The Most Influential Movie of the Past Decade Was About a Toy. It Came Out in 2014.

On the morning the Oscar nominations were announced, the excited cries of newly crowned nominees were drowned out by a chorus of disappointed Barbie fans. Sure, the film had racked up eight nominations, including one for Best Picture. But where was the recognition for director Greta Gerwig? And what about Margot Robbie, who, in the words of Gerwig’s Lady Bird, played the titular role?

Rather than focus on the nominations Barbie didn’t get, it’s worth dwelling on the ones it did—and what an unlikely achievement that eight-nod haul is. The surprise isn’t that the directors’ branch, which awarded Gerwig with a nomination for her first solo feature, may have balked at giving her another for a movie about a plastic doll. It’s that the rest of the academy did not.

Not long ago, it would have been unthinkable for a movie that originated in the bowels of a toy company’s marketing department to be up for any Oscars at all. Using stories to sell products to children is as old as Saturday morning cartoons, but those stories were historically regarded as disposable and disreputable. In the 21^st century, the stuff of low-rent TV became the stuff of big-budget blockbusters, but the stigma remained, as did the disdain in which even the people making those stories seemed to hold them. A movie like 2012’s Battleship might have the trappings of a major studio production, but its execution was as half-hearted as its connection to the titular board game was tenuous. You got the sense that it wasn’t even trying to be good.

That began to shift 10 years ago today, with the release of The Lego Movie. Riding high off the success of 2009’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, writer-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller had been presented with a task that even the most gung-ho consumerist might have balked at: make a movie about blocks. But rather than shrink from the challenge, they embraced it, and made it the center of their story. The conundrum at the heart of their film is whether it’s possible to make something personal out of parts that someone else owns. That question hangs not only over the past decade of Hollywood filmmaking, when one of the few ways to secure a sizable budget is to take on a highly managed piece of corporate IP, but over the entire public sphere, where our digital selves connect in walled gardens whose boundaries and ground rules are set by outside forces.

Like Barbie, The Lego Movie begins in a paradise that turns out to be a dystopia. In the city of Bricksburg, everyone lives in perfect harmony. The slogans that loom over them as they carry out their daily routines may seem a little ominous—one billboard reads “Conform: It’s the norm!”—but their minds are blissfully unclouded by the idea that things could or should be any different. Everything, in short, is awesome.

Life in Bricksburg is governed by the Instructions, a set of numbered commandments that guide citizens through every aspect of their lives. That includes Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), a nondescript construction worker who dutifully follows the steps each day for how to “fit in, have everybody like you, and always be happy.” The fact that none of those results has materialized thus far doesn’t dim his dedication: He lives in a perfect world, so any failings must be his fault.

But as Emmet soon discovers, Bricksburg isn’t perfect, and it isn’t the world. It’s just one of numerous realms, each with its own style (the Old West, the age of piracy) but sharing the same ruler, the tyrannical Lord Business (Will Ferrell). The realms were once protected by a secret order called the Master Builders, who can discern and rearrange the component parts of their environment at will—using, for example, the pieces of a dark alleyway to construct a rocket-powered motorcycle. But Lord Business has spent years hunting down and imprisoning them all, leaving behind a world populated by unimaginative dullards like, well, Emmet.

Since Legos have no story, the idea was to invent one that evoked their spirit: the invitation to create. Their protagonist would not be a visionary or a chosen one, but someone whose defining factor was his lack of definition. “We wanted to see if we could make a hero’s journey story where the hero was not extraordinary but extra ordinary,” Lord and Miller wrote. When Emmet’s colleagues at the construction site are pressed to recall him, they can’t come up with a single distinguishing feature. “We all have something that makes us something,” one recalls. “Emmet is nothing.”

Even before The Lego Movie, Lord and Miller had established themselves as masters of the implausible success. No one was clamoring for a big-screen revamp of the 1980s TV drama where Johnny Depp played an undercover cop who goes back to high school, but 21 Jump Street turned a leaden property into box-office gold, a raucous comedy that wasted no time making fun of its ridiculous premise. For audiences as well as the filmmakers, the degree of difficulty was an integral part of the fun. “One of the principles,” Lord explained, “was it would be so funny to make this movie actually good.”

The Lego Movie works to keep its audience’s expectations low, even as its thematic and philosophical ambitions swell. The movie only looks like it was made with real Lego blocks—with the exception of a few shots, the animation is a digital simulation of analog stop motion—but Lord, Miller, and their co-director Chris McKay worked diligently to give their images a handmade, even crude, finish. The virtual bricks look scuffed and oily, as if they’ve been retrieved by grubby hands from underneath a living-room couch; some frames even contain flakes of virtual dandruff. There’s no getting around the fact that the movie is the product of two exceedingly large corporations, but the homespun aesthetics, simulated though they may be, make it feel like the product of an individual intelligence and not a boardroom mandate.

