Kyle Balda
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Apart from those little pokey yellow things, the character designs remain stiff and ugly, randomly pieced together from a junk drawer full of spindly legs, barrel torsos, and huge schnozzes; although Despicable Me 3 spares younger viewers the sight of Dr. Nefario, the Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2 supporting character who looked like he was imported from the Harkonen home world in David Lynch’s Dune , it does add what appears to be a grotesque, ballooning caricature of Gerard Depardieu, as well as the sight of the Bosc-pear-inspired Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) being unceremoniously excreted down a small aperture by his toucan-faced successor at the Anti-Villain League, Valerie Da Vinci (Jenny Slate).
This is where the series makes the most of its ’70s-era setting, as there are multiple references to martial arts films including Game of Death , with the Minions donning versions of Bruce Lee’s signature yellow jumpsuit.
The travel sequences and overwrought adventures recall DreamWorks’ dreary Penguins of Madagascar, and Minions suffers from many of the same problems.
“Minions” is a straight-up crowd pleaser and reminded me an awful lot of another quality movie featuring scene-stealers from another franchise, “Penguins of Madagascar.”
It’s a ploy that didn’t work terribly well for the “Penguins of Madagascar,” and fares even worse in this case, though young kids may enjoy the hullabaloo of what amounts to a manic but rarely inspired prequel—cinematic hamburger rather than filet minion.
As with “Penguins of Madagascar,” it attempts to take the hilarious sidekicks from an animated series and put them center stage.
Like the Penguins of Madagascar before them, these Minions spun off (from the mega-popular Despicable Me films) don't so much go on an adventure, in their own solo movie, as run a fool's errand.
Not as strange or funny as “Penguins of Madagascar,” the “Despicable Me” offshoot chases a series that already included octopi guns and shrunken elephants, not to mention its lovable baddie’s vast army of baby babbling yellow whatzits.
El filme incluye una serie de referencias a las travesuras y rutinas de los niños de The Little Rascals (1994) –principalmente aquellas situaciones en donde la estatura de los más pequeños es ridiculizada porque se les considera incapaces de realizar tareas que sólo las personas altas pueden ejecutar–, y los directores, Pierre Coffin (Despicable Me, 2010) y Kyle Balda (The Lorax, 2012), intentan reproducir el aspecto retro de la época en que sitúa la mayor parte del filme: los sesenta en Estados Unidos e Inglaterra.
I liked the dual homage to Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute,” with one minion humming an aria by birdcatcher Papageno and another embracing a fire hydrant and yelling “Papagena!”
The filmmakers are conscious of this silent heritage, judging by how they borrow from Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Modern Times .
A base example of this is the presence of the cartoonishly-ugly new head of the Anti-Villain league (voiced by Jenny Slate), whose presence is limited to just one scene where she berates and fires Gru and Lucy, but even its idea of an Easter egg just reads as nasty (in the opening scene, Gru callously and clearly kills a Finding Nemo-esque clown fish with his submarine).
It’s a joke, and a meta movie reference to the competing studio Pixar’s Finding Nemo franchise (Nemo is a clownfish with a tiny malformed fin).
More irksome, they’re at the centre of a joke that takes aim at Finding Nemo — a glib bit of homage that only illustrates how far out of Pixar’s class Gru and his crew are.
Most disappointing (and disturbing) is a brief scene that, in what has to be seen as a shameful effort to bait "Finding Nemo" studio Pixar into an on-screen "war," seems to show a clownfish's fins being unceremoniously sheared off by a Minion-controlled rocket.
Modern Times (1936)
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
influenced Despicable Me 3 (2017), Minions (2015)
Visuals
The filmmakers are conscious of this silent heritage, judging by how they borrow from Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Modern Times .
There are plenty of other outlandish jokes here, such as a French character that's a spitting image of Gerard Depardieu, a rather outré depiction of a fictional European island (whose inhabitants include lots of cheese-eating kids, a bunch of drunks and a somewhat offensively rendered woman with major facial hair) and, in what may be the film’s piece de resistance, two laugh-out-loud Minion sketches: one that may be a direct reference to the song-and-dance number in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, and a prison sequence scored to Pharrell’s hit “Freedom.”
