Last weekend brought the nationwide opening of The Lego Batman Movie, a computer-animated whizbang that uses the Lego brand’s spark-plug characters and interlocking construction bricks to spoof the Batman/Superman/DC Comics universe. Like many children’s animations, the movie is a pinball machine of gags, wisecracks, and knowing pop-culture references, designed to feed the attention deficit disorder of kids and adults alike. Everything is foregrounded, everything is in your face, and your eyes dart around in the darkness of the theater like a caged bird. The Lego Batman Movie is an exercise in media overload, the density that is the void, the endless endlessness of modern entertainment.
When De Wit does focus on his characters, they’re often birds or sea creatures, and his imagery emphasizes their role in the grand design of nature. At the beginning of the movie, when the man has been washed ashore, a little crab pops out of the sand, scuttles and stops, scuttles and stops, circles the man’s foot and stops, then crawls up his pant leg, rousing him from his sleep. Later he’s awoken on the gray nocturnal beach by a tiny turtle crawling toward the sea, which he picks up and inspects. A school of these guys is making its way down the beach to the waterline; as the tide comes in, it pushes them back momentarily before pulling them in. (Moving water is one of the hardest things to animate, and De Wit does it fluidly, so to speak.) The only character in the movie to win an extreme, silent-film-style close-up is the title character, which stares at the man with obsidian eyes, its skin covered in irregular brown blotches that form a floral pattern around its central nostrils.
Directed by Michael Dudok de Wit
