[MeechMunchie]

I saw The Lego Movie.

I was cautiously optimistic going in, and it turned out to be pretty much as great as everyone says it was. Right from the start you can tell that they're trying to tap into a lot of the retro appeal as well as trying to be hip and modern, rather than getting too nostalgic or, inversely, staying exclusively "cool". Lego's always had a timeless quality to it - anyone can pick it up and stick it together - so it really is in the spirit of the stuff to take that approach.

By the same token, I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the settings and characters were a mish-mash as well. Early on the protaganists find themselves in the Wild West, and I assumed the rest of the story would be a Gulliver's Travels-type romp through all the various franchises they've sold over the years; cute enough, but the fact that Warner Bros. styled the film on how a real child plays with Lego - chucking everything into the same box and having pirates flying spaceships pulled by dragons - was pretty brave. It really resonated with how I liked to express myself with it when I was younger, and I presume kids today do too.

As for what the story was, there wasn't a whole lot to it; an intentionally-loose MacGuffin story that gave the writers and characters a lot of room to mess around, at the expense of feeling pretty rushed at times. What I was genuinely impressed by was that the focus wasn't really so much on the story as a set of ideals, which were presented without being overly preachy - the idea of life as struggle between creativity and prescriptivity, a choice between freedom and safety that we treasure as children and forget as adults. Along with a bit of existential fluff about how it's only by doublethinking that we're special while accepting our relative interchangability that we can survive; to believe we hold the power to enact change is to grant ourselves the capacity to do so.

Yeah. They presented a richly realised, visually satisfying world, populated it with charming characters, made me feel young(er) again, and taught all the kids a valuable moral lesson while being seriously fucking funny.

Round of applause hope this gets a sequel etc. etc.

There was a split-second Bionicle cameo, too. Not the 1:1 Shadow of the Colossus-style excursion I was hoping for, but enough to raise a smirk - quite enough, by my standards.