It's a hilarious concept, especially for anyone who ever wondered what the "Ghostbusters" Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would have looked like had Dan Aykroyd's Ray Stanz thought about a Twinkie instead.
But the British writer-director shares directing credit with Christophe Lourdelet, who worked on the art for “Minions” and “Despicable Me 2,” and Jennings’ warmth complements Lourdelet’s visual zaniness.
Sing is the latest from Illumination Entertainment, which also brought us the double bummers The Secret Life of Pets and Minions.
It would probably help, though, if you thought of "Sing" as more akin to Illumination's " Minions " -- the 2015 flyweight "Despicable Me" spinoff -- than to that original "Despicable Me."
While Jennings’ presence hasn’t quite led to a Pixar-level bump in quality, this is a clear step up from the likes of The Secret Life Of Pets and the endless Minions-related movies.
Scarlett Overkill’s bedtime story about three little pigs (the Minions) and a Big Bad Wolf (herself) unfolds in cut-out and puppet animation that pays madcap homage to legendary puppet animators of the 1950s and 1960s, like Jiri Trnka, while Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf plays on the soundtrack.
The minions first arrive in New York, but while flipping channels on a department-store TV—The Saint, Bewitched, The Dating Game—they stumble across a secret channel announcing the upcoming Villain-Con convention to be held in Orlando.
Like the Pizza Planet aliens of Toy Story and the penguins of Madagascar, Minions are more digestible in small doses, like the Twinkies they resemble.
Imagine a movie about Elmer Fudd or a “Toy Story” spinoff about Mr. Potato Head or a “Snow White” sequel about Grumpy.
Adults hoping for an all-ages animation worthy of Toy Story or Up , or even just a continuation of the Minions adventures with the brilliantly-crafted Gru, may find it falls short.
Even better for the film's energy level, many of its sequences are set to an exceptional collection of '60s rock classics like the Kinks' "You Really Got Me," the Who's "My Generation," the Doors' "Break on Through (To the Other Side)," the Box Tops' "The Letter," the Rolling Stones' "19th Nervous Breakdown," the Spencer Davis Group's "I'm a Man."
The Boxtops song “The Letter” and the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” underscore respective scenes, which are animated slapstick and have nothing to do with the music.
If all it was was 90 minutes of them reading the phone book, all would be well, especially since they’d do it in a made-up language that’s far cooler than Jodie Foster’s in “Nell” though not nearly as cool as Milla Jovovich’s in “The Fifth Element.”
The two films from Illumination, the animation studio of “Despicable Me” and “Minions,” derive a lot of their appeal from a karaoke game of pairing a chart-topping hit with the appropriate anthropomorphic animal.
Still, this franchise from Illumination (the outfit behind "Despicable Me" and "Minions" ) doesn't really aspire to be anything more than fun, and on the most basic level, delivers just enough of it, especially for the pre-puberty demo.
Illumination will probably always be known, for better or worse, as the Despicable Me folks who gave us those annoying/adorable Minions.
For better or worse, Illumination will always be known as the studio that gave an extended life to Minions .
Illumination, el estudio de animación detrás de Mi villano favorito y Minions , la pegó en 2016 con Sing .
This suspicion is underlined by the film’s several references to older movies, including the Bond films, Ghostbusters, Cast Away and even It Happened One Night.
Grandparents are pandered to with a Singin' in the Rain riff.
There’s plenty of slapstick tomfoolery that will appeal to all ages, but there’s also the opportunity to burst into their unique renditions of familiar music including “Make ’em Laugh” from “Singin’ in the Rain” and a post-credits production of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”
For example, the minions break into a gibberish version of “Make ’Em Laugh” from “Singin’ in the Rain.”
The Minions also riff on Donald O’Connor’s “Make ’em Laugh” showstopper from Singin’ in the Rain — yet, bizarrely, it’s only a musical number, with no slapstick acrobatics.
In the movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen included a short animated scene in which he confessed a childhood crush on the wicked queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
From George Lucas' frustratingly blah "Star Wars: Episode 1 -- The Phantom Menace" to Ridley Scott's sleep-inducing "Alien" bummer "Prometheus," so-called origin films often fail to live up to, or even approach, the magic of the original.