The blockbuster mediocrity of Despicable Me and its Minions dominate the made-for-iPad form

With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.

It was about time that DreamWorks got DreamWorks’d. That’s what some animation fans must have been thinking back in 2010, when Despicable Me, a feature-length cartoon from the barely-branded studio Illumination, beat the DreamWorks cartoon Megamind to theaters by several months, sporting a similar premise about so-bad-they’re-good self-styled supervillains. Ever since DreamWorks threw its hat into the feature-animation ring with Antz in 1998, it has periodically released a movie that appears designed to either scoop or knock off a release from their rivals at Disney or Pixar—starting with Antz itself, which scurried into theaters just six weeks or so before A Bug’s Life, seemingly crossing the line from friendly competition to genuinely vengeful rancor.

DreamWorks couldn’t always beat Disney to market; Shark Tale trailed Finding Nemo by over a year, and two years separated the sea-monster-themed Luca from Ruby Gilman, Teenage Kraken. Sometimes, though, their diligent (if ambiguously intentional) work paid off: The prehistoric film The Croods got to theaters (and a lot of money) before the vaguely similar The Good Dinosaur, while the studio got four Shreks deep before Disney got it together to finally finish Tangled, which at some point was intended as a more overtly irreverent fairy tale.

That same year, Illumination released Despicable Me, which doesn’t seem quite right. Those little yellow “banana!” guys really debuted the same year as Tangled? The latter has since become a canonized Disney classic that nonetheless feels like another era of the studio—because it was. Disney and Pixar have cycled through a variety of successes and failures since then, while Illumination continues to churn out Despicable Me movies, remixing and rehashing the same Pharrell songs as they go. The fourth film was just released to typically strong box office; between the four main-line movies and two (so far) Minions spin-offs, it’s become the most dependable animation franchise in the world. Actually, maybe strike “animation” from that descriptor, because there may not be another current series that averages so close to a billion dollars worldwide each time out. Yes, Marvel can claim more billion-dollar movies overall, but they’ve become a hit-and-miss proposition since the pandemic. Whereas even a global outbreak seemed to somehow help, rather than hurt, the Gru family: The series came back from a COVID-induced break stronger than ever in the U.S., where Minions: The Rise of Gru is currently the highest-grossing installment.

It’s worth foregrounding the mind-boggling financial success of these movies, because their casual $900 million check-cashing mirrors the clockwork zone-out consistency of the movies themselves. The Despicable Me movies should be an easy source of delight: Vaguely European designs, unpretentious slapstick involving chattering yet largely dialogue-free weirdos, an instantly recognizable framework of kid-friendly heroics and villainy, some Pixar-style parenting content to speak to the adults in the room. Instead, compared to many of their peers, they’re dance-party endings in search of a movie.

That’s not necessarily true of the original Despicable Me (2010), which to its credit comes up with a more instantly irresistible premise than the similarly themed Megamind, moved along by a stronger central character. Yes, in the battle of Anchorman stars playing ostentatious, self-impressed bad guys, Steve Carell, with his unplaceable Eastern European accent complementing the animators’ creation of his trademark dark coat and striped scarf, wins handily over Will Ferrell. Ferrell actually probably has funnier lines in Megamind, because Ferrell has a way with bizarre turns of phrase and exclamations that Carell doesn’t really go after. Carell’s live-action comedy tends to be grounded in greater pathos and so, in its way, is his performance as Gru. Gru’s behavior is outlandish; he goes about his day using the various gadgets at his disposal to engage in minor feats of bad behavior (freezing people ahead of him in line at the coffee shop, for example) while plotting bigger (though arguably more pointless) heists. Specifically, Gru has his eyes on the moon, which he intends to steal. (Sorry, Chairface from The Tick: You’ve been DreamWorks’d, too.) Yet even before his inevitable change of heart, Carell plays Gru as more of a hard-working striver than a full-on cackling megalomaniac.

As part of a convoluted plan to thwart a rival supervillain, Gru adopts a trio of orphaned sisters, planning to abandon them once his plan has succeeded. Instead—and this is the aforementioned irresistible bit—the evil-loving loner starts to bond with the girls, and ultimately chooses the rewarding love of a makeshift family over the temporary satisfaction of moon-stealing and freeze-raying. This predictability is carried out with charming directness and a cute-ugly style that, at the time, set it apart from other big-name animation studios—and Carell sells the mean-to-cuddly turn. With his arc more or less completed in those first 90 minutes, the sequels have Gru mostly working for the Anti-Villain League, which is how he meets his future wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) in Despicable Me 2 (2013), and also how the series clarifies that these supervillains are more of the James Bond variety than the superhero-fighting variety.

