Julian Dibbell meets some of the more prominent members of the brickfilm community, a bunch of dedicated types who make short, handmade animated films using stop-motion and Legos. The Lego Indiana Jones short has become a genre unto itself, along with Legis variations on the likes of Fight Club, Titanic, and assorted music videos. Now, ambitious brickfilmers (whose work can be sifted through at YouTube or freely sampled here have begun turning out insanely assured originals such as Nathan Wells's Unsound or Night of the Tater, by seventeen-year-old Nikolas Jaeger. As Dibbell delicately puts it, "Lego does have its limitations as an expressive medium," but what Wells and Jaeger are demonstrating is that making brickfilms may be a way for talented budding directors to experiment with lighting and editing in a narrative form without a lot of money or the disadvantage of live actors who may object to hanging around your bedroom all day and night waiting for you to have your next brainstorm. "Spend enough time browsing the Brickfilms.com directory, though, and you're likely to end up seeing them a little less like an outsider, and a little more like a brickfilmer," writes Dibbell.
"It's not that you stop seeing them like little plastic toys. Not quite. It's that you see them as little plastic toys with lives of their own."
