Piece by Piece canvasses Williams’s origin story and career entirely via Lego-based animation. It’s a glorious visual symphony that comes alive through delightful re-creations of iconic music videos (a bricky rendition of Wreckx-n-Effect’s extremely-1992 “Rump Shaker” video, sax-playing sea siren and all, is a personal favorite); kaleidoscopic washes of color illustrating Williams’s synesthesia; and the visualization of beats as kinetic blocky clusters, helping to concretize what still remains a mystery to many people: what exactly a music producer does. Not to mention a starry ensemble of collaborators weighing in, all rendered as lovingly detailed, instantly recognizable Lego Minifigures: Jay-Z, Daft Punk, Gwen Stefani, Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar, and Snoop Dogg among them. The result is not only an uplifting tale of how a daydreamer from the Virginia Beach projects became a renaissance man for our times but also a refreshingly self-aware exploration of creativity and finding one’s purpose.
Five years ago Williams approached director Morgan Neville, winner of the 2013 best-documentary Oscar for 20 Feet from Stardom, calling him “the best storyteller there is.” The plan was, per Williams, “I would give him all the pieces, including all the music, and let him just tell the story in whatever way he saw fit—and not take over the process and jam in all these hubristic aspects of my career and achievement. But I wanted to do it in Legos, which would be difficult—but could be fun if we pulled it off.”
Legos were among Williams’s earliest toys and had been on his mind as a father. “If I’m going to tell my story, I want my kids to understand it,” Williams says of his aha moment, “and doing it through the guise of Legos would make that easy.”
Neville recalls Williams’s pitch to him as: “I want you to shoot a documentary, finish it, then take all the visuals, throw them away, and do it again in Lego.” His reaction? “I don’t know what the hell that means, but I’m really interested to find out.”’