It’s an odd choice, given that the movies’ target audience likely hasn’t seen any James Bond movies, or even, like, Agent Cody Banks. In other words, anyone casting about for a reason for the enduring popularity of these movies probably wouldn’t land on their world-building. The Illumination team has an eye for detail and an understanding of villain/hero dynamics on par with a later-period Spy Kids movie; the very ideas of good, evil, espionage, heists, and so forth are abstracted into meaninglessness, indistinguishable from any other bombastic chase-scene antics that punctuate the lower tiers of the American feature animation world. Maybe that’s why the best of the sequels is—counterintuitively—Despicable Me 3 (2017). Pitting Gru against a supervillain who loves ’80s culture, constantly gyrating to the most obvious pop hits of the day, seems like an absolutely insufferable conceit. Yet the commitment to this bit is so thoroughly, borderline deranged, with such evident joy taken in the animating of its tubular nonsense, that the series briefly regains the daftness lost in the domesticated will-they-or-will-they tedium (with a dash of overprotective-dad tedium) of Despicable Me 2.

The casts of these movies are supposed to help keep the parents awake through storylines that hold more novelty for five-year-olds, and indeed, the cast list for the first Despicable Me looks like a directory of hot comic talent, with only a few voice actors definitively past their expiration dates 14 years later. At the time, this may not have seemed so notable; Megamind, for example, boasted Ferrell and Tina Fey, plus genuine global superstar Brad Pitt. It’s not that there are vastly fewer celebrity voices infesting big-studio animation these days, but there does seem like less of a desperate grab for as many of them as possible. Just look at how the first Despicable Me includes Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Kristen Wiig (in a different role than the lead she’d take in the sequels), Will Arnett, Jemaine Clement, Danny McBride, Jack McBrayer, Mindy Kaling, and Rob Huebel, many of them filling out bit parts. (This must have served as an unofficial recruiting tool for an even bigger cast of comic ringers, including some of these same names, to fill out the atrocious Angry Birds movie.) By the time the series reaches Despicable Me 4 (2024), the cast isn’t quite so packed with hip comedians, but Carell and Wiig are still joined by Stephen Colbert and, in an ultimate if fruitless coup de grâce, the movie poaches Will Ferrell from Megamind (left to produce a belated, chintzy-looking, straight-to-streaming sequel without him) to play the actual, non-sympathetic villain of the piece.

Here’s something weird about Despicable Me 4 (2024): Will Ferrell doesn’t have a single funny line. He busies himself with a sort-of amusing French accent, so it’s not a completely phoned-in performance, and the animation gives him a memorably grotesque cockroach body for much of the runtime. The screenplay, however, gives him absolutely nothing. How does a movie not make more hay from longtime pals Carell and Ferrell bouncing off each other as hated rivals? It’s in part because these movies are so increasingly swollen with old and new characters, with almost none of them well-served. In Despicable Me 4, the family goes into hiding to avoid Ferrell’s vengeful baddie, which poses theoretical challenges for Gru, Lucy, and their oldest daughter Margo, among others. None of it ultimately registers as real conflict because the roster (which also includes new baby Gru Jr., a girlfriend for Ferrell’s villain, an entire family of new next-door neighbors, and the director of the Anti-Villain League—and those are just the humans) gets so crowded that entire storylines get boiled down to nigh-nonsensical scenes. Lucy, never well-served by this series, gets a showcase where she… runs around the supermarket for reasons I’ve already forgotten.

Of course, grousing about the lack of characterization or strong sketch-comedy humor in the Despicable Me series misses their intended comedic goldmine: the Minions, diminutive, vaguely medicinally-shaped yellow guys who chatter in their own Esperanto-like language. That’s not the only pilfering the Minions engage in: They’re DreamWorks’d from Pixar’s predilection for weird little guys with limited or unusual modes of speech, like the aliens from Toy Story, the pill bugs from A Bug’s Life, the seagulls from Finding Nemo, and the scrambled dogs of Up. They’re so popular that they’ve starred in two (approximately) billion-dollar movies of their own, plus countless bootleg sequels in the form of memes on your aunt’s Facebook feed.

