The “Minions” and the crime of the century: stealing the hearts of the audience

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years it’s hard not to know the ‘Minions‘, the yellow banana-loving creatures who have gone on to form a media empire, dominating toy stores, movie theaters and spreading to every corner of the internet. With regard to the upcoming release of the movie “Minions: A Villain Is Born” (“Minions: The Rise of Gru”), we review the phenomenon that they caused and analyze why they are so popular despite the passing of the years.

“Despicable Me” was the first film from Illumination Entertainment, an animation studio belonging to Universal Studios founded in 2007 by Chris Meledandri, a former Disney and 20th Century Fox executive. who was one of the main creative forces behind the successful 3D animation franchise “Ice Age.”

The film revolves around Gru (Steve Carell), an evil genius who in the midst of a midlife crisis decides to commit the crime of the century by stealing the Moon, showing his superiority over a younger rival. It is during the film’s plot that the supervillain adopts three orphans, finding love from a family he didn’t know he needed.

With Carell in the lead role, the film had all the signs of a box office success, but the creators were greatly surprised when, after the film’s premiere, the main attraction of it was not the famous comedian, but his clumsy and funny minions known as the ‘Minions’. His unexpected popularity led to the fact that in July 2012, a year before the premiere of “Despicable Me 2”, the release of a movie focused on these characters will be announced for 2015,

It was in that year that we experienced the greatest saturation of the ‘Minions’, aided by a millionaire and powerful advertising campaign by Universal Studios, with the yellow monsters appearing on the Chinese Wall, on a historic Hollywood theater and even disrupting traffic in Dublin, Ireland, after an accident with a giant advertising balloon.

The strategy paid off and “minions” grossed in 2015 a total of 1,159 million dollars at the box office around the world, becoming the most successful entry in the franchise to date – above “Despicable Me 3” (2017) and its 1,034 million- and positioning itself today as the fifth highest grossing animated film of all time.

The profile of the ‘Minions’ has also remained at high levels and a brand study by the National Research Group (NRG) published in 2019 indicated that these characters are particularly popular in Latin America, Japan and China.

What are minions?

Characterized by their yellow coloring, blue overalls, and comical goggles, as well as their playfulness and relative incompetence, these creatures were a mystery in the first two installments of the franchise. Their species name describes – in English – also their role in the films, serving as Gru’s “henchmen”.

It would not be until the movie “Minions” that the origins of these beings were further delved into, showing that it is an immortal species that has existed since prehistory with the aim of serving the most despicable villains of the moment. His past employers include a tyrannosaurus rex, a tyrannical Egyptian pharaoh, Count Dracula, and Napoleon Bonaparte.

It is worth noting that the story of the ‘Minions’ was not planned when the franchise began, and initially the creators of these beings, the directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, as well as the designer Eric Guillon, shuffled various ideas for the Gru’s subordinates.

Preliminary drawings published by Vanity Fair show other permutations of the ‘Minions’, including short humans in overalls, robots and even mutants with cybernetic parts. In the end they decided on the design that we already know: yellow, round, with wide foreheads and big eyes.

The psychology of adorable

The choice was not fortuitous and responds to what the Austrian biologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz described in 1940 as the ‘kindchenschema’ or the baby scheme, a set of physical characteristics that cause whoever observes them to be affected by how adorable it is.

Among the characteristics described by Lorenz, who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1973 for his work, There were large round heads, small noses (or snouts), large foreheads, chubby cheeks, large eyes, and fleshy mouths. A being with these gifts causes in humans “a behavior of care and protection” that has the evolutionary function of “guaranteeing the survival of the offspring”, answering the question of why babies seem adorable to us, as well as the popularity of kittens, puppies and all kinds of infant animals on the web.

Being a concept with decades of existence, the ‘Minions’ are not the first nor will they be the last to take these principles into account in their creation, but knowing them we see the reason why a yellow cyclops can cause us tenderness instead of horror and disgust.

But the charm of the ‘Minions’ goes beyond the superficial and is related to their personality. In ‘Freudian’ terms, the banana-colored beings are practically pure It, those primitive impulses and desires that are housed deep in the subconscious. It is this unbridled sincerity and authenticity in their acting that puts them on a similar level to children themselves and makes many people find them endearing.

