Piece by Piece, a new Lego animated biopic, pulls the curtain behind rapper, singer and producer Pharrell Williams’ rise to the top.
Hitting theaters October 11, the film chronicles Pharrell’s life using Lego minifigures. The film will feature many of Pharrell’s collaborators also in Lego minifigure form with appearances from Snoop Dogg, Timbaland, Jay Z, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, Kendrick Lamar and Daft Punk.
“You know what would be cool is if we told my story with Lego pieces,” Lego Pharrell, voicing himself, tells the Lego director in an on-camera interview. “When I was a kid, I knew I was different. And people would say, ‘Oh, that’s an odd child.”
A January press release described the film as “an unparalleled motion picture experience that captures the magic and brilliance of Pharrell Williams’ creative genius, one brick at a time.”
As the clip illustrates, Williams has always viewed art in unconventional ways. “I loved music. It was mesmerizing to me,” he narrates over a scene from his young life. ” I would see beautiful hues of light cascading. I just thought that’s what all Black kids did — they stared into the speaker like ‘Whoa.’”
Naturally, the idea to use Lego to illustrate his journey makes sense for the unconventional thinker. However, he’d been resistant to the idea of doing a documentary or biopic when his agent first brought him the prospect seven or eight years ago.
“Everyone was doing them at the time, and I was like, ‘Hell no.’ I never want to do what everybody else is doing,” Williams recalled with Morgan Neville, the film’s director. “Everybody’s taking the Lincoln Tunnel, then I want to take a plane.”
He continued, “But when he finally said the magic words, ‘You can do it any way you want,’ I knew deep down inside that I wanted to do it through Lego.”
Plans for a Pharrell Williams biopic date back to 2018 when Illumination announced plans to build a film about the musician. Eventually, the film morphed into Pharrell’s Lego idea — making the film the first Lego film under Universal’s new exclusive licensing agreement.