Pierre Coffin would like a little respect — and maybe an Oscar. So would James, the Minion hero of Coffin’s new movie, “Minions & Monsters,” and they’re both going to go about it in the same way, by making a movie about Hollywood. Flattery will get you everywhere, especially in this town.
Coffin is the French madman behind the Minions, those little yellow guys in overalls that are now ubiquitous. He’s the voice actor, fluent in Minionese (a language he invented, a blend of Spanish, French, Italian, gibberish and various other sounds), and the director of the first four movies in the “Despicable Me” franchise (he was nominated for an Oscar for “Despicable Me 2”). While he has continued to lend his vocal skills, he has returned as director with a new Minions vehicle that’s a bit more high-minded than the usual fare, both a love letter to Old Hollywood and a lightly spiky critique.
The Academy loves to reward films about the noble quest of making art, especially movies, because who wouldn’t want to see themselves reflected onscreen? Coffin may be banking on that narcissism, while simultaneously giving the American film industry a light, good-humored flambé. But he’s also legitimizing his Minions, placing them, Forrest Gump-style, in the lineage of cinema history. What is a Minion if not a silent movie star like Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton gone through a few iterations? (Though the “Jackass” boys would like a word on that front.)
By placing the Minions in early films like “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat,” and the Georges Méliès sci-fi flick “A Trip to the Moon,” Coffin suggests that the earliest DNA of the Minions is in these experiments of sensation and spectacle. They’re not just silly little creatures, they’re cinema, he argues (with co-writer Brian Lynch).
Coffin literally places his star Minions, Henry and James, in a movie museum next to George Lucas, where Allison Janney voices a tour guide who provides the framing device for this historical yarn. As she tells a group of unruly kids, in the old days, Minion tribes roamed the planet searching for evil masters to serve — no wonder they ended up in Hollywood, right?
After stints with a cyclops, wizard, mummy, king, samurai, etc., this crew of Minions barrels into the Hollywood of the 1920s on a runaway train, where they become movie stars, taken under the wing of a movie director named Max (Christoph Waltz), who works for oversized super producers the Bright Brothers (Jeff Bridges). It’s a heady, wild, decadent and debauched time (see also, Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon”), until the advent of sound. Much like Lina Lamont in “Singin’ in the Rain,” the Minions can’t make the leap, and end up out on the street.
Henry, James and Ed pursue their dream of making James’ monster movie, while the rest of the gang team up with Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a friendly alien robot who’d like to take over the planet. Big dreamer James is like any aspiring young filmmaker — blindly driven to the point of ignoring every red flag that comes his way. He and his pals want to conjure up a kaiju from their old wizard’s spell book for the movie, but end up manifesting scheming monster Goomi (Trey Parker), who becomes a classic smarmy producer talking out of both sides of his mouth. The monster pals Goomi summons are liable to destroy everything, including a giant, all-consuming orange blob covered in eyeballs named Irene (Eye-rene?).
Choose your own metaphorical adventure with the lovely Irene, a monster whose only motivation is to mindlessly devour. Does she represent corporate mergers and monopolies that swallow up every creator and craftsperson in her wake? Or is does she represent the kind of (dumb) artificial intelligence that consumes a whole town and industry, leaving us with only mass surveillance and nothing of use? Why not both?
Either way, “Minions & Monsters” is a lightly barbed cautionary tale about the collective (hordes of brave little Minions) coming together to protect a certain way of life, and a certain way of making movies. It might be represented by a world that’s now a hundred or so years old, but it’s an era that we romanticize nevertheless.
With the joyous James his avatar, “Minions & Monsters” is Coffin’s Hollywood mash note, his cinephile cri de coeur, stuffed with historical in-jokes to please the movie nerds, and lots of other silly stuff to please the kids (and hopefully this movie can be a gateway drug to “Singin’ in the Rain”). For this film lover, it’s probably the first actual capital G Good “Minions” movie, but, there’s a first time for everything. Always expect the unexpected, especially when it comes to the Minions.
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‘MINIONS & MONSTERS’
3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG (for violence/action, language and rude/macabre humor)
Running time: 1:30
How to watch: In theaters July 1
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