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LEGO was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen a Danish carpenter who specialised in wood work, a lot of the early day Lego products being wooden toys. Eventually he invented the Automatic Binding Brick which is what is now synonymous with the name Lego. It wasn’t until 1973 that Lego was used in an animation median. The short is called ‘Journey to the Moon’ and was made by the  brothers Hassing, Lars and Henrik, who were 12 and 10 respectively and just children playing with the toy. They used the bricks to create a stop motion which told the story of a rocket launch, exploration of the moon and then return home. The stop motion techniques used are basic, utilising object motion for moving objects like the cars driving or space ship engine detaching. At the time Lego didn’t produce Minifigures yet, which are their plastic figurines that come in lego sets today, so the short is full of brick built men with zero chance for emotion or articulation so they just waddle along the ground frame by frame, its a super early version of stop motion but its still easy to identify them as people due to anthropomorphism (the attribution of human traits to objects). Throughout the duration of the short the brothers integrate real life film between frame by frame animation, something a head of its time, now would be considered super stylistic and innovative challenging the norms of animation. we see a sparkler used for the emissions of the rocket ship, a fully filmed shot of string pulling the elevator leading to the rocket ship and a funny detail at 2:47 a real human foot steps onto what’s ment to be the moons surface. The short is a very crude style of stop motion, but for two kids an a camera in the 70s it shows already how much Lego is a conduit for creativeity, allowing anyone to express their imagination.

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With the invention of computer graphics the Official Lego group saw an opportunity to step foot into visual media, in 2005 they partnered with Tt Games and Lucas-film to create the first ever ‘Lego Star Wars game’. This is were we saw what would become the signature animation for any Lego Production through out the early 2010s. This style is big on breaking the physics of a real lego man, the joints on a Minifigure can only have extremely limited movement, The head is on a stud and can pivot Left to Right, the arms rotate at the shoulders but only spin around on that axes, and the legs are attached to a hip piece that pivots allowing them to swing (Brickipedia, n.d.), the Animation instead allows for the Head, Arms and Legs, to move dynamically in any direction, the claws of the Lego man are even able to close and grab things, this was so that the Video Game Animation expression wasn’t janky a character would move around with the motion of a normal person. Future projects decided to stick with this style, it went on to be the norm for Lego games, commercials, Movies and TV shows.

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In 2011 they realised their first ever long lasting series ‘Ninjago’ which has now been on air for 15 seasons going through many different studios and distributors, the animation of the Minifigures was the same as the Star Wars game a lot of dynamic animation, lots of squash and stretch and exaggeration. The environments how ever are completely “realistic” no lego is used to build backgrounds or sets, buildings, trees, rivers tare fully animated worlds like any other.

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Another thing was birthed in 2005 that changed the world as we knew it, YouTube, a platform on the internet that allowed anyone in the world to create what ever type of video they wanted, post it to the internet and let anyone watch. This became the platform for one of the most beautiful and creative uses of Lego, Stop Motion Animations, a step beyond the first one made in the 70s, these now told stories. The animation techniques vary massively due to individuals understanding of the art form, sometimes its very basic just simple frame by frame photography, others going the extra step to add in principles of animation for effect. One thing all of these videos had in common was to stick to the physics of a lego Minifigure not going beyond what they were capable, this is what ends up with this unique charm of an animation style where it is rather janky and stiff but it suspends our disbelief, allowing us to imagine what if our lego sets could come to life, so people give it a pass.

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Eventually the Lego group decided it was time to tell their first story on the big screen. A film straight out of my childhood imagination, The LEGO movie realised in 2014 by Warner Brothers directed by Lord and Chris Miller. A fully lego animated feature like none before it, all the characters and environment built with specifically only lego bricks that were on the production line, the laws of the universe following those of real world lego, but beyond the creations made on YouTube. Smear frames are used perfectly through out the   movie to evolve past what was physically capable of a Lego Minifigure, the smears were made out of lego however, stretching arms  with bricks. The fully lego world was made in blender and was an innovation to what was capable for lego animation, while the style feels like its real stop motion its actually a blend of 3D cgi with only the aesthetics of stop motion. Artistes used blender to model the bricks and then manually add imperfections like fingerprints, shine, smudges and dust to the surfaces (Games of Bricks, 2023) all to emulate the look of real world lego pieces, the directors chose to do this to capture the look and feel of handmade brick films in honour of the creative community that had been built on YouTube (Chris Miller, 2014). Now a days this is the new norm for lego animation its used now in games and ads with tv shows having to stay behind for budget reasons.

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The Lego YouTube community has been growing for years now, people getting more creative and even more skilled with the technique of stop motion, now with iPhones and other technology evolving to make the process even easier for small creators. there has begun to be many creators, LegoMe_TheOG being a pioneer, who have taken the time to learn how to animation lego in Blender. Now its become normal to see high grade lego animation made by someone in their bedroom, with almost just as much detail as the real theatrical realise. Scratches, smudges etc having to be added manually before can now be added in a specific lego pack. Something I haven’t touched on is the lego minifugres emotions on their face specifically, before stop motion made it really hard for lego men to have expression in their face, having to exchange the whole head of a character to create a different emotion and in most cases the same head would only have 2-3 different emotions, with the 3D animated style this evolved massively in the early days it was rather simple, having just normal exaggerated animated faces but now with this new 3D computer stop motion the facial expressions can be dialled to 100, with little shaking of the eyes adding emotion, if a character is overly joyed their eyes might slightly jitter to emulate a twinkle in their eye, or the creases on their faces appearing when they smirk or frown, this tiny little details just make you feel so much more. The creative capacity of lego animation in the community will always be growing and with tech making it easier more and more stores can be told in the visual style of LEGO.