Lego music doc Piece By Piece is only missing "puff" from its title
Pharrell Williams is a smart, creative guy. Is that enough to sustain a feature film?
Photo: Focus Features
The Lego Movie, the 2014 cartoon from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, challenged a lot of preconceptions about what a movie based on a toy line could be—and, as such, became a text of permission for plenty of middling-to-bad ideas. At the center of these new misconceptions was the idea that maybe Lego wasn’t just a brand of high-end plastic building toys, and maybe it wasn’t just the vehicle for a particular style of manic but self-aware comic animation that looks like stop-motion (but isn’t). Maybe it could serve as a whole new medium, man. It’s still theoretically possible that Lego will one day produce an animated movie that exists far outside of the slightly diminished-returns comfort zone established by The Lego Batman Movie and The Lego Ninjago Movie and blazes its own inventive trail beyond family adventure-comedies. The pop music puff piece Piece By Piece would like very much to be that movie right now. Instead, it tells the agreeable but not particularly galvanizing life story of musician Pharrell Williams with the visual wit and whimsy of approximately one to three excellent music videos. It is 93 minutes long.
Piece By Piece is also rated PG, which may be its greatest novelty: a documentary about the music business—and yes, though it’s illustrated with animation, the backbone of the movie is narrative provided by real-life interviews, not full-on Legofied dramatic scenes—that’s probably perfectly fine to show a second-grader. Excerpts of it could very well work in an elementary-school music classroom when the teacher needs a break towards the end of the year, because of Pharrell’s unusually behind-the-scenes-heavy creative path and the generally wholesome image put across by director Morgan Neville.