These acrobatics can be found in Lego’s trajectory from maker of humble toys to a multibillion-dollar cross-platform marketing empire. First, a simple product — primary-colored interlocking blocks — is expanded to include a universe of specialized pieces and wildly popular faces from Star Wars, Harry Potter, Spider-Man and Dora the Explorer. The Lego empire has since grown to include (among other things) six Legoland theme parks, more than 50 video games, Lego Modular Buildings (complex models aimed at adults), a programmable brick called Lego Mindstorms and something called Lego Serious Play, a “radical, innovative, experiential process designed to enhance business performance,” which seems to boil down to making adult co-workers play with Legos.

Lego’s imperial domination isn’t complete without its core message, the religion of “play,” which binds this multifaceted galaxy together. “Play is an absolutely essential need, not only for children but also for grown-ups,” Mads Nipper, the chief marketing officer of Lego, says. Sounding more like new-age gurus than businesspeople, Nipper and other Lego executives repeat the word “play” over and over, reverently, taking a basic source of human happiness and placing it at the center of their brand’s religion.

The brilliance of “The Lego Movie” lies in providing every piece to the modern branding puzzle, including the surface-level subversion. Not only does the movie effectively celebrate its own enormous, diverse and endlessly seductive universe, not only does it rejoice in the importance of play and creativity, but it also mocks the faux-positivity of modern corporate schlock (“Everything is awesome!”). Eventually, Lego’s core brand message is threatened when President Business transforms into Lord Business, a manipulative mastermind who preaches the religion of Awesomeness to distract everyone from his dastardly plans to make creative play impossible.

In this way, “The Lego Movie” graduates to a new skill level in the game of branding, an approach that’s at once more grandiose and more pernicious than ever. Because by the end of the movie (without spoiling anything), Lord Business’s insistence on tyrannical control over his empire yields to the wildness and unpredictability of a child’s imagination. All of those sophisticated constructions and celebrity minifigures and universes within universes are nothing, we learn, compared to a simple box of (noncross-platform promotional) colorful plastic blocks in the hands of a child. That box of blocks proves that, even though you might feel average and empty-headed, in fact you are “the most important, most talented, most interesting, most extraordinary person in the universe.”

It should probably be a red flag that the most memorable line from “The Lego Movie” is pretty much the central message of any great marketing campaign: This product will deliver you from averageness. But somehow it still works. In the movie’s final moments, big tears stream down my face. I am weeping over a 90-minute infomercial.

In the new branding world order, you can introduce us to the man behind the curtain, be he Mads Nipper or Lord Business, and still deliver your core message without apology. And then you might be lauded as subversive for it.

Consider how “The Lego Movie” itself has been marketed and discussed. After earning almost $70 million in ticket sales over its opening weekend (Warner Brothers is reportedly already setting a sequel into motion), garnering critical praise almost across the board (96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and inciting cultural pundits to predict that Legos are going to be huge in the coming months, many critics are arguing that “The Lego Movie” is “much more than a 90-minute toy commercial.” According to a critic from The Los Angeles Times, the movie is brilliant and “postmodern” thanks to a rare case of “corporate latitude” — even though the movie’s message couldn’t be closer to the core message of Lego. Fast Company reported (somewhat breathlessly) that the producer Dan Lin and the Lego executive Jill Wilfert “put together a manifesto that they sent to everyone — the filmmakers, the studio, the company, everyone. And in that document is the line, ‘We are not making a commercial for the toys.’ ”