Moving Pictures: LUMIÈRE LE CINÉMA! andMINIONS & MONSTERS

We can always count on the French to do their part in keeping cinephilia alive. Thierry Frémaux takes us back to the dawn of the movies with his documentary Lumière, Le Cinéma! The form of the film couldn’t be more simple. The effect could not be more illuminating or entrancing. It’s a collection of late-19th century short films by the Lumière brothers, played one after the next without interruption. Frèmaux narrates, contextualizing and analyzing what we see. This is part of his ongoing project of researching and restoring the Lumières’ works. Those pioneers of cinema are perhaps best known today for two films: The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station and Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon. The apocryphal story of the audience leaping out of the way of the oncoming train has taken on a position as the mythic Birth of Cinema. You don’t need to think of the imaginary audience. Look at what’s really there on screen. The documentary realism of the camera’s witness of both machines and people locate these two shorts squarely in the time of the industrial revolution, and set a standard for the camera as observer that carries us through today. Together these shorts tell us a helpful story about the appeal of the movies. They provoke strong reactions. They take us places we may never go and show us people we’d never meet. 

The magic of these formative images is compounded by the truth of their making and their context within a body of work. Not content to repeat those greatest hits, Frèmaux’s patient pace and thorough explanations take us through more formative moments captured on shimmering celluloid—early comedic conceits, gymnastic stunts, home movies, anthropological travelogue. What an expansion of our understanding of their contributions! We see people behaving so naturally in front of the camera, our only opportunity to see people who have no context for what it means to be recorded in this way. We see machines in all their new might, whirring gears and moving parts. We see a window into an old world ending, and a new one arriving. Here’s cinema—the personal and the mechanical, the head and the heart, the documentary and the fantasy—as it’s born. Frèmaux, as artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, already helps shape contemporary film culture. With this film he pays reverence to the early black and white frames that got us here. To let these shorts wash over you is to clean out your eyes and see moving images afresh.

But what if, when you saw the workers leaving the factory, there were a couple Minions there, too? If you, like me, are already laughing imagining a couple of those goggle-eyed, overalls-wearing, mostly-hairless squishes waddling out alongside turn-of-the-century factory workers, then you get the appeal of Minions & Monsters. The seventh entry of an animated series usually spells creative exhaustion. Instead this movie is the best one yet, and by quite a large margin. Pierre Coffin, director, co-writer, and voice of the eponymous little guys, has taken the opportunity to proudly place his creations as shimmering, glowing stars in the Hollywood firmament. The movie follows a heretofore untold tribe of the Minions who, lost on their centuries-long quest to find a Big Boss to serve, end up in 1920s Hollywood. After a raucous slapstick tumble through the streets, during which they interrupt the filming of a Charlie Chaplin, a Harold Lloyd, and a Buster Keaton film, they end up impressing the heads of a studio with their silliness and pluck. It makes perfect sense they’d be instant silent comedy stars themselves. 

They have an inexhaustible persistence of juvenile spirit, and a seemingly immortal capacity to take and enact cartoon pain and just keep going. There’s always destruction ahead of them and unintended chaos behind them. Popular comic conceits in any time! But, with their Minionese language, they’re left behind in the transition to talkies. Hoping to make a creature feature comeback, a trio of Minions filmmakers summon some cute, but dangerous, Lovecraftian monsters to play the antagonists. So they’re risking the end of the world, or at least Los Angeles. But they’re making cinema! There’s something so pure about these particular Minions’ drive to create movie magic it’s easy to root for them. So it’s a movie about The Movies, a mad jumble of references and influences done as bouncy cartoony joyousness for showbiz history, riffing on countless classics in a gleeful and affectionate way. (You’ll never forget Minion Charles Foster Kane’s dying word.) And it also appreciates the act of creativity’s dual purpose as personal satisfaction and community building. Isn’t nice when a movie loves being a movie? And this one wears it with genuine lightness. Here’s a celebration of moviemaking through being every kind of movie. It’s ultimately an animated slapstick comedy, a satirical period piece, a western, a monster movie, a let’s-put-on-a-show picture, a fantasy, a robot movie, a UFO movie, a behind-the-scenes movie-within-a-movie, and, of course, a Minions movie. Here they’ve risen to their highest potential, unleashed to be a pure mad gag-a-minute delight from first frame to last. To be a real cinephile is to recognize that, to paraphrase Ratatouille, great movies can come from anywhere. And isn’t that why we keep going?

