Those yellow bastards
Five films into a series that hasn't really shown any signs of losing its audience is an odd time to decide to course-correct for quality; even less so when the series is the signature franchise of Illumination, an animation studio that has never yet indicated that it feels terribly worried about quality in any meaningful way. And yet here we are, with Minions: The Rise of Gru, the fifth film in the broader Despicable Me universe, and it's, like... fine. Which is a major achievement for this series; a major achievement for this company overall. At the very least, The Rise of Gru is easily the best one of these since the first Despicable Me back in 2010, Illumination's very first feature overall, and a film that I found at the time to be pretty harmless, a sufficiently colorful and rubbery kids' comedy that didn't do anything to actively piss me off. That hasn't been a milestone that a single Illumination film in the intervening 12 years has been able to claim. Till now. Glorious days are upon us indeed.*
I can come up with three reasons, all of them pretty simple and straightforward, for why The Rise of Gru is so bizarrely and inexplicable adequate and watchable and even, dare I say it, somewhat entertaining. First there's the focus of the story: even though it might be positioning itself as a sequel to Minions, where the babbling yellow capsule-men who have become the mascots of the company and inexplicable internet meme superstars were the entire show, this is actually much more of a prequel to Despicable Me, focusing a considerable portion of its running time on the character of Bondian supervillain Gru (Steve Carell). It's probably about half-and-half between him and the three "star" minions, Kevin, Stuart, and Bob (their pidgin Franco-Spanish gibberish voiced, as are the rest of the minions, by Pierre Coffin), which is still a lot given how intensely annoying the minions are, but they've been at least somewhat lashed into a narrative that constrains their ability to just be random slapstick fuckups. But back to the point: the is the story of how Gru, at age 11¾, first had a chance to realise his dream of becoming a world-renowned bad guy. And Gru-as-unrepentant-sociopath is just better than Gru-as-grumpy-hero-figure, which is what Despicable Me 2 and Despicable Me 3 stuck us with. Plus, hearing Carell's voice turned up to a prepubescent squawk - I don't know if it's sound editing or Carell himelf, or a mix of the two - has a loopy amusement of its own. So we're back to the series' core competency: mildly antisocial gags built around Carell's voice being peculiar to listen to.
Second, this has by far the most ambitious visual aesthetics in Illumination's history. That's not saying much at all, you understand, but their style has been atrophying for several films now, and The Rise of Gru is at least trying to do anything at all that's interesting to look at. Mostly, this manifests in the lighting used: there's a pretty effective James Bond parody opening with silhouettes against abstract backgrounds, and a few moments scattered throughout that use silhouettes with strong edge lighting to suggest the flashy stylisation of old kung fu movies. And there's also quite a lot of very playful camera movement, giving a lot of kinetic energy to the various slapstick chase scenes that make up a substantial amount of the film's conflict. At one point, a character jumps up along a brick wall to do the "running parallel to the ground" parkour trick, and the camera twists quickly to follow him, a simple little thing that nevertheless made me realise that I'm not sure that I've seen that specific thing in animation before. Which is weird, because that specific thing is mindlessly easy to do in animation. It is at any rate unusual enough to be a good visual joke, and there are other moments where the movement adds a bit of whimsy and playful visual chaos. The character animation is still pretty undistinguished, in part because the character design is still somewhat gross to look at, and by this point the animators have entirely exhausted what the rubbery tube shape of the minions permits them to do. But we cannot ask Illumination to make a leap up all the way up to, say, mid-tier DreamWorks in one go. Impressive technique is new for them. Let them go slowly.
Third, Minions: The Rise of Gru is 87 minutes long, including credits.
