This past January, teen animator Preston Mutanga released a recreation of the trailer for “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” using Legos. The trailer became such a viral sensation that he got a call from the film’s writer-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who wanted him to make a scene for the film.
“We found out that it was a 14-year-old kid who made it and we were like, ‘This looks incredibly sophisticated for a nonadult, nonprofessional to have made,” Miller told The New York Times. “It blew us all away, including some of the best animators in the world.”
Moviegoers can see Mutanga’s work when the film’s antagonist, The Spot, goes traveling from one alternate universe to another through interdimensional portals. One of the places he visits is a miniature Lego city, where his arrival prompts a plastic panic and attracts the attention of that universe’s Spider-Man, who alerts the multiversal Spider Society about the new threat.
Mutanga told the Times that he first got into animation after he was introduced to the rendering software Blender by his father and used YouTube to learn stop-motion animation skills. Shortly after releasing his trailer parody on Jan. 2, he got a call from Lord and Miller, who have experience working with Legos as co-directors of “The LEGO Movie.”
Over the course of several weeks, Lord and Miller kept in regular contact with Mutanga as he developed the Lego scene, providing feedback on how to improve his work. Mutanga said that he learned a lot about “how much stuff actually gets changed from the beginning to the final product.”
“‘The LEGO Movie’ is inspired by people making films with Lego bricks at home,” Lord said. “That’s what made us want to make the movie. Then the idea in ‘Spider Verse’ is that a hero can come from anywhere. And here comes this heroic young person who’s inspired by the movie that was inspired by people like him.”
Watch Mutanga’s “Across the Spider-Verse” trailer in the clip above.
