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The LEGO Ninjago Movie


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  • 3 months later...

I'm glad they aren't afraid to shake things up. 

 

Interesting that they're recasting all the characters. I'm worried Jackie Chan's voice isn't really gonna read as anything but "Jackie Chan," though, even if the words are coming out of Wu's mouth. I guess we'll see.

 

The new figs are a lot more interesting, though! Shifting Cole over to brown so Nya can have her own color is a good move in my book. Making her colors red+blue in the first place was a sort of awkward choice, defining her by the two guys she's directly tied to (Kai and Jay). Plus its just a weird combination. New hairpieces are interesting too.

 

EDIT: also now the six ninja are the same colors as the six Toa. huh.

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Dazzgracefulmoon

jackie chan as sensei wu??? nice.

fred armison as cole?????????? I never would have thought that

 

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  • 1 month later...

New press release I guess!

 

JRkeNSM.jpg

 

Quote

The main cast has been put together for “The LEGO® Ninjago Movie,” a new animated adventure in Warner Bros. Pictures’ LEGO franchise. The film will star Dave Franco, Justin Theroux, Fred Armisen, Abbi Jacobson, Olivia Munn, Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Peña, Zach Woods, and the legendary Jackie Chan. “The LEGO Ninjago Movie” is slated to open nationwide on September 22, 2017.

 

In this big-screen Ninjago adventure, the battle for Ninjago City calls to action young Lloyd, aka the Green Ninja, along with his friends, who are all secret warriors and LEGO Master Builders. Led by kung fu master Wu, as wise-cracking as he is wise, they must defeat evil warlord Garmadon, the Worst Guy Ever, who also happens to be Lloyd’s dad. Pitting mech against mech and father against son, the epic showdown will test this fierce but undisciplined team of modern-day ninjas who must learn to check their egos and pull together to unleash their true power.

 

Jackie Chan (“Kung Fu Panda,” “The Karate Kid”) stars as Master Wu; Justin Theroux (“Magamind 2,” “The Leftovers”) is Garmadon; Dave Franco (“Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising”) plays Lloyd; and Olivia Munn (“X-Men: Apocalypse”) is Lloyd’s mom, Koko. Making up the secret ninja crew, Fred Armisen (“The Jim Gaffigan Show,” “SNL”) voices Cole; Abbi Jacobson (“Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising”) plays Nya; Kumail Nanjiani (“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”) is Jay; Michael Peña (“Ant-Man,” “The Martian”) is Kai; and Zach Woods (“Silicon Valley”) voices Zane.

 

This is gonna be hella different from the show, and I still don't know if this is a good or bad thing yet. Welp.

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12 minutes ago, le717 said:

 

Someone misspelled Misako.

isn't it great that the second most important woman in the ninjago story is inconsequential enough that they can rename and totally replace her without much difficulty

 

OTHER THAN that, looks good to me. I'm glad we're going back to Garmadon as the badguy evilman. Hopefully they will right the wrongs of the show and not make his evil status be because a snake bit him and he just can't help himself. Because that was lazy. And bad.

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TheBillionTonBrick

Next thing you know,  they'll make Lego Movies for Lego Racers, Lego Island, Rock Raiders, Stunt Rally, Lego City, Animaniacs, Phineas and Ferb -- you get the idea.

 

But in all seriousness, I'm actually looking forward to this, TLM's sequel, and the Lego Batman movie.

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  • 2 weeks later...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/new-lego-short-master-debut-922834

There's gonna be a Ninjago short playing before Storks in theaters. 

 

Quote

The Master: A Lego Ninjago Short is based on the Lego Ninjago series and features Master Wu, voiced by Jackie Chan, who gets into a conflict with Chicken, voiced by Abbi Jacobson. Justin Theroux narrates the story.

 

Chicken's VA is Nya's, and the narrator is Garmadon. But just who is Chicken, anyway?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Looks like the monastery from Ninjago's first season, cool. except now it has a giant statue of Wu in it

 

It looks really pretty. kind of interesting that the courtyard is filled with real sand particles, already setting this apart from TLM and its all-Lego world. And I guess it makes sense to experiment with stuff like that now - they don't have to hide that it's all being played out by a kid in 'real life' anymore.

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Pretty cool, looks awesome. I hope I get to see it in full someday, as I'm probably not going to watch Storks.