That actually really does matter, and it's not me just being a weirdo about running time. It is me being a weirdo about running time, but seriously, the fact that this movie gets in and out so damn fast - the shortest Despicable Me film by three minutes, which I acknowledge is hardly anything - is pretty important to its effectiveness. This film is operating in exactly two modes: zany nonsense comic bits happening at a very high speed, and cute moments of emotional bonding between outcast weirdos. And the second of these happens only in the last third, and not even persistently in that third. So basically, we have a film whose main and perhaps only thing is "keep up the wacky mayhem", and that's just not something that can sustain itself. The all-time masterpieces of the form, the Warner Bros. cartoon shots of the '40s and '50s, clock in at eight minutes or less; they understand the crucial trait of this kind of humor is to blaze in, pummel the audience, and blaze back out before we can get our bearings - and also before we get bored of the absurdist shenanigans. The Rise of Gru is ten times their length, and not at all a masterpiece, but it's grasping some of the same principles in its limited way. For one thing, the film is built entirely around quick setpieces, playing out briefly. The minions fly a plane for all of about five minutes of screentime. Gru takes roughly 90 seconds to plan and execute a heist. There's a complete subplot that feels like it could easily take an act - the minions learn kung fu from a sarcastic acupuncturist in the Chinatown neighborhood of San Franchisco, Master Chow (Michelle Yeoh) - that is over and done with in maybe ten minutes. Director Kyle Balda and screenwriter Matthew Fogel are looking to make a snappy movie full of digestible little pieces, and the mostly succeed.
This works to the film's benefit twice over: not only does it keep up a remarkably brisk pace, it also means that the moments that don't work tend to be over in a few minutes. This true all the way up to the climax, an unnecessary intrusion of pure children's movie fantasy into a movie that has been largely a '70s Bond parody with blaxploitation touches; it's unfortunately the weakest part of the whole thing from a narrative standpoint (though the lighting and camera are quite good here, and there are some decent enough physical gags), but it ruins things less than it might simply because it takes so little time to resolve it.
I would end by reiterating: this doesn't add up to some extraordinary new work of animation. It's a goofy slapstick kids' comedy, mostly mindless and mostly harmless, occasionally annoying but occasionally witty. The standard for success I have declared is "almost as good as Despicable Me", a film whose great triumphant strength is that it's passable entertainment with the merest shred of personality. But that's more than Illumination has been able to claim for a very long time, and The Rise of Gru is just cute enough and just mean enough in its mild way that I think it is extremely passable, indeed.
Reviews in this series
Despicable Me (Renaud & Coffin, 2010)
Despicable Me 2 (Renaud & Coffin, 2013)
Minions (Coffin & Balda, 2015)
Despicable Me 3 (Coffin & Balda, 2017)
Minions: The Rise of Gru (Balda, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*"Glorious days" meaning, in part, that here in the summer of 2022, if you looked me in the eye and asked, "Hey Tim, which should I see, the new Illumination film, or the new Pixar film, Lightyear?" I would quickly and confidently reply "Oh, the new Illumination film, for sure." Which is perhaps less "glorious" than it is "the days of black omens that speak to the coming of the End Times".
I can come up with three reasons, all of them pretty simple and straightforward, for why The Rise of Gru is so bizarrely and inexplicable adequate and watchable and even, dare I say it, somewhat entertaining. First there's the focus of the story: even though it might be positioning itself as a sequel to Minions, where the babbling yellow capsule-men who have become the mascots of the company and inexplicable internet meme superstars were the entire show, this is actually much more of a prequel to Despicable Me, focusing a considerable portion of its running time on the character of Bondian supervillain Gru (Steve Carell). It's probably about half-and-half between him and the three "star" minions, Kevin, Stuart, and Bob (their pidgin Franco-Spanish gibberish voiced, as are the rest of the minions, by Pierre Coffin), which is still a lot given how intensely annoying the minions are, but they've been at least somewhat lashed into a narrative that constrains their ability to just be random slapstick fuckups. But back to the point: the is the story of how Gru, at age 11¾, first had a chance to realise his dream of becoming a world-renowned bad guy. And Gru-as-unrepentant-sociopath is just better than Gru-as-grumpy-hero-figure, which is what Despicable Me 2 and Despicable Me 3 stuck us with. Plus, hearing Carell's voice turned up to a prepubescent squawk - I don't know if it's sound editing or Carell himelf, or a mix of the two - has a loopy amusement of its own. So we're back to the series' core competency: mildly antisocial gags built around Carell's voice being peculiar to listen to.
