit,” he continues. Well, he’s certainly free now. As bizarre as this whole thing is on paper, it’s clearly giving him the creative license to go big and crazy with absolutely everything. “It’s mind-blowing, in a way, the freedom that we were able to put together in the film, but that only works if you’re channeling your subject,” Neville told Variety.
One of the ways Williams was able to exercise this freedom was by casting a bunch of his famous friends and, of course, drawing them all up as Lego avatars of their own. The supporting cast of this thing is pretty mind-blowing and includes recognizable, hook-handed versions of Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, and Snoop Dogg.
If you’re wondering what happened to the other Pharrell Williams real-life inspired feature—the still untitled, Michael Gondry-directed musical which just added Quinta Brunson and Anderson .Paak to its cast—that’s very much still on. “[The Lego biopic] is about my life and how God is continuing to give me the pieces that put it together—piece by piece—and to have really amazing people along the journey in my constellation. To all the stars, musically, and all my teachers and everybody who has contributed to this constellation,” Williams told Variety. “[The untitled musical] project is about the neighborhood that I grew up in until I was, maybe, 10 and what that life was like. It takes place in 1977. I was obviously four years old, so it’s not about my life. It’s a fictional story told in that world, called Atlantis Apartments.”
Piece By Piece opens in theaters October 11.