Despite their own series—which, in its most recent installment, features a younger version of Gru that only muddles his character arc from the first movie—the Minions are Despicable Me in a nutshell. They should offer uncomplicated slapstick comic relief, a contemporary version of Looney Tunes anarchy. And occasionally, they do this; there are Minions set pieces across the six movies that are perfectly funny, and kids, of course, go nuts for them. Yet there’s also a kind of mercenary carelessness at work, especially in their own movies: Minions (2015) is so ill-equipped for the Minions trademark lack of English-language exposition that it crams in “funny” British narration to explain the set-ups for their zany vignettes. While Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022) doesn’t feel quite so slapped-together, it still resists the kind of basic comic logic that fuels better silly cartoons. When the Minions relentlessly pursue a goal at the behest of the master they worship, it’s funny. When they stop off for a random series of kung-fu lessons for absolutely no reason, it’s just a manic distraction. Having their own dedicated spin-offs doesn’t diminish their presence in the other movies, either; Despicable Me 4 has a whole side plot about the AVL creating MegaMinions, belatedly bringing superhero spoofery into a world that’s loosely modeled after Bond-style heroics. The Minions also feel increasingly aggro as the series goes on. Rather than hapless, Gru-loving bozos, they’ve become more prone to slapping the shit out of each other with the merest provocation. Again, cartoon slapstick can be delightful; it’s also, judging from the Minions sub-series, something of a lost art on the big screen. (If only there were a big-screen Looney Tunes movie or two waiting in the wings for a release!)

It might be fair to counter at this point (or much earlier) that this is a harmless series of kiddie movies, so what’s the point of complaining about them? That’s true, to an extent; the Despicable Me movies aren’t as actively smarmy as the worst of Illumination. That would be the Sing series, which tries to turn the studio’s basic-ass music taste into some kind of guiding principle of insincere uplift, all while inching them closer to the platonic ideal of that 100-minute dance-party ending. The first Despicable Me might even be the best thing Illumination has ever made. But fans and scholars of big-studio animation still might look upon these movies with a mixture of fascination and horror, tracing their lineage back to the manic imitation-Disney crowdpleasing of DreamWorks—yet they maintain a stranglehold on their audience that even the Shrek movies eventually loosened. Some of Illumination’s work is done at a French studio, and there’s a touch of American caricature in the number of Illumination characters who waddle around with bottom-heavy physiques and beadily inexpressive eyes as they dully fret over the most simplistic domestic issues possible. Maybe the Minions are the shiny car keys Illumination thinks they’re jingling in front of the very all-ages morons they’re satirizing—audience contempt that unexpectedly went global.

More likely, though, Despicable Me movies are simply the ideal animation for an era of blurred lines between cinema, TV, TikTok, three-second memes, and ad breaks. They don’t feel made-for-streaming, exactly; they’re more like made-for-iPad content that can work just as well for five minutes as it can feature-length. (Maybe this is why my body often starts to shut down well before these films move towards their noisy wrap-ups.) That said, there is some animated precedence for Despicable Me’s blockbuster mediocrity. Under the initial supervision of Illumination founder Chris Meledandri, the Ice Age movies rode a surprise hit and international affection to years’ worth of non-Disney, non-Pixar, not-even-DreamWorks sequels that seemingly no one attended sans children. (I love animation, write about movies for a living, and saw the first Ice Age in theaters. Yet I’m still not sure how many of them I’ve seen or not seen in total.) Then, abruptly, the fifth one underperformed, Disney bought Fox, Blue Sky Studios was dismantled, and now the series is an occasional direct-to-video tile on Disney+.

There’s no reason to hope that this happens to Illumination and Despicable Me. Disney should be prohibited from buying any more companies, and Illumination eating DreamWorks’ lunch so often seems to have encouraged the latter to adopt a more flexible, semi-painterly style on some of its projects. There will be, at minimum, two more Despicable Me-related movies in theaters before the decade is out, and barring a miraculous upturn in quality, this edition of Run the Series will scarcely feel outdated for not including them. The best that can be hoped for is that other studios use their domination as an excuse to try other paths, rather than copying another copy of a copy. Despicable Me’s series-wide lack of any master plan could be read as a rebuke to the conniving nature of supervillainy. Or maybe it’s an admission that when it comes to movies for kids, Not Evil is perfectly capable of triumphing over Good.

Final ranking:

1. Despicable Me (2010)

2. Despicable Me 3 (2017)

3. Despicable Me 4 (2024)

4. Minions: The Rise Of Gru (2022)

5. Minions (2015)

6. Despicable Me 2 (2013)