Bad Guy Gone Good: DESPICABLE ME 3

Despicable Me 3 is a bright cartoony machine, the best one in the series since its first installment way back in 2010. For over seven years now, the little yellow slapstick pill Minions (voiced by co-director Pierre Coffin) have been everywhere, helping boss Gru in a sequel and themselves in their spin-off prequel. In the process, the folks at Illumination animation have proved to be pretty good at making these movies (and only these movies, as their grating Secret Life of Pets and Sing show). This new one makes good use of its threadbare Saturday morning adventure comedy appeal, concocting B-plots for supporting characters and giving the lead a couple big problems to sort out in sitcom fashion that allows the colorful slapstick and neat invention to take center stage. There’s nothing groundbreaking or deep about the series, but need there be? It’s goofy, energetic, colorful, and full of funny little touches: ever-expanding bubblegum as a weapon of mass destruction, a secret hideout in a blimp accessible only by a sofa in a fake retirement home, a pig farm mansion concealing a supervillain armory, and a drone fleet of remaindered dolls from a forgotten 80’s oddity. These silly charms are enough to keep the story of a pathetic cartoon villain hanging up his evil ways for fatherly duties coasting on and on.

The plot is so simple. In a fun opening action sequence, new villain Balthazar Bratt (a purple-jumpsuit-wearing, keytar-playing, dance-battle-enjoying doofus voiced by Trey Parker) escapes a flying hijacked freighter before Anti-Villain League operatives Gru (Steve Carell) and Lucy (Kristen Wiig) can stop him. For this failure, they’re fired. Before they can fight to get their jobs back, there is the movie’s other development: Gru’s long lost twin brother, Dru. Apparently, there was a secret Parent-Trap-backstory situation happening here, with Gru’s mother (Julie Andrews) admitting that she got the bad end of the bargain. Gru is invited to take his family to the island nation of Freedonia (a neat reference to the Marx brothers’ fictitious Duck Soup setting) and meet this long-lost bro. No surprise, the guy turns out to be Gru’s opposite: happy-go-lucky, overeager to please, and with a full head of hair. The series’ usual directors and writers here provide Carell an opportunity to continue his pleasant, mushy-mouthed, vaguely-Slavic voice performance’s Peter Sellers’ tendencies in a double role distinguished mostly by how frowny or bubbly he makes any given line reading. Freedonia becomes a silly playground for Gru’s daughters (Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, and Nev Scharrel) and their small scenes – cute, flimsy stuff involving cheese rituals and unicorn hunts – while the grown-ups run around. You see, Dru is jealous of his brother’s infamy, and Gru hopes to use this to partner up and take down Bratt. Simple as that.

Bouncy 3D cartoon commotion in a slick wide frame moves things along, with heists and chases and all sorts of mad scrambling and shouting (the voice work is energetic and giggly), explosions and engines, and elaborate gadgetry nonsense. Gru and Dru grow closer and further apart depending on the needs of a scene, though it makes a prickly brotherly sense. Bratt is a fun new villain, bopping to 80’s tunes and plotting with his chintzy robot sidekick from his lair: a deep-sea tower surrounded by poisonous spikes and guarded by rockets stored in a giant Rubik’s cube. Lucy gets short shrift most of the time, but she has a pleasant motivation to gain her new adopted daughters’ trust. Best, of course, are the Minions, babbling away in their own plotline most of the way through, having resigned to find a more despicable boss. (They remain as preposterously hilarious as ever, waddling and squabbling and getting the brunt of the wackiest violence.) In the end, the variety of subplots converge in a fast-paced action climax where lessons are learned, loyalties confirmed, trust earned, and everything is in its place for a sentimental finale with a door wide open for more. It’s all hectic set-pieces and quick gags, one after the other, lined up for minimum downtime and maximum zany distraction. There’s nothing to it but skillfully empty colorful entertainment. That’s good enough, the series approaching exactly the sort of comforting rhythms and agreeable form of any other reasonably diverting Saturday morning cartoon. Forget the popcorn. I bet it pairs best with a huge bowl of Frosted Flakes.

