Minions (2015)
Directed by Kyle Balda
Minions Stuart, Kevin and Bob are recruited by Scarlet Overkill, a super-villain who, alongside her inventor husband Herb, hatches a plot to take over the world.
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33 films that influenced Minions
What critics say influenced Minions
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 .
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The filmmakers are conscious of this silent heritage, judging by how they borrow from Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Modern Times .
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.
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.
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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.