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Bric[k]olage: Adaptation as Play in The Lego Movie (2014)

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/adaptation/apy015

1755-0645

Madeleine Hunter,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

This essay seeks to contribute to the evolving conversation surrounding the effects of convergence culture on adaptation as process and product in twenty-first-century media culture. To this end, it engages Christopher Miller and Phil Lord’s The Lego Movie (2014), approaching the film as an example of Eckart Voigts-Virchow’s concept of meta-adaptation in order to explore to what extent the film’s explicit construction of adaptation as a form of play testifies to a new relation to culture and its products brought about by media convergence. This article explores affinities between theories of play and of adaptation, before moving on to explore Lego’s own mediality as a medium of both play and adaptation and how this mediality informs The Lego Movie’s performance of adaptation. The Lego Movie is at its core an exploration of what it means to ‘play well’ (a phrase that in Danish translates to ‘Leg godt’ and from which Lego takes its name), and so this essay concludes by examining how the film’s climactic debate about the nature of play echoes debates about the nature of adaptation as they have unfolded in the field of adaptation studies from its inception up to the current day, and by pondering what a conception of adaptation as play might offer those approaching the study of adaptation in contemporary media culture.