It’s one of the most unexpected and unusual ideas for a film in recent memory – but since Pharrell Williams has rarely played by conventional rules, it somehow makes sense. The music legend – producer, rapper, frontman of N.E.R.D, beatmaker to Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani and plenty more – is telling his story in a biopic titled Piece By Piece. And that biopic (or, behind-the-music documentary) happens to come in animated LEGO form. Yes it’s your, um, typical animated LEGO Pharrell Williams biopic. Watch the trailer here:
Let’s lay any cynicism aside for a minute: this could be a fascinating and unique film, a distinctly Pharrellian way to tell the story of a musical icon who made it his signature to pick apart melodic bricks and rebuild them in his own image. And amid a deluge of straight-up play-the-hits music movies (your _Back To Black_s and _Bob Marley: One Love_s, for instance), it’s refreshing to see a different medium employed to convey Pharrell’s creative journey. Plus, it means we get to see the likes of Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, and Justin Timberlake in minifigure form. Tie-in LEGO music studio set coming when?
Piece By Piece comes with serious filmmaking pedigree behind it – director Morgan Neville is an Oscar-winning documentarian, behind 20 Feet From Stardom, the Mister Rogers-centric Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, and this year’s two-part Steve Martin documentary. Visually, it looks of a piece with the slew of LEGO movies that arrived in the mid-‘10s, complete with those films’ signature sense of humour – and, of course, it comes with new Pharrell music. Considering Despicable Me 2’s ‘Happy’ became a massive runaway hit in its own right, maybe this could be a win for Pharrell in multiple ways.
Either way, we’ll find out if Piece By Piece manages to click all the pieces together, or if it feels like there are bits of the instructions missing, when it hits cinemas later this year.