Yellow and Dumb
Illumination may have finally found a way to bend critics to its will. Between the disastrous reception of Super Mario Galaxy and the creative laziness repeatedly on display in the last Despicable Me/Minions installments, our vocabulary for critique was starting to run dry. So, when Minions and the Monsters opens by rewinding the Universal logo to its earliest black-and-white version, then hijacking iconic images from cinema’s infancy with its own heroes (Muybridge, the Lumières), we let our guard down.
No doubt cinephile parents, held hostage by their little ones at every release, will have plenty to chew on. It’s even the film’s remarkable oddball move, not afraid to feature a cameo by George Lucas (voicing himself) and to linger on references not exactly tailored to its target audience in order to win over the adults. And one must admit that it works.
Still in the mood for a villain to root for, the Minions find themselves in Los Angeles during the golden age of silent cinema, becoming the darling fodder of an alternate history of the seventh art. It’s almost like stepping into Peter Jackson’s clever documentary Forgotten Silver, as it rewrites key dates for an industry that sometimes forgets its pioneers too quickly. The lineage makes sense, given that directors Pierre Coffin and Patrick Delage cast the Minions as the burlesque heirs of Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton (explicitly named for our delight), even as the indestructible yellow nuisances never quite push their gag setups to their logical ends.
If not for one train chase that spirals into chaos, Minions and the Monsters cuts short its best visual ideas, preferring a rapid-fire set of references that jump from one era to another. As with Illumination’s usual fare, the film lacks real stakes and danger for its characters. The twist is that this narrative gap fits rather naturally into a story about Hollywood as a dream factory, where the Minions hop from one production to the next before facing technological leaps so swift they leave them sidelined.
Babble Under the Rain
Yes, you read that right—this third spin-off is most surprising when it recreates the plot of Singin’ in the Rain. The Minions’ yogurt-like chatter (Pierre Coffin, the troupe’s longtime voice, adds new wacky bits, such as a “Z Command” you can recognize when canceling a spell) acts as a brake on the arrival of dialogue. Subtlety, the Illumination team closes the loop with its own logic of trimming a slapstick animation that can get by without words, and it tells the moment when cinema loses some of its sophistication under the constraints of sound.
That’s when it unveils its second master stroke: an homage to B-movies filled with robot aliens and big monsters inspired by Lovecraft’s “Great Old Ones” (in case you missed it, two of them are named Howard and Phillips). Despite the forced leaps, the film strives to keep a small heartbeat going through its hero James, a Minion who breaks free of the pack for his unruly imagination and is ostracized by his peers.
After all, with its musical numbers amplifying the raw emotions of its characters, Singin’ in the Rain was already portraying Hollywood as a playground for big kids, chasing clumsy technologies without really considering the consequences of their actions. The Minions’ appetite for creativity and the studio’s caprices (a wonderful blend of MGM and Warner, fueled by two tyrannical twin producers whose voice Jeff Bridges lends his distinctive timbre) evoke that same childlike impulse, perfectly matching the sugar-fueled, hyperactive behavior of the Minions.
One could fault this collage of influences for its opportunism, but Coffin and Delage deploy the references like a frenzied channel-surfing montage. For once, it’s less irritating than charming.
