The Magic Portal

Starring: Ingle Knight (voice), Bernie Davis (voice), Lindsay Fleay
Directed by: Lindsay Fleay
Rating: Not rated
Genre: Animation, Short, Action
Length: 16 minutes
1989

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: A Lego astronaut is stunned to discover a magic portal aboard his spaceship.

Review:

Tim: I always love discovering films of which I had zero awareness. It's funny, to be obsessed with movies for 22+ years and still routinely learn new things. The Magic Portal is a short film I'd never heard of, until my 8 year-old son came home from Lego camp and insisted we watch it. At first, I admit I was a bit dismissive. I'd never heard of such a movie. A quick google search, though, brought me up to speed. This is a stop motion/live action science fiction action film, created between 1985-1989. It's one of the earlier and most popular brickfilms (another term I never knew). A brickfilm is what you'd expect- typically a stop motion movie filmed using brick sets like Legos. There were a few independent film examples of this in the 1960s and 1970s, but The Magic Portal really put these films on the map. Its production values were significantly higher than usual. Lego actually threatened legal action against Lindsay Fleay, so the film was hard to come by for a significant period of time.

What's fascinating to me is that as I write this in 2023, Lego has since got their act together and produced multiple Lego movies themselves. Their first foray was still the best, 2014's The Lego Movie. That one referenced The Magic Portal, which is an impressive full circle moment for this film. To better understand those more recent Lego movies, it makes sense to go back to this one.

I have to give Lindsay Fleay a ton of credit- while this movie looks rough by today's standards, it's surprisingly effective for 1989. To make a short film this compelling with only a 5-figure budget is an outstanding accomplishment. The film is limited in its scope to some extent, but it's far more ambitious than I ever expected it would be. It starts out simple enough, a few Lego astronauts on a spaceship. One discovers a magic portal, which transports him to a different realm. This is where the film picks up. Eventually, though, the story takes on an almost dizzying quality, as the Lego astronauts venture into our world and meet the filmmaker himself. It's this meta approach that really makes the story unique (and brilliant). It's fascinating that The Lego Movie would take this same path (albeit with a much, much larger budget). Making any kind of stop motion film is certainly a labor of love, and as I mentioned, it took Fleay years to build this one. He doesn't really cut any corners- the different facial expressions on the Lego people obviously took a substantial amount of work, and then breaking free of just the Legos was such an inspired approach. The Plasticine creature scene is one of the highlights of the film, using an entirely different medium in the storytelling. It's things like that which really showcased the ambition Fleay had making this film.

Now, as I think about The Magic Portal, I'm very much impressed with the technical challenge Fleay undertook to make this film. It was undoubtedly a painstaking process and he invested years in crafting the film. I was stunned considering this, watching the movie. From a technical standpoint, the short film is amazing. From a narrative standpoint, it's a bit rough. There's not a lot of rhyme nor reason to the story and it's occasionally boring. It's great for kids, but I certainly wish the story had been tighter and more focused. It's really a story of random events happening, one after another. I didn't love the story, even as I marveled at the technical accomplishment.

The Magic Portal is a fascinating film, an early unauthorized Lego movie. I'm really glad I watched this film and learned about brickfilms, so I'm in debt to my awesome son.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating- N/A



If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: The Lego Movie, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part