The goggled, giggling little goobers who look like ambulatory yellow Tic Tacs are back in Minions & Monsters.
The latest from animation powerhouse Illumination (Sing, The Secret Life of Pets), the movie serves as a prequel to the Despicable Me series. It’s also a fun bit of meta-cinema, injecting the Minions into movie history itself. After wandering the Earth in search of a villain to serve – they take turns both with the Cyclops from The Odyssey and, critically, a wizard with a book of conjuring spells – the nattering henchmen blunder into early Hollywood and find their brand of bedlam fits perfectly in the movie industry.
They become stars in the silent era, then casualties of the talkies, in which their incomprehensible gibberish doesn’t cut it. One of their number, a storytelling prodigy named Jim, hatches an idea for a comeback epic in which the Minions face off against monsters, hence the title, and his devoted friends Henry and Ed struggle to help him realize his vision with the help of the wizard’s conjuring book.
They summon up a mild-mannered version of Cthulhu named Goomi (voiced by South Park creator Trey Parker) and he in turn conjures up additional eldritch Lovecraftian horrors. But the agenda of the Minions is cinematic mayhem, while Goomi’s is real-world mayhem.
There’s more to the plot than that – there’s even a robot-suffragette romance – but you get the idea. It’s a silly, episodic story that allows for frenzied yet precise gags from beginning to end. Director and co-writer Pierre Coffin, who also provides the voices of the Minions, fills the movie with fun references to everything from Modern Times to Safety Last to Steamboat Bill, Jr., and from The Day the Earth Stood Still to The Blob to Jaws. The voice cast is stellar, with turns by Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Zoe Deutch and Jeff Bridges in a dual role as movie mogul brothers.
Minions & Monsters is briskly paced and at times riotous, and its theme of friendship as a balm in the face of feeling like a misfit in your community is restorative. But as with so many current fantasy films, it’s hard not to reflexively read political allegory into it: The ultimate monster here is a huge blob covered with thousands of eyes, trying to overwhelm and devour everything in sight. And it’s orange.
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