Despicable Me director asks God to spare us the horror of live-action Minions
Even the man who helped birth the Minions doesn't want to see these little yellow Hell Twinkies running around in live-action
Photo: James Devaney/Getty Images
If we’re looking to throw around blame—and we always are—for the cultural ubiquity of the banana-loving hell Twinkies known as the Minions, Chris Renaud is a pretty good person to blame. As director or co-director of three of the four extant Despicable Me movies, as well as the voice of all the Minions in the first two films of the franchise, Renaud has done more than almost any other human being to put these terrible little men into earshot and eyeline on a planetary basis. He knows what he did.
But not even Chris Renaud, Traitor To Humanity, wants to go so far as to create [WARNING: ALL-TIME UNPLEASANT PHRASE TO CONTEMPLATE INCOMING] live-action Minions. Renaud, making the rounds on Despicable Me 4 (which he directed, after taking off both the third film and the two Minions spin-offs) was recently asked about the idea by Film Hounds magazine, apparently in deference to Disney’s ongoing crusade to take any and all of its classic animated characters, shove them screaming into a blender, and then make billions off of the CGI goo that comes pouring back out. But Renaud wasn’t having it.
“God, I hope not. That’s my answer.”
And while we think invoking the Almighty, when you’ve got this much sin crawling on your back, is a little rich, we do actually take Renaud’s point as intended: “If there were conversations like that, I haven’t been privy to them. But for me, what defines the world is that it is animated and it allows us to get away with what we get away with. Like locking a Minion in the vending machine, or you know, blowing up Gru when he attacks Vector. These are really cartoon ideas, like what would have been in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.” Illumination has mostly taken over the madcap animated territory that Warner Bros. has all but vacated in recent years, and you can trace the Minions’ success to animation’s century-long love affair with slapstick comedy, even if this particular version of that is especially irritating to anyone born before, whatever, 2008.
(Interestingly, Renaud’s comments also dovetail with those recently made by representatives of 2024’s other big animated movie winners, Pixar, with the studio’s Pete Docter recently admitting that the whole live-action remake trend “sort of bothers me. I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves.”)