“Yeah, totally,” Coffin laughs. “She has the same hairstyle and stuff.” But then he admits he is playing in the same sandbox as every film, recent and old, that has revisited this monumental moment in Hollywood history. “I mean it’s the same subject matter, right?” Coffin considers. “Babylon, Singin’ in the Rain, and The Artist, they all speak about that era and the arrival of sound, obviously.” By his own admission, the party sequences in Minions & Monsters were more specifically modeled after the epic shindigs written down by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the seminal 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. Yet even by almost accident, he found himself echoing the immense bacchanal of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, which imagined Hollywood debauchery culminating in an elephant running through Los Angeles house parties.
“The Babylon thing came after the fact, but my initial thing was Blake Edwards more than Babylon,” says Coffin. “It was just a general collectivist thing where let’s have crazy animals in there to show these guys are so rich they can get anything they want.” The filmmaker is specifically referring to the Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers comedy The Party (1968), wherein ‘60s go-go swingers and flower children throw down at a party that also includes an Asian elephant running wild. Still, when the connection to Babylon became apparent, Coffin and his team happily brought it into the merrymaking.
Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and the Brothers Warner
Of course no exploration of the Golden Age of Hollywood, especially when sound is introduced, can occur without a nod to two poles that frequently wind up at the top of all rankings of the greatest American movies: Michael Curtiz and Warner Brothers’ gold standard example of the Hollywood system of yore being able to produce masterpieces, Casablanca (1942), and the iconoclastic film that broke that mold and bucked industry trends and cinema vernacular, Orson Wells’ Citizen Kane (1941).
One of the latter’s several easter egg nods in the film has been partially released online, in which one of the Minion performers continuously flubs a pivotal moment for his director (Christoph Waltz) by being unable to say the fateful word “rosebud” on his deathbed. Once you see the finished film though… it ain’t “rosebud” that comes out of James’ mouth!
“Citizen Kane is obviously the ultimate thing,” Coffin admits, and it was one of the movies from the earliest concept art and meetings that was always going to be referenced in a montage of the Minions struggling with sound.
“That survived the test of time, but we tweaked it slightly, because we used to end it on just one word, a nonsense word. It used to be ‘bikini,’ which I think now is second. But in the end, it’s just, ‘Oh poop!’ And then ‘bikini.’ Then all of them.” It’s the culmination of a gag that was always supposed to show, like for the characters of Singin’ in the Rain, that the talking pictures were hard, man.
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