‘Piece By Piece’ Review: An Animated Pharrell Williams Biopic Gets A LEGO Up On The Format – And It Works – Telluride Film Festival
deadline.com“You take it apart, then you put it back together piece by piece“. That, in a nutshell, is why Pharrell Williams was inspired to do his biopic completely in the animated world of LEGO.
Turning the standard music-oriented documentary life story on its head, Williams enlisted Oscar and Grammy winning documentarian Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) to direct and conceive a format that would bring the uber creative life of Williams to a happy place cinematically.
Surprisingly it brings a freshness and originality to a docu format that makes it feel all new again. In a way that actually is standard in biopics the basic bricks of Williams’ life are told in linear fashion with the first part taking place as he was growing up in the projects of Virginia Beach, a little bit of an outcast not quite blending in with other kids but finally finding his mojo when he meets Chad Hugo in a high school music class and the beats of their collaboration took hold, leading to talent shows and discovery by manager Teddy Riley who signs them to a contract taking their group, The Neptunes and their producing career to heights he couldn’t have imagined, Neville is himself seen in LEGO form interviewing Williams about all of this, and specifically on the star’s neurological disorder called Synethesia which allows Williams to see music in vivid colorful images.
That alone frees up both star and filmmaker to also bring the iconic songs to life in animated form that makes this not just a biopic, but a gorgeous musical fantasia.
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