Second, this has by far the most ambitious visual aesthetics in Illumination's history. That's not saying much at all, you understand, but their style has been atrophying for several films now, and The Rise of Gru is at least trying to do anything at all that's interesting to look at. Mostly, this manifests in the lighting used: there's a pretty effective James Bond parody opening with silhouettes against abstract backgrounds, and a few moments scattered throughout that use silhouettes with strong edge lighting to suggest the flashy stylisation of old kung fu movies. And there's also quite a lot of very playful camera movement, giving a lot of kinetic energy to the various slapstick chase scenes that make up a substantial amount of the film's conflict. At one point, a character jumps up along a brick wall to do the "running parallel to the ground" parkour trick, and the camera twists quickly to follow him, a simple little thing that nevertheless made me realise that I'm not sure that I've seen that specific thing in animation before. Which is weird, because that specific thing is mindlessly easy to do in animation. It is at any rate unusual enough to be a good visual joke, and there are other moments where the movement adds a bit of whimsy and playful visual chaos. The character animation is still pretty undistinguished, in part because the character design is still somewhat gross to look at, and by this point the animators have entirely exhausted what the rubbery tube shape of the minions permits them to do. But we cannot ask Illumination to make a leap up all the way up to, say, mid-tier DreamWorks in one go. Impressive technique is new for them. Let them go slowly.
Third, Minions: The Rise of Gru is 87 minutes long, including credits.
That actually really does matter, and it's not me just being a weirdo about running time. It is me being a weirdo about running time, but seriously, the fact that this movie gets in and out so damn fast - the shortest Despicable Me film by three minutes, which I acknowledge is hardly anything - is pretty important to its effectiveness. This film is operating in exactly two modes: zany nonsense comic bits happening at a very high speed, and cute moments of emotional bonding between outcast weirdos. And the second of these happens only in the last third, and not even persistently in that third. So basically, we have a film whose main and perhaps only thing is "keep up the wacky mayhem", and that's just not something that can sustain itself. The all-time masterpieces of the form, the Warner Bros. cartoon shots of the '40s and '50s, clock in at eight minutes or less; they understand the crucial trait of this kind of humor is to blaze in, pummel the audience, and blaze back out before we can get our bearings - and also before we get bored of the absurdist shenanigans. The Rise of Gru is ten times their length, and not at all a masterpiece, but it's grasping some of the same principles in its limited way. For one thing, the film is built entirely around quick setpieces, playing out briefly. The minions fly a plane for all of about five minutes of screentime. Gru takes roughly 90 seconds to plan and execute a heist. There's a complete subplot that feels like it could easily take an act - the minions learn kung fu from a sarcastic acupuncturist in the Chinatown neighborhood of San Franchisco, Master Chow (Michelle Yeoh) - that is over and done with in maybe ten minutes. Director Kyle Balda and screenwriter Matthew Fogel are looking to make a snappy movie full of digestible little pieces, and the mostly succeed.
This works to the film's benefit twice over: not only does it keep up a remarkably brisk pace, it also means that the moments that don't work tend to be over in a few minutes. This true all the way up to the climax, an unnecessary intrusion of pure children's movie fantasy into a movie that has been largely a '70s Bond parody with blaxploitation touches; it's unfortunately the weakest part of the whole thing from a narrative standpoint (though the lighting and camera are quite good here, and there are some decent enough physical gags), but it ruins things less than it might simply because it takes so little time to resolve it.
I would end by reiterating: this doesn't add up to some extraordinary new work of animation. It's a goofy slapstick kids' comedy, mostly mindless and mostly harmless, occasionally annoying but occasionally witty. The standard for success I have declared is "almost as good as Despicable Me", a film whose great triumphant strength is that it's passable entertainment with the merest shred of personality. But that's more than Illumination has been able to claim for a very long time, and The Rise of Gru is just cute enough and just mean enough in its mild way that I think it is extremely passable, indeed.
Reviews in this series
Despicable Me (Renaud & Coffin, 2010)
Despicable Me 2 (Renaud & Coffin, 2013)
Minions (Coffin & Balda, 2015)
Despicable Me 3 (Coffin & Balda, 2017)
Minions: The Rise of Gru (Balda, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*"Glorious days" meaning, in part, that here in the summer of 2022, if you looked me in the eye and asked, "Hey Tim, which should I see, the new Illumination film, or the new Pixar film, Lightyear?" I would quickly and confidently reply "Oh, the new Illumination film, for sure." Which is perhaps less "glorious" than it is "the days of black omens that speak to the coming of the End Times".