 

I just noticed that Master Wu's name is impossible in Japanese, if Ninjago actually takes place in a Japan-ish setting. But it would make sense if he was Chinese, he's also voiced by Jackie Chan, soooo yeah. It's still pretty weird nonetheless. Why would a master of Spinjitsu (note the suffix jitsu which is Japanese) be from another country? I get that it actually happens, and quite often at that, but for the sake of simplicity and straight-forwardness I'd make him Japanese.

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11 minutes ago, Fush said:

 

I know. That's what I was saying. :P Maybe I should've been more clear.

12 minutes ago, Fush said:

Really I think you are overthinking it though. I don't know what the movie will do, but the show at least doesn't take place in any real world location, buy a fictional fantasy world that draws inspiration from no one specific culture. 

 

Yet Master Wu has a Chinese surname, for no clear reason, and Spinjitsu has a Japanese-ish name. :P I get what you're saying though, for example none of the ninjas actually have a Japanese name, and Garmadon clearly isn't a Japanese word. Still, Wu... it's the only one that really doesn't work in my opinion.

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2016/09/06/jackie-chan-master-lego-ninjago-sneak-peek-exclusive/89817888/

 

Quote

The Master slightly tweaks the traditional all-Lego-brick computer-graphic animation.  Saunders brought animated greenery into background hills and floating clouds "to introduce the idea you're now in the backyard playing with Legos."

 

I'm looking forward to this movie, seems like a fresh enjoyable take on Ninjago so far.

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  • 4 months later...
13 minutes ago, Ayliffe said:

* Screenshot of the new character designs *

 

 

hsV53D9.jpg

...hrrrrmm...

...there are some... interesting design choices on display here.

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I'm just so damn refreshed to see people experimenting with minifigure styles after they've gotten so homogeneous over the past decade (The LEGO Batman Movie also does this and I love it). These still technically stick with the established guidelines for the modern style, but expand on it and give the characters a lot more individual personality... Which is especially nice when the original designs for the ninja were so formulaic and similar to each other, usually  just with main colors and symbols swapped. The only thing about these I'm not so sure on is Kai's hilariously poofy hair. I like everything else though. Zane's hair piece looks like it'd be great for a more game-accurate Dash minifigure if it were in brown - which is funny as the older hair piece previously used by Zane (and Dash) was based on Dash's game design (For those who don't know: The Alpha Team game came before the sets and the characters were designed by the game devs; the physical minifigs were adaptions of the game designs.)

 

(Edit a few days later - updated the topic title to be more fitting)

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  • lol username changed the title to The LEGO Ninjago Movie
  • 9 months later...

So whilst the forum went off to the toolshed for repairs, the film released worldwide to... well, less than stellar reception overall. Thanks to the UK release being three weeks after the initial US release I had to dodge spoilers for longer than I would've liked to, but I just about managed to go into the film reasonably blind. My thoughts on the thing are... extremely mixed. More in the spoilers!

 

Spoiler

THE GOOD STUFF

  • The visuals are, as per usual with these films, utterly gorgeous. A lotta reviews for the film have used the "oh no it doesnt use legos all the time its lazy" thing as a frequent criticism, but for me I... don't get this? The realistic natural elements with minifig-made structures being integrated into 'em reminded me mostly of those wonderfully-photographed spreads you'd get in 90s lego catalogues with train layouts and castles and such, and boy do I have a love for those layouts. S' a good visual style.
  • I also really really like Ninjago City's general design, it's almost like Los Angeles in Blade Runner but brighter and more child-friendly and I really really like that. Good stuff.
  • The animation is also, as per usual, still utterly gorgeous. They definitely do "cheat" a lot more with popping off minifig arms and exaggerated movements than the other films, but every smear frame in the film is still made with 100% lego elements so far as animation goes it's pretty dang inventive. 
  • Apart from one or two duff notes (I'll get back to this in a sec), the voice acting is mostly pretty spot-on too. Garmadon, Lloyd and Zane in particular are dang great, and the rest of the ninjas are pretty well-voiced too... when they do eventually speak, that is (I'll also get back to this in a sec).
  • The stupid pointless love-triangle from the show that serves no purpose other than to start shipping wars on tumblr is completely absent here, thank christ.
  • The character designs are several notches above Ninjago's usual decent standard and some of them (particularly Zane and Jay) are probably my favourite iterations of the characters design-wise ever.
  • Zane is best ninja bar none.

Right, now we've covered that let's move onto the more questionable bits of the film, with...