Mellow Yellow: MINIONS

Minions, the scene-stealing little yellow pill-shaped babblers from the Despicable Me movies, have been spun off into a feature film all their own. You could say they’ve gotten this honor because, with a distinctive look and elemental appeal, they’ve proved themselves instant members of the Cartoon Characters Hall of Fame. You could also say it’s because they’re a money-minting merchandise machine. It’s a bit of both. Minions follows the title group’s antics from before they met up with Gru, their supervillain-with-a-heart-of-gold boss in their earlier films. They’re shorn free of his story’s sentimentality, involving fighting off worse villains for the sake of his adorable adopted daughters. Instead, the Minions are careening on a fast-paced consequence-free zip through sequences of amiably silly animated slapstick. There’s not much to it, but it’s often too pleasant and amusing to resist, at least for those of us predisposed to find the Minions funny.

Screenwriter Brian Lynch and co-directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda are smart to keep the story simple, the action goofy, and the focus on the cute, unpredictable lead creatures. What is it that makes the Minions so appealing? They have visual simplicity, aural abstraction, and physical malleability. They speak near-total nonsense, and yet because they wobble their bodies and stretch their little faces, we can always figure out what they’re feeling. It’s pleasing inscrutability.  They’re ageless, genderless, and timeless, speaking language made up of gibberish and bits of every language under the sun. But they’re so strong-willed, we can watch them express elemental emotions. Minions are mischievous troublemakers, quick to laugh and quick to get angry, easily frustrated, sputtering and grumbling, or opening up their mouths in blasts of staccato laughter.

We open on a montage of their failed attempts to find a boss, the more despicable the better, from prehistoric times on. The Minions (all voiced by Coffin), wander through the ages inadvertently leading a variety of employers (a dinosaur, a caveman, a vampire, Napoleon) to their doom. These early moments play on pre-verbal visual jokes and cartoony energy, while a booming narrator (Geoffrey Rush) speaks over-emphatically about whatever silliness we observe – a T. Rex trying to balance on a boulder, a caveman using a flyswatter on a bear, an army of Minions in Napoleonic uniforms wobbling through the snow. Eventually, the creatures flee an angry mob into the wilderness where they hide in a cave for many decades, luckily avoiding work for Hitler or the KKK while they’re at it.

By 1968 they’ve grown bored of their exile. Three Minions, a tall one named Kevin and two shorter ones named Stuart and Bob (I could rarely tell them apart) leave in search of a new home where they can serve a villain. After a long trek through the wilderness, a rowboat across the ocean (complete with the old reliable seeing-others-as-giant-fruit hunger pains), and a stop in New York City, the trio finds their way to Orlando for a Villain Convention. They hitchhiked, picked up by a deceptively sunny couple (Allison Janney and Michael Keaton) and their kids, whose family secret is too funny to reveal. At the convention, they win the affection of the terrifically named villain Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock, teetering smoothly between sweet and mean), who invites them back to her place in London and demands they help her execute a heist.

That’s the long and short of the plot, with a series of manic antics and rubbery cartoon violence twisting and turning its way to a slaphappy conclusion. The Minions almost can’t quite hold down a full, interesting story on their own. But every stop on their trip is bright, colorful, and manic, full of characters and designs appealingly clever and round. Retro-cool supervillain gadgetry, wardrobe, and architecture fit right in with a Swinging Sixties London. The likes of The Beatles, The Who, and The Kinks jump on the soundtrack as the Minions are stuck in a vintage Bond meets Rube Goldberg meets Thunderbirds aesthetic. There are lots of visual gags from slapstick violence, cultural iconography, and teasing naughtiness – characters flailing every which way in loose hectic zaniness. In the center of it all, Kevin, Bob, and Stewart are Looney Tunes crossed with Three Stooges, pliable indestructible absurdities driven to get a job done, but too incompetent to do it right.

They bumble into conflict with a Tower Guard (Steve Coogan), a lanky inventor/torture chamber enthusiast (Jon Hamm), and the Queen (Jennifer Saunders), before Overkill herself turns on them. It's good for conflict. But the people and all their funny chattering and flailing can’t match the little yellow guys for appeal. The Minions have no emotional arc or great lessons to learn. Not even Gru could be so purely powered by id. They want their buddies. They want fun. They want bananas. They’ll do anything to get back to a comfortable status quo serving Saturday morning cartoon villainy. There are car chases, hypnosis, disguises, trap doors, elaborate weapons (a lava lamp gun was my favorite), and mad science gone wrong, but the stakes never feel all that high. (Look what happens to a time traveling scientist for an example of matters straight-faced horrifying this movie’s bouncy tone covers up.) It’s a simple jaunt through rubbery ridiculousness. Minions’ only interest is in tickling you into distraction.