(Emmet and the other minifigures – Batman, Unikitty, Shaquille O’Neal, and Abraham Lincoln, to name a few – aren’t so geometrically restricted they look more like sophisticated versions of Fisher-Price characters.) But the computer graphics have an endearing, stop-motion quality to them, one that’s a couple of notches above the jerky South Park but several below the digital sleekness of a Pixar flick.

Granted, the animation looks a little scruffy and unpolished, given the inherent imitations of the rectangular elements used to assemble the film. The Lego Movie may be the shrewdest marketing ploy you’ve ever seen.

And all the while, the film is one big advertisement for the multicolored building blocks from which it’s made. It all fits together seamlessly, in a way you don’t see coming. (The film’s nods to Star Wars and The Matrix are more than just pop-culture asides.) What initially appears to be a nonsensical story about an ordinary minifigure named Emmet, who joins forces with a cadre of Master Builders to save Legokind from the evil Lord Business (who’s plotting to take the snap out of things with Krazy Glue), later resonates with depth and feeling when it segues into the real world of rigid fathers and their imaginative sons. But in The Lego Movie, the tug of war between individuality and conformity is one with the Lego. Most animated films deliver their third-act homilies about the value of friendship or the strength of family to the 8-year-olds in the audience seemingly for their parents’ sake these tacked-on messages of socially redeeming value do little but dilute the cartoony insanity that precedes them. Smart and savvy, it takes the classic dilemma of every Lego owner – to follow the instructions or not to follow? – and constructs a wild-ride fantasy of colorful, interlocking plastic bricks only to deconstruct it in the most amazing way possible.

Let’s go out on a critical limb, shall we? The Lego Movie is the best thing to come along since that other toy-centric movie revolutionized animated films about 20 years ago.

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