Awesome!

It’s right there in the post title, but that will be the only unencrypted spoiler you find here.

Against all odds, The Lego Movie is the best non-Pixar CGI movie I’ve seen in – well, maybe ever.

The comedy is anarchic, like the best bits of Robot Chicken – Lego’s licensing of other properties allows the filmmakers to create a universe in which DC characters bump up against Star Wars characters (and Lord of the Rings characters, and many others) to hilarious effect (a louche Lando Calrissian has an appropriately sleazy cameo; and the Batman is kind of a sullen jerk with daddy issues).

In fact, the whole movie is stacked high with sly references to other media and films (off the top of my head: nods to Aliens, The Matrix, Monty Python, The Simpsons, and “Mr. Bill” all make appearances, along with too many more to count.)

But it’s more than just 100 minutes of winks – like Toy Story, the filmmakers have managed to sneak something deeper, maybe even a little bit profound, into a movie about multicolored pieces of plastic; in the film’s final act, there’s some stuff that may hit dads like a ten-ton nubbed interlocking brick.

It even manages to do something a little different with the old “Chosen One” trope, and take its digs at mindless, endless conformity, while simultaneously celebrating teamwork.

If you’ve got kids, or even if you don’t, you could do a whole lot worse than this movie.

(I don’t know whether to be sad or proud that I came up with the idea of the qbhoyr-qrpxre fbsn long before this movie did).