Piece By Piece

 

“🎶 Because I’m happy! 🎶”

Creative, colourful and charismatic, Piece By Piece thrives in its unique LEGO animated approach to documenting the life and career of Pharrell Williams with surreal sequences and plenty of interviews with industry peers to combine and explore what makes the artist tick delivering a fun and fresh film going experience. 

Discussion Points:

Like Pharrell, a genre-less artist who has worked in hip-hop, pop, rock, R&B, country and more, Piece By Piece isn’t just one thing: It’s an animated feature. It’s a documentary. It’s a musical. It’s a biopic. It’s unique. And it is very funny to watch LEGO Snoop Dogg or Daft Punk in a movie that’s animated and rated PG. Since making “Happy” for Despicable Me 2 in 2013, Williams has felt more like a family friendly force despite his litany of edgier hip hop hits and so it’s refreshing to see the film explore some of his earlier work and life, albeit still in colourful sanitised digital LEGO. Pharrell is an artist who sees sounds and feels beats, and documentarian Morgan Neville leans into that with the LEGO compositions and rhythmic waves that pulsate out. The film does come off a bit like a pro-Pharrell puff piece and despite its efforts to unpack his battle with ego, it can’t help but still come across as a calculated career move to celebrate the artist whilst lawsuits brew between him and former Neptunes partner Chad Hugo. However it’s also very clear that Neville wants to get to the heart of Pharrell’s personal story - and for a producer who’s quite private - the films biggest strengths are interviews with his parents and his wife, and the personal testimony about the impact his grandma and her faith had on him. Definitely comes off very pro its subject, but it’s also frequently very funny, with some great visual references that come from the creative use of LEGO. It’s got a great flow narratively and was really refreshing to watch. I had a fun time with this!