"Piece by piece" and why greatness awaits.

As someone who has been obsessed with hip hop and African-American culture in general for years, it's pretty hard to ignore the figure of Pharrell Williams, one of the most important American producers of the last decade and the genius behind several of the most successful songs in the entire music industry.

For this very reason, I was willing to give his biopic a chance, a film that seemed to join the tedious list of works like Bohemian Rhapsody, Elvis, Rocketman, and you name it... However, Pharrell's film had a small peculiarity: it would use a lego format to tell the story of the brilliant artist from Atlanta, an unorthodox decision that only makes sense if you are familiar with the very creative nature of his work in the world of music, art and fashion.

On a conceptual level, I like "Piece by Piece" because far from following the typical formula we are used to (seeing the life and work of a relevant artist in a reduced format, omitting the most gruesome details of his life and barely replicating his greatest triumphs), we find ourselves instead with a kind of documentary where many people who have been relevant to Pharrell's life go over the relationship they had with him, as we come to understand his way of seeing art and music, as well as the incentives he had since he was a child to always give his best.

And while fan service is inevitable (a crucial part of the advertising campaign was the presence of cameos from big stars like Jay Z, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani and Snoop Dogg, to name a few examples) I was surprised that the strongest points of Piece by Piece lay in the sincerity of its message, a moving message that understands the earth as a playground where we can use the pre-existing pieces to build whatever we want, even if the path to achieve it is not necessarily easy.

It is ironic that being so irreverent and chaotic, Piece by Piece ends up feeling like one of the most sincere and realistic approaches to the history of a figure of popular culture, because although we know that Pharrell Williams never literally traveled to the moon or levitated in front of Carl Sagan, we understand that at some point in his life his entire mental state was adjusted to make him feel as if he had.

It's a beautiful film in musical terms, and while the animation is a bit simpler compared to what we've seen in other works like Lego Batman or The Lego Movie, the large number of winks and visual gags that this style of animation allows is greatly appreciated, packing an absurd amount of content into less than an hour and a half.

I understand that Piece by Piece connected with me thanks to the previous admiration I felt for Pharrell (as well as the inevitable knowledge of several of the hits that accompany it, starring music giants like Kendrick Lamar or Daft Punk), but I feel that anyone of any age will be able to find something of value in this film.

Score taken from my Letterboxd account.