Published
The question this page answers arrives in several spellings, and the answer is the same list: the cast of The Lego Ninjago Movie is a comedy roster wearing a martial-arts story, with one genuine martial artist at the middle of it. The full billed table is below; what follows is who matters and why.
The short version
Dave Franco leads The Lego Ninjago Movie cast as Lloyd, the Green Ninja by night and the most hated teenager in the city by day, because his father is the warlord attacking it. Justin Theroux voices that father, Garmadon, as a man genuinely puzzled that conquering the city keeps going badly. Jackie Chan is Master Wu, the wise-but-petty mentor, and the rest of the ninja team is filled out by comedians: Fred Armisen as Cole, Kumail Nanjiani as Jay, Michael Peña as Kai, Abbi Jacobson as Nya and Zach Woods as Zane, the robot who has not quite told anyone he is a robot.
The one live-action role
The film opens and closes outside the animation, in a curio shop where an old shopkeeper tells a boy the legend of Ninjago. The shopkeeper is Jackie Chan on camera, not in voice, credited as Mr. Liu. It is the only live-action part in the film, and it gives the whole cast list a small asterisk worth knowing about: Chan is in the movie twice, once as its storyteller and once inside the story he tells. The film also gave him a stunt-team credit, since his team choreographed reference footage for the animators, a detail that separates this Lego film from its two siblings, which had no fight choreography to worry about.
A comedy bench, used on purpose
Reading the billed list top to bottom, the pattern is unmistakable: Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Broad City, Parks and Recreation. Warner Animation cast the ninja the way a sitcom casts an ensemble, then let improvisation drive the banter between action beats. That is why the film’s team scenes sound looser than the television series that shares its characters: the Ninjago show recorded a different, dedicated voice cast, and the film recast every role with names who could riff. Olivia Munn’s Koko rounds out the family at the story’s centre, giving Lloyd one parent the city does not hold against him.
What the synopsis promised
In 2016, the announcement promised a simple setup, and the finished film kept it: Garmadon attacks the city, the secret ninja defend it, and the worst part of Lloyd’s double life is not the fighting but the surname. The “ultimate weapon” the plot turns on is a laser pointer, the beast it summons is a live-action cat named Meowthra, and the resolution is a father remembering his son’s birthday — which is roughly the ratio of sincerity to absurdity the whole cast was hired to play.
The film opened in September 2017, directed by Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher and Bob Logan for Warner Animation Group. Every credited English-language voice is in the table below, in billing order, including the morning-show anchors and comedians in the smaller parts. For the other animated voice cast documented on this site, the Aladdin file records how a different era credited its performers.