Of course, the movie is both: a freewheeling, joyous expression of creativity that is also, inevitably, a 100-minute commercial. It makes a villain of corporate conformity—Lord Business’ ultimate goal is to douse the world in superglue so every block will be stuck forever in its assigned place—but ultimately concludes that its Big Bad is just misunderstood. Toward the end of the movie, it’s revealed that the entire story has been the creation of a young boy who has sneaked into the basement to play with his father’s precious, not-to-be-touched Lego sets. The quasi-fascist lord of Legoland is just a dad who’s forgotten that the purpose of toys is to be played with.

The Lego Movie is excruciatingly aware of this double bind. “The truth of this situation is it’s an anti-corporate movie made by the union of two corporations,” Miller explains on the film’s audio commentary track. But it’s not difficult to discern which side of that divide Lord and Miller ultimately fall on. The film’s “anti-corporate” stance is largely theoretical, aimed at a mindset rather than any specific company, while its connection to Warner Bros. and the Lego Group is direct and material. “These companies are great engines of innovation when they work the right way,” Lord says in his commentary. “They’re facilitating great innovation and storytelling.” (Given that they got their big break when Disney chairman Michael Eisner read an interview with Miller in Dartmouth’s student newspaper, perhaps it’s not surprising that the duo harbors no animus toward the system writ large.)

The movie’s conceptual masterstroke isn’t its cutaway to the real world, but in submerging viewers in a universe so defined by the titular product that no one needs utter its name. The only time the word Lego appears in The Lego Movie is as part of its title. This isn’t product placement or product integration; it’s product assimilation. The moral is that anyone can be creative, no matter how dumb or bad their ideas may seem. (In fact, its most important insight is that sometimes a bad idea is a brilliant idea in disguise.) But within the world of The Lego Movie, there is only one arena in which artistic inspiration can be expressed: Creativity is what you do with Legos.

It’s too much to expect a movie to change the world. But it’s not even clear that The Lego Movie changed Legos. Walk the aisles at a Target and you’ll scan in vain for the classic bucket of assorted bricks, ready to be assembled any way you can imagine. Instead you’ll see shelves bursting with branded kits, pricey build-your-own-IP sets that show you how to make your own version of Hogwarts Castle or Avengers Tower. Even the bespoke creations whipped up by The Lego Movie’s Master Builders in defiance of Lord Business’ mandate to follow the Instructions now come with their own instructions. Sure, there’s nothing preventing you from ripping open all the bags of carefully presorted blocks and tossing the instruction booklets, but after you’ve spent $850 on a Millennium Falcon, are you really going to improvise?

Hollywood movies have long preached the idea that anyone can be an artist—or as Ratatouille put it, that “anyone can cook”—which is not the same thing as saying that everyone is. But now, we are all creators, if only of the nebulous stuff known as “content.” Communicating on public platforms—or rather the public-facing play areas of privately held, lightly regulated corporations—we make ourselves up as we go along, tailoring our expression of self to the ethos of a given app. The more sophisticated the apps become, the more seamlessly their needs become ours. We follow the Instructions without even knowing they exist. But the selves we create don’t belong to us, existentially or legally. We’re building with someone else’s blocks, and they can take them away whenever they want.

Lord and Miller discovered as much not long after The Lego Movie, when they were selected to write and direct a stand-alone movie about the early days of Han Solo. Their improvisational style clashed with the brand-management impetus of Star Wars Inc., and they were fired in the middle of the shoot, replaced with the non-boat-rocking hands of Ron Howard. They haven’t directed a movie since.

Their influence still looms large, especially over the Spider-Verse series, which they executive produced (though the creators of Lord Business have been accused of being tyrannical bosses themselves). Although their hero thinks he’s one of a kind, the movies’ Miles Morales discovers that he’s just one of an infinite variety of Spider-Men spread across the multiverse. In the second movie, Across the Spider-Verse, which Lord and Miller co-wrote with Dave Callaham, Miles discovers that not even his origin story is unique. The life of every Spider-Man follows the same arc, recycling the same storytelling tropes, even if some of the details are changed. They’re all built from the same blocks. In other words, Miles is faced with the same conundrum as his screenwriters: How do you make a story your own when the pieces it’s made of aren’t yours to begin with?

The Lego Movie casts a particularly prominent shadow over Barbie. Diablo Cody, who worked on an earlier version of the movie in the mid-2010s, said that the project’s self-aware sensibility was so close to The Lego Movie’s that it functioned as a “roadblock”: “Any time I came up with something meta, it was too much like what they had done.” Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s screenplay—which was in fact nominated for an Oscar—borrows significantly from The Lego Movie, casting Will Ferrell as the CEO of Mattel and building to a scene where Barbie meets the human responsible for her existence. Like The Lego Movie, Barbie uses deliberately old-fashioned effects—hand-painted backdrops, plastic waves—to mimic the feeling of childhood play.

Barbie also learned from The Lego Movie’s shortcomings. Lord and Miller’s movie ends by returning us to the machine it has railed against: Emmet returns to a newly liberated Bricksburg, and both President Business and his human counterpart learn their lesson—that anything is possible, as long as you build it with Legos. But Barbie leaves Barbieland behind, because prefabricated perfection is no match for the complexity of flesh-and-blood existence. Grown-ups should never forget how to play, but they also need to know when it’s time to put their toys away and take what they’ve learned back to the real world.