If you’re a person older than the age of 25 (and I’m being generous with my dating here, given that the first Despicable Me film came out back in 2010) and/or have a Facebook account with a whole lot of older relatives on your friends list and/or are extremely online and/or live somewhere on the coasts in a reasonably-sized to a super-sized metropolis, you probably hate The Minions. It is totally understandable why you would, as well: The babbling little tic-tac-shaped characters, clad in denim and little goggles, are almost fine-tuned to annoy the hell out of you, given that their specific form of hyperactive cacophonous slapstick is, like a great deal of media for children, directly inexplicable to adults. This form of kids’ entertainment is somewhat like the bell given to the child in Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express, where as soon as one hits the age where they’re concerned about matters of taxation and household management or, Christ forbid, old enough to have children themselves, they can no longer find the spark in what they once might have found amusing. Once upon a time, we might have just considered this how one “grows up,” in which one sheds childish things in favor of the taste of scotch or a finely-kept and groomed mustache or the novels of Jonathan Franzen or the films of Nora Ephron and Ron Howard, but that’s no longer the case. The essential matter at the core of a film like Minions: The Rise of Gru (which probably should have just been called “Electric Boogaloo” if they were gonna go the after-colon subtitle route) is whether that distinction means anything in the modern era.
Now, to quickly get the matter of the film itself out of the way: If you are a child or the parent of a child and/or you like Minions, you’ll most likely enjoy this little romp. It concerns the misadventures of young Gru (Steve Carell) and his band of misfit sidekicks as they attempt to first join, and then later fend off, The Vicious Six, a group of supervillains headed up by Taraji P Henson (and stocked with voices from the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren). The Six have captured an ancient artifact — a jade necklace — which endows the wearer with the power of the Zodiac, changing them into one of the animal forms on the device, and Gru, following his rejection from the group because he’s too little and too immature, steals it. This sets off all sorts of French-flavored wackiness in the streets of ’70s San Francisco (it remains interesting to me how little the European cultural stew that Illumination Entertainment emerged from matters to critics in their analysis of this series, which feels akin to a less visually-accomplished version of A Town Called Panic in its absurdity), and to its credit, Minions 2 is surprisingly colorful and competent in its look and in its construction. The jokes are sophomoric, but the slapstick is amusing, and though the attempts to make some kind of “emotion” work, especially between Gru and a mentor character, a kung-fu hippie voiced by Alan Arkin who founded the Six and was later excommunicated from the group, mostly fall flat, it doesn’t demand that you care about any of that: there’s another joke seconds around the corner, ready to reward the limited attention span of its intended audience.
Anyhow, back to the point: If you’ve read my reviews for any length of time, you’re probably aware of my exhaustion with most children’s media these days, in which I regularly praise movies that a whole host of folks would consider “terrible” for simply having the gall to be oriented around making kids laugh. And to be perfectly fair, there are a ton of awful movies with that aim (go ahead and get your tickets to Paws of Fury today!), lacking even the minor sophistication that Illumination brings to these films: flat construction of gags, a lack of color, etc. Yet compare audiences at your average screening of something like Lightyear, silent aside from whenever the cat’s on screen, to the raucous preview showing of Minions 2 I attended this week: You practically could hear the shouts and barks of laughter three theaters over, which has its own infectiousness. Perhaps it’s just a sort of Pavlovian response, like a contagious yawn, that one seems to laugh harder when they’re in the company of those being entertained, but there’s something to be said for just how much these movies entertain their target crowd and just how little they give a fuck about whether the parents are having a good time or not. This gets to the heart of the matter: Most “kids” films are, in reality, “family” films, which means they’re designed to entertain their elders as much as they’re for the children, which pleases few from either quadrant and even goes against the ethos of the Wu-Tang Clan. And, I don’t know about you, but that’s a side of a debate I’d prefer not to be on if ODB and the RZA are against it.
Perhaps this wouldn’t be such an issue if there was a clearer demarcation between the needs of adults and children at the cinema, but as properly “adult” entertainment has made its way from taking up half of the multiplex to filling the few screens at the arthouse to only finding a home on streaming services, mature folks looking for a good time at the movies have found their options limited by market demands — a family of four will always bring in more ticket sales than a pair of adults, after all. On the other hand, through the emergence of the so-called Disney Adult, we have a whole host of grown folks specifically attuned to what they believe are the needs of children: Strong moral instruction, as if Aesop’s Fables truly had any impact on the Looney Tunes, perhaps the last true theatrical cartoon series aimed squarely at the funny bones of both audiences; an adult-oriented sense of humor that doesn’t really find the kind of balance that even something like The Animaniacs once did in its fusion of high-culture references and gleeful yet understandable anarchy; and, of course, the needs of the Franchise, where the enterprise of making a single successful film is less important than maintaining its status at large. It would be accurate to suggest that latter-day Pixar and a majority of the modern Disney library are smarm-poisoned, each cloyingly oriented to sate the needs of adults: Either imagining that these films were what they wished they had growing up, or forgoing children entirely to ensure that their fanbases remain perpetually posting on their given poisoned platform of choice.
It’s with this in mind that we should return to the Minions, which, despite being extremely present online, are more so in the way that the Looney Tunes characters were on clothing and other adult wear in the ’90s, and if your grandmother wearing a garish Tweety Bird t-shirt throughout that decade didn’t ultimately render the entire enterprise bullshit, I think the same should apply to the omnipresent memes that Facebook Aunts share. Because as these movies shed length, plot, and meaning, they come closer and closer to their ideal form: 10-minute shorts stacked with nonsense gags, directly aimed at the most juvenile portion of one’s brain. Perhaps it’s through this sheer annoyance that we’ll be able to drive a wedge between those who assume that all media should be intended for them, unworthy of attention or scrutiny because they’re above it, and those who a movie like Minions 2 is specifically oriented towards. And in how quickly the “meaningful” aspects of these movies have been jettisoned in favor of more stupid antics and slap-fights and bare Minion ass-cheeks on screen, I’d say that Illumination is beginning to understand where they should position themselves in contrast to Disney and company. They simply do not give a fuck if you learn anything or grow from these films; all they want you to do is laugh, which is, in and of itself, a goal worth striving towards. It is deceptively hard to make children genuinely laugh, as any adult who has ever played peekaboo with a toddler and wondered why the kid ran away from them screaming after seeing their mug emerge from behind their hands understands. To avoid that same fate but on a mass scale is no minor feat.
I’m not trying to shrug my shoulders and slough off responsibility here, either. To quote Mike Gundy, I’m a man (I’m 31! You come after me!) — I’m not likely going to find these movies mega-entertaining, although I did laugh every once in a while. But the kids did so, loudly, every few minutes, and to suggest that their still-gestational tastes are somehow wrong or bad elides the point that these probably aren’t going to be long-lasting cultural touchstones in their minds. It’s hard to imagine the same fevered devotion going into preserving the sanctity of these particular films or paying tribute to them, as one might find in a Disney forum or subreddit, where one is forced to acknowledge a corporation’s market dominance as a sign of their import, to say nothing of their perpetual bottom-feeding in the sequel-and-live-action-remake department. The day I’ll be worried about the Minions and their effect on culture is when Universal announces a live-action remake of the first Despicable Me in the 2040s, aimed straight at the 40-something parents who saw it back in 2010 when they were just a kid, furthering the immature cultural black hole whose event horizon we are trapped in, and at that point, the last specks of light will slowly be slipping into the void. Here’s to hoping that’ll never happen.
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