Pharell Williams uses LEGOs to tell the story of his life in director Morgan Neville’s first animated documentary.
After making its cinematic debut with The LEGO Movie, the LEGO brand of toys has since been in a fight against the law of diminishing returns, with The LEGO Movie 2, The LEGO Batman Movie and The LEGO Ninjago Movie failing to reach the same financial heights as the animated classic from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, which eventually led to Warner Bros. selling the movie rights to the popular trademark to Universal. Their first film project with The LEGO Group is Piece By Piece, a documentary about the life of prolific musician Pharrell Williams, and the jovial creativity on display here from the hip-hop mogul and director Morgan Neville does indeed take the LEGO franchise to new heights and sets it back on the right proverbial track.
The music documentary Piece By Piece begins in a CGI-animated rendering of Pharrell Williams’s lavish family estate, and follows the LEGO figure of Pharrell Williams (voicing himself) into a one-on-one interview with the film’s director Morgan Neville (also voicing himself). Here, Pharrell tells the story of his life from the beginning with his childhood in the slums of Virginia Beach, Virginia. Pharrell admits that he wasn’t the best student, and mentions that other adults perceived him as weird before describing his discovery of music and being enthralled by the sounds it produced from his living room stereo to the point of realizing that was his calling.
From there, Pharrell details forming record production duo The Neptunes with his best friend from high school Chad Hugo (voicing himself) in 1992, and even his friendships with other fellow future names in hip-hop like Missy Elliott, Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley and Melvin “Magoo” Barcliff, as well as getting his and Chad’s feet in the door of the music business when famous producer Teddy Riley discovers them all when they compete in a local talent show. Riley offers Pharrell an internship at his recording studio to skepticism from his parents, but his grandmother is there to provide inspiration and encouragement every step of the way. What follows is a bouncy and exuberant chronicle of Pharrell’s rise to prominence in hip-hop and popular music.
Piece By Piece is the type of music doc that succeeds in being entertaining as well as informative, particularly through teaching unaware audiences how Pharrell made money by selling instrumental beats to rappers. It’s also fascinating for millennial moviegoers to comprehend that Pharrell had a hand in so many hit songs from their childhood, such as a particular reenactment that sees Teddy asking a young Pharrell to write the lyrics for his verse in the one-hit wonder “Rump Shaker” by Wreckx-N-Effect.
Piece By Piece also gets points for its style of animation. Like the LEGO movies under the Warner banner, Pharrell’s LEGO-assembled world looks gorgeous, colorful and brimming with detail, like when the film’s subject floats in his giant swimming pool in which the many studs are visible on all the LEGO pieces that make up the water surrounding him. The animation also beautifully visualizes audio with vibrant colors and abstract shapes to reinforce both Pharrell’s descriptions of the sounds that play from the family soundsystem, as well as the wondrous euphoric state in which music takes him.
In this documentary’s opening scene, Pharrell proposes his idea for the documentary about himself to Morgan Neville face-to-face to be done entirely in the world of LEGO because it’s the best way for him to show his authentic self. The choice pays off to make Piece By Piece an ultimately charming and enlightening watch that endears us to the hip-hop mogul as a person, and injects the film with a childlike energy that matches his love for music and fashion design. It’s always fun to watch LEGO versions of this generation’s greatest musicians touch on how Pharrell helped them evolve their sound into something light-hearted and danceable, from Gwen Stefani’s tale of his assistance on the famous No Doubt track “Hella Good” to the story of how he evolved Snoop Dogg out of gangster rap and into the top 40 charts with “Drop It Like Its Hot”.
To that point, the film is also very humorous in both moments where Pharrell and his friends break the fourth wall by talking to the audience during a reenactment, as well as in the little details. A couple examples arrive when Pharrell and Hugo play a beat to a man on the street that sounds so new to him that his head and torso comically explode, and an instance where Pharrell as a child tries to make the ‘Live Long and Prosper’ hand sign from Star Trek after seeing Spock do it on TV, only to realize his LEGO hands only have two fingers.
But it’s important to mention that Pharrell Williams also serves as a producer for Piece By Piece, and his involvement in this project about himself results in an ultimately safe probing of the hip hop icon that barely scratches the surface of who he is. As aforementioned, he admits that he was perceived as an “odd child” growing up, and the way he describes music suggests that he is somewhere on the autism spectrum, but the movie doesn’t want to admit that outright for reasons unknown. It’s also worth noting that the second act turn for the dramatic feels really tame, not only with the lack of insurmountable obstacles for Pharrell to overcome, but also with how little time is spent on this downward turn, robbing the film of a satisfying emotional punch.
At the end of the day, however, Pharrell Williams and director Morgan Neville aim to inform, entertain and inspire moviegoers of all ages with his life story, and Piece By Piece achieves that in its breezy 93-minute runtime. Audiences will bop their heads to all the original tunes crafted for this documentary and all the top 40 classics Pharrell had a hand in producing and writing in his 30 years in the music industry, marvel at how well scenes from famous music videos are recreated (eg. “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell’s biggest hit “Happy” and even “Shake Ya Azz” by Mystikal), and feel inspired to dream big and do big by using their imagination. That’s a good message in this day and age, and that’s why Piece By Piece is fun for the whole family.