Minions creator Pierre Coffin wanted to make a love letter to old Hollywood

Movies about the moviemaking of yesteryear — where do we go for those? Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” or the Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar!” come to mind. Maybe even Damien Chazelle’s divisive “Babylon.”

But a new “Minions” film?

The banana-loving, villain-worshipping yellow blobs that have become animation’s most enduring creations now take on classic Hollywood for “Minions & Monsters” (in theaters Wednesday), their latest prequel adventure — and their most sophisticated, though still satisfyingly ridiculous outing yet.

The plot isn’t what you’d expect: Passionate about storytelling, James, a Minion from a different tribe than the one audiences are familiar with, becomes determined to direct a monster movie after he and his pack accidentally arrive in 1920s Los Angeles. They decide to try their luck at the studio system.

Pierre Coffin, the French inventor of the Minions, who also voices them and co-directed the first three “Despicable Me” movies, had his doubts.

“I needed some convincing, otherwise I was happy not doing anything except for the voices,” Coffin, 59, says in English (and not Minionese) during a video call from France, where “Minions & Monsters” had its world premiere at last week’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival.

That convincing would come down to a question of creative control.

In 2022, producer Chris Meledandri called Coffin with an idea for a movie: a Minion wants to make a monster movie, so he needs to build a monster or summon one. As he listened to the proposed plot, Coffin thought about the time period it would take place in and whether it would involve Kevin, Stuart and Bob, the trio of Minions fans have come to adore.

“I pitched him the idea of: Could it happen in Hollywood in the ’20s?” Coffin recalls. “Could it be other Minions and can I write the script? Because I really wanted to be in control of how the story was told. I wanted to have the freedom to be able to rewrite the stuff without going through the whole chain of command that big studios have.”

Meledandri said yes to all of Coffin’s requests. They shared a history with these characters (Meledandri is also the founder and CEO of Illumination, the animation company behind these movies) and Coffin’s proven record with its money-minting property was enough to take a chance.

The two agreed that at some point another writer, Brian Lynch (who has credits on the previous Minions movies), would join the process. But at the onset, Coffin would take the lead.

“It was the time when cinema became an industry,” he says, by way of explaining the appeal of early Hollywood to him. “It was very interesting for me to say, ‘We’ve got to do this building. We’ve got to do these cars. We’ve got to do these editing machines. We’ve got to do these cameras.’”

He realizes it was a stretch and laughs. “I don’t know if it’s visually a movie for kids and I don’t think I cared that much,” Coffin says, “as long as I managed to do something that was very appealing to the eye.”

All of these elements, which Coffin calls texture, convinced him to do the film. “If I wasn’t convinced, I wouldn’t be able to convince the 300 people working with me to give what I wanted from them, which is a lot in terms of energy and talent,” he says.

“Minions & Monsters” quickly becomes a tribute to cinema at large while still staying true to the signature silliness of his characters.

As a child, Coffin was not allowed to watch TV, except for when his father would watch classic films. “Every time he would turn on the TV, it would be to watch very old things,” he remembers. “And I was happy to be able to watch TV, so I would watch what he was watching, which were black-and-white things.”

Minions sneak their way into black-and-white classics in the movie “Minions & Monsters.”

(Illumination / Universal Pictures)

Later in life, when he studied animation at Gobelins Paris, Coffin realized that those actors in early Hollywood movies, particularly comedies, had provided the foundation for pioneering animators. (Animated versions of Charlie Chaplin from “Modern Times,” as well as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd make brief cameos in the new film as the Minions run around L.A.)

“When you watch cartoons by Tex Avery or Chuck Jones, everything calls back to the perfect timing and the slapstick of those actors,” he says. “Cartoons were inspired by the slapstick masters. This was a way to pay back to that period that also inspired the Minions.”

However, the nods featured in “Minions & Monsters” go even further back — call it a serious film school with training wheels.

The movie opens with a black-and-white credits sequence that features references to Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878’s “The Horse in Motion,” the Lumière Brothers’ footage of everyday life “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” from 1895 and Georges Méliès’ fantastical “A Trip to the Moon” from 1902, all with Minions inserted into the footage.

Later, in order to get the Minions from the Wild West to L.A., Coffin replicates Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 “The Great Train Robbery,” often considered one of the first films that used editing for storytelling — and one of the first action movies ever.

Coffin, who lives in Paris, hasn’t spent any substantial time living in Los Angeles. His re-creations relied on black-and-white photos, archival material and, not surprisingly, Hollywood’s own product. “My education of Los Angeles is movies,” he says. (Since this was still a Minions movie, Coffin wasn’t too concerned about total historical accuracy.)

“We had to imagine what these environments would be like in color. And for that we used all the movies that were shot in the ’50s or early ’60s about that period, the ’20s. If you take ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ for example, it was made in 1952, but it’s set in 1927.”

One of the most astute plot points involves the Minions finding early success as actors in Hollywood during the silent era but then losing their status as the talkies took over, revealing their puny, screechy voices.

“That was a tricky one though, because a lot of movies have done that already, like ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ ‘The Artist’ or ‘Babylon’ more recently,” Coffin says. “Every time the big turning point is the arrival of sound and then something bad happens. I was really afraid of that moment because the other movies had done it, so if we were to do it, it had to be special.”

“My education of Los Angeles is movies,” says Coffin, who wanted to pay homage to the black-and-white classics his father watched on TV.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“Minions & Monsters” introduces the talkies with a sequence that shows the Minions failing to deliver their lines (because they don’t speak a human language) while shooting scenes that honor classics like “Citizen Kane” and inky detective film noirs.

“I know that those references aren’t really for kids, but what happens in them is funny anyway,” Coffin says. “If you don’t have the reference, it’s OK. If you have the reference, it’s even better. But you can be a kid, watch that ‘Citizen Kane’ scene and it’s ridiculous. I think you laugh because everyone is doing a raspberry at the end or saying, ‘Oh, poop.’”

Before the narrative kicks in, the movie starts at a museum exhibit where a tour group learns about the history of film. The exhibit serves as a perfect canvas to include even more movie icons. Statues of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Bruce Lee, Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix,” Kirk Douglas in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” decorate the hall.

There’s also George Lucas, who happens to be alive behind glass as part of the museum collection. Coffin, who saw the original “Star Wars” as a child when it was first released and was inspired to make movies, geeked out at the possibility of having Lucas in his film. “That was one of the highlights of this movie,” he says, still a fan.

“My producer knows George Lucas, so he just texted him and George said, ‘I’ll be in Paris in two weeks,’ and then in 30 minutes we recorded him and he’s in the movie,” Coffin recalls, still amazed. “I asked, ‘Does he know it’s a Minion movie? Does he know that we’re going to make fun of him a little bit?’ He knew all that.”

As for the monster and sci-fi elements of the story, Coffin invoked his lifelong love of 1956’s “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,” specifically Ray Harryhausen’s effectively unsettling stop-motion alien ships, as well as his childhood fear of the original “The Blob.” Creature artist François Launet designed the monsters that James summons, including a miniature take on H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu that the production nicknamed Goomi (also Launet’s pseudonym and easier to pronounce than Cthulhu, says Coffin).

That the Minions’ new saga unfolds in L.A. makes sense. And not only because of all the references that Coffin packed into it. This has always been their home.

If you drive on the 101 Freeway, you might catch a glimpse of the giant Minion that overlooks the city from the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park.

“That Universal Minion, he’s been there for years now, so he’s part of the scenery,” Coffin says with a laugh.