Of all the famed titan franchises of animation, the everlasting existence of the Despicable Me (2010) franchise is one of the most bizarre. From Pixar’s rise with Toy Story to the insane number of properties that both Walt Disney Animation and DreamWorks have produced over the decades, Illumination has turned one film into a sprawling blockbuster franchise phenomenon. Believe it or not, it’s been over 16 years since Illumination Entertainment made the film that would essentially model and mascot their entire company, but no one could’ve expected just how much a cute kids flick about a lonely villain becoming a girl dad would become a permanent part of the zeitgeist across the world.
The first two Despicable Me films were so popular, in fact, that Illumination realized they should give the little yellow Tic Tacs who provided comedic relief their own spin-off franchise within the universe. Now, billions of dollars later, we’ve arrived at Minions & Monsters, the seventh entry in the mega franchise.
What’s most fascinating about this latest entry, however, is that just when it seemed these movies had run completely out of steam, Minions & Monsters injects the franchise with new life. The film is both a shockingly lovable ode to the silent era of cinema and a complete embrace of the minions’ slapstick inspirations, with plenty of antics. While the film isn’t always able to stay charming in its back half, it mostly remains utterly enduring and is both the best of this franchise and of Illumination’s entire catalog.
Minions & Monsters (like the other Minion films) acts as a prequel to the Despicable Me films, except this time going all the way back to the 1920s. Olivia (Allison Janney) is showing off a Hollywood exhibit in the present day and tells her attendees a story about how two minions, James and Henry, formed cinema as we know it today. As we follow the minions (all voiced by the film’s director and co-writer, Pierre Coffin) as they find one master after another to serve evil, James is the odd minion out, finding more passion in creativity, which he shares with Henry and the hard-of-hearing Ed.
One fateful day, as the minions wander the desert with no master to serve, they come across a bandit on horseback riding away from the police. The minions invade the scene, chasing the guy via horseback and hijacked train, but it turns out they’re invading the Hollywood set of a silent film being directed by Max (Christoph Waltz). What first seemed like a disaster scenario for Max turns out to be a revelation as the public ends up loving his film. The minions become frequent collaborators and bona fide stars of the silent era.
Everything changes when Hollywood makes a full shift from silent films to talkies, and with the only language the minions know being essentially gibberish, the yellow guys are shafted from the Hollywood limelight. James won’t be so quick to give up on his dreams of picture making, though, as he tells Henry and Ed about an idea he has for a big monster movie. The trio decides to use a spell book to summon the biggest monster they can find for the film. They spawn Goomi (Trey Parker), who is a lot smaller than they expected but who tells them he can find huge monsters that are perfect for the film. However, Goomi has rather world-destructive ulterior motives, leading to the minions having to stop the mayhem they unleashed.
If you are wondering just how faithful Minions & Monsters is to the Hollywood of old, the film’s opening credits sequence quite literally rewinds time through all the multiple variations of the Universal logo. This is followed up by the minions invading some of the earliest black-and-white short films of the 1800s and early 1900s, including Eadweard Muybridge’s Sallie Gardner at a Gallop (1878), Louis Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), and even the classic A Trip to the Moon (1901). Heck, the instrumental to “Hooray for Hollywood” ends up as a recurring beat throughout John Powell’s wonderful score. It’s confounding to see the latest Minions movie as a celebration of the origins of cinema, but the passion for the medium and silent cinema radiates all over Minions & Monsters. Coffin does such a great job paying respects while also parodying to great comedic effect.
While it is delightful to see all the loving odes to Safety at Last! (1923) and Citizen Kane (1941), what makes the film more than just the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) for cinephiles is the heart at its center. It doesn’t forget to celebrate the minions’ comedic inspirations. The story, centered on James and Henry’s relationship, gives the film an inspirational warmth that none of the other Minions films really convey. It’s a wonderful story about the joys of pure creativity amid such love for filmmaking, and it’s simply adorable to watch.
From the slapstick perspective, the Minions pay their dues with cameos and odes to the escapades of both Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, with a Modern Times (1936) homage. Truth be told, the mindlessness of Minion humor has never been better, as the silent humor gags alone elicit so many smiles. Admittedly, once the movie takes a shift in the back half to homage more classic monster and Kaiju movies like The Blob (1958), it becomes a lot less engaging and more of the brainless kiddie movie we’ve come to expect from this franchise. But the movie still has plenty of charm, so the delightful escapades never grow completely weary in the end.
For all intents and purposes, Minions & Monsters is the kids’ mashup of Babylon (2022) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952) we never knew we needed. It’s a completely surprising but welcome delight, a love letter to the earliest era of film that retains its slapstick insanity with a cute message surrounding never-ending passion for storytelling. Minions & Monsters isn’t without flaw, but it’s the absolute creative highlight of the Despicable Me franchise.
Review Courtesy of Joshua Mbonu
Feature Image Credit to Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment