One of Coffin’s major contributions is voicing all the Minions himself.
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Their dialect might stem in part from Coffin’s own background (his father is French, his mother Indonesian), but it also suits the collaboration between the Illumination Entertainment animation team in Santa Monica and the Illumination Mac Guff animation team in Paris. And their gibberish language, a United Nations of nonsense syllables, never fails to tickle the audience’s ears. Happily, in Minions, their moody mouths and goggled eyes (some are Cyclops, some Biclops) are expressive enough to anchor their own slaphappy epic. In Despicable Me, Gru brushes off the questions of who they are and where they came from simply by saying they’re his “cousins.”
Even Coffin and his original co-director Chris Renaud must not have realized that these eternally immature hedonists would become mighty mites at the box office. Why has no comic artist before Coffin fully exploited the humorous undertones in the word “minions?” Geoffrey Rush relishes it in his narration, making it sound like a tangy compression of minced onions. (In Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2, their enthusiastic allegiance to Gru helps bring out the good in that good-bad guy.) They’re like the wind that blows away the chaff, and they operate en masse with the sweep of a farcical hurricane. Their best efforts to serve wicked masters result in the bad guys’ downfalls. Though “minions” are by definition servile, disposable underlings, in Brian Lynch’s script these Minions work in mysterious ways. But their neediness, loyalty, and skittering energy make them infectiously entertaining and appealing. Part of their subversive humor- and one reason they strike such reverberating chords with children-is that, like wayward kids, they mistake treachery and egotism for strength. They are eager to become part of any master predator’s team, including Dracula’s. These chattering, easily distractable little guys embrace what they should fear, be it a Tyrannosaurus rex or a Neanderthal. The Minions’ two defining characteristics are a potent herding instinct and an unstoppable drive to follow the most potent and wicked villain in their sights. What makes it all so distinctive is that Coffin and Balda individualize each one with an array of split-second double takes and rapid-fire ooohs and aaahs. As a tribe they plow ahead in hysterically hyperactive herky-jerky movements.
They’re tremendously engaging as they swim, wade, trudge and scamper through ocean, sand, tundra, and ice. In an inspired introductory sequence, the Minions emerge with a roguish group personality from hazardous prehistoric seas. With knock-’em-dead burlesque instinct, that’s how directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda deploy them throughout a cock-eyed “origin story” that goes from all way back to Creation to “42 B.G.” (That is, 1968 A.D., 42 years before they first appeared with Gru, their one true master, in Despicable Me.) When the Minions enter 1960s New York and then Swingin’ England, they become DayGlo catalysts for tie-dyed comical destruction. In Minions, the prequel to the Despicable Me movies, evil Scarlett Overkill describes her mini-henchmen as “pill-shaped miracle workers.” Actually, they’re more like petite yellow projectiles.
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