TY - JOUR AU - Burt, Richard AB -

Drawing on Paul de Man’s essay on Heinrich von Kleist’s Marionette Theater and on several essays by Walter Benjamin on puppets and toys, this essay explores Shakespeare’s appearance as a Master Builder in the The Lego Movie, The Lego Movie Videogame, several amateur YouTube videos of scenes from Shakespeare using Lego toys, a Shakespeare Lego action figure, and a two volume Brick Shakespeare edition of eight plays using photographs of Lego models as characters. The figures of the puppet and the toy open up a perspective on the mimicry of stop-motion animation in The Lego Movie and what German novelist Friedrich Theodor Vischer calls “Die Tücke des Objekts” (“the spite of objects”). With digital cinema, animation has regained the centrality it had before the advent of narrative cinema, the difference being that digital animation uses CGI whereas stop-motion animation requires the filmmaker to act as off-screen puppeteer. As a minor Master Builder engaged in awesome destruction, The Lego Movie’s Shakespeare offers a small-scale way of thinking the film’s clever fetishization of what it calls the “piece of resistance.”

TI - What Is Called Thinking with ShaXXXspeares and Walter Benjamin?: Managing De/Kon/struction, Toying with Letters in The Lego Movie JF - Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies DA - 2016-12-28 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/university-of-pennsylvania-press/what-is-called-thinking-with-shaxxxspeares-and-walter-benjamin-8FKnUv3Adf SP - 94 EP - 115 VL - 16 IS - 3 DP - DeepDyve ER -