The Lego Batman Movie is a necessary film, after a fashion. Necessary because, after Burton, Nolan and (God help us) Snyder, Batman movies have become grim, dour horror shows, largely devoid of humor and fun. Yeah, I’m going to put the Nolan films in there as well, because while they’re pretty good, they’re not really fun. This is a fun movie. Freed from the constraints of having to make a “realistic” costumed vigilante film, or really to explain much of anything, the movie is basically a running mockery of the “Lone Wolf” Batman which we can pin squarely on Burton. (I recently read someone saying Robin is there to bring in the young kids, but of course the kids identify with Batman, not Robin. They identify with Batman having a friend and someone to teach, but generally not on the side of the one being mentored.)

Batman’s a jerk to Robin in this movie. And to everyone. Again, pretty much encapsulating not just the live action movies but a good deal of the cartoons (like “Doom”, which in turn is based on a comic series “Tower of Babel”, in which Batman gets the entire Justice League murdered). But because we’re not being “realistic”, we can have a plot where not only is this considered not a good thing, it’s considered an unhealthy thing. Nobody gets along in life without friends.

In a lot of ways, this is actually better than the original Lego Movie, which (while entertaining) had a more frenetic feel. This movie has much of the same energy, a lot of it at a very fast clip, but it feels less effort-y, if you follow. Perhaps the success of the original made them less worried about packing every square millisecond with something. There’s a kind of pinpoint precision here that treads the line between “silly” and “disposable”.

The animation also treads a fine line: It’s quite beautiful, and manages to balance its visually rich world with the blocky, choppy nature of Legos. I mean, they certainly could have had the Lego characters themselves move in a fluid fashion, but it would look wrong. Legos are rectangular and need to be animated in what is essentially a stop-motion style, or they cease to seem like Legos. Doing the whole film in that style, however, would tend to look cheap and probably lower the audience acceptance rate. So they pull out all the stops for the non-Lego aspects of the film (e.g., the sky) while keeping everything else in a rough, Lego form—something often amusing just for where they manage to pull it off, like the fire.

The Barbarienne liked it. Because of course. Some day we’ll come out of a movie and she’ll say she didn’t like it, but it’s kind of nice for now that she loves everything so much. The Boy, who was on the fence about the whole endeavor, also really dug it. As did I.

N.B. that Rotten Tomatoes rates The Lego Batman Movie as the #2 Batman movie of all time, only behind the dour The Dark Knight Returns.