 

THE BAD STUFF

  • On imdb the film has a grand total of 13 (!) writers, and when it comes down to the plot... you can really, really tell this thing's had a silly amount of rewrites/changes through production and the final result feels more like remnants of several different story ideas blended together in the edit rather than having a clear idea of what they wanted to do at the very start. There's bits like the Good Morning Ninjago segment introducing the ninjas at the start where you can really tell that they had a ton o' finalised footage they'd removed from an earlier cut that they didn't know what to do with so they just haphazardly shoved it in there and it just suuuuuuucks. Talking of the first Good Morning Ninjago segment...
  • With storytelling in any medium, there's a general golden rule that should never, ever be broken with characters - show, don't tell. If you wanna get across to the audience that a character is shy or reckless or calm, then you should get that across through their speech and mannerisms so the audience can work out for themselves which character is which. What you absolutely shouldn't do in any piece of media whatsoever is yell directly at the audience which character is which and exactly what all their character traits are because it treats the audience like two-year-olds and is frankly an extremely lazy way of introducing characters. Naturally then, that's exactly how TLNM decides to introduce you into this world and, to put it bluntly, it's absolutely piss-poor and by far the worst part of the film for me. Tiny bits and bobs of exposition is one thing, but getting two news anchors to spend like 5 minutes yelling at you exactly who each character is and their relationship to Lloyd is just extremely lazy and awful in every single way and I just hate it so much and ugh. Showing all of the mechs and the inside of Garmadon's fortress in said news segment also completely removes any sense of surprise from their initial reveals later on in the film for the audience, which also completely sucks. The absolute worst part about it is that it's pretty clear from the unused footage in the ninja montages that they were gonna have a longer battle sequence at the start that would've introduced every character naturally through actions like every other good film, but instead they opted for this route because... why? Why did they do this? Why?!?
  • This definitely isn't a problem unique to TLNM (By the sounds of it the MLP Movie does it and I've got my fears about Avengers: Infinity War and Justice League doing it), but it's very much prevalent here - whilst some of the main characters get a ton of development/screen time, with a lot of them sorta just feel like they're tagging along for the ride and don't really contribute to the plot in any meaningful way as individuals. Kai and Cole in particular are just sorta there, and whilst Jay and Zane have some cool lines every now and again they don't really evolve as characters that much throughout the story. Shame really, since I was really hoping that the movie would make an attempt at not making Cole the "sorta-here-I-guess" ninja like he is in the show. Guess it simply wasn't to be.
  • Remember how I said most of the voice acting is pretty good? Well, there's an exception to that general rule, but there's a chance you may not have heard it - instead of having Good Morning America hosts for the GMN segments, here in the UK they replaced 'em with Ben Shephard and Kate Garraway from Good Morning Britain because localisation or something. Whilst Kate's performance is completely fine, Ben's is... to put it blunt, pretty darn awful. I dunno whether it's the way he's saying the lines or how it sounds like they're not written with his voice in mind (I wouldn't be surprised if he's got the same lines as the US GMN hosts, but I've got no way of checking that), but either way it sounds cringey as hell and I don't like it no siree.
  • Without going into too many details, the framing device the film uses serves no real purpose plot-wise and really doesn't need to be there honestly. They could've completely cut it and it wouldn't have made a shred o' difference.
  • Warner Bros really, really shouldn't have revealed Meowthra in the SDCC trailer honestly. If they'd kept it secret until the film's release as a right-outta-left-field reveal I really would've had more respect for the film than I do now.
  • The climax also feels kinda... rushed? Like, the moral lessons happen and then the animated stuff just sorta... ends. Doesn't feel as earned as TLM or TLBM.
  • There's a couple of scenes near the beginning that sound awfully devoid of background sound/music, almost to a degree that it makes the thing feel like WB sent out an unfinished cut to cinemas. S' weird.
  • The meme-y ultimate weapon montages? Awful. Please don't do that again.
  • Occasionally the ninjas describe things as "So ninja!" and it feels very "how do you do fellow kids" each and every time.
  • Zane does not dab in the film. 

 

All in all, if I had to rate the film I'd give it a firm 6/10 - it's not the absolute worst film I've seen this year (to be fair I had to sit through the bloody emoji movie so I wouldn't take that as much), but there's much better out there to watch and I'd encourage you to do so. 

 

tl;dr: Save the money you'd spend on film tickets for the stunning sets and just wait 'til the movie arrives on DVD - it's competent but really not worth the cash honestly.

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