For Sarah Mansilla, marketing manager of United International Pictures Peru, another attraction of the ‘Minions’ is that they share our values. “They are funny, they have values ​​that are very similar to ours: they are mischievous, they are loyal, they are persistent, they are eccentric.. They are hilarious and unpredictable and have a lot of energy, they never get tired”, he tells Trade the executive, who in her work has seen the distribution of each of the outlets of this franchise in our country.

And although initially the ‘Minions’ were practically interchangeable, the 2015 film brought forward three clearly identifiable and differentiated characters with Kevin, Stuart and Bob, with whom the viewer can identify.

“There is the case of Bob, the smallest, who is the cutest and most popular among the girls. Then you have Kevin, who is the leader of the gang, the one who makes the decisions and takes risks. There is also Stuart, who is the most bohemian and plays the guitar. He connects more with young people and adults, from 17 to 25, who like music”, he added.

Without Borders

But there is an additional point that has made the ‘Minions’ global stars and it is related to the way they communicate. The first language mastered by these beings is physical comedy – also known as ‘slapstick’ in English – whose acceptance crosses borders.as evidenced by the continuing popularity of Charlie Chaplin’s films in every country in the world.

The second way in which the ‘Minions’ communicate is a more complex and particular issue to these beings. We refer to the ‘minionese’, a strange invented language in which words of all nationalities are mixed.

It is so oran official list of the words in ‘minionese’ shows us that “banana” is the fruit that we also know as banana, while to order an ice cream the ‘Minion’ resorts to Italian with “gelato”. Kisses, on the other hand, use onomatopoeia, being “muak muak muak”, while to toast they use the Japanese word “kampai”, the equivalent of saying hello to us.

Unlike the Klingon of “Star Trek” and the Elvish invented by JRR Tolkien for “The Lord of the Rings”, ‘Minionese’ is not a true language nor is it consistent in itself. Its creator, “Despicable Me” director Pierre Coffin, has confessed that this language is based on the cadence of words rather than their meaning.

“I have my Indian or Chinese restaurant menu on hand. I also know a little Spanish, Italian, Indonesian and Japanese. So I have all these sources of inspiration for his words,” she stated in an interview with the Daily News. “I only choose one that does not express something by its meaning, but by the melody of the words”.

This combination of so many languages ​​creates a strange effect on the listener, a feeling of being on the verge of understanding what they are saying that never gets done.

“That language that they have pulls everyone. You go to a movie theater where the ‘Minions’ are showing and you can see how people laugh, of all ages. I think it is a matter directly to the heart. The heart and humor, and humor is transversal to everyone”, says Sarah Mansilla.

The real world domination of the ‘Minions’ has been accompanied by an expansion on the web, where these characters have become, as Shrek once did, the protagonists of countless memes. The ‘Minions’ Facebook page has almost 33 million followers – twice as many as the “Despicable Me” page – while their Instagram account has 1.4 million fans.

And although Sarah Mansilla assures us that neither the ‘Minions’ nor the franchise adhere to any political or religious position, fans of the yellow creatures transcend these divisions, using images of them both in political rallies, to support or attack different opinions. or simply to celebrate the arrival of Friday.

And this continued popularity shows no sign of ending. Illumination Studios had prepared the release of “Minions: The Rise of Gru” for July 2020, but postponed the premiere for 2021 due to the pandemic of the new coronavirus COVID-19; date that moved again to June 2022. Meanwhile, it is expected that they are already working on the fourth installment of “Despicable Me”, where there is no doubt the ‘Minions’ will play an important role.

But not everyone is happy with the apparent ubiquity of the ‘Minions’, and there are those who find their media saturation unbearable. It is not the only criticism from his detractors, who also complain about the immutable simplicity of these characters in an era where the animation industry has evolved to bring us bittersweet stories like “Up” or intense family relationships like “Onward” and ” Frozen”. Faced with this, the ‘Minions’ do not evolve-they haven’t since prehistory-leaving this room for Gru and his family to grow. But perhaps therein lies the strength and the reason for the persistent appeal of these characters, little yellow pills of happiness that simply help us express what we want or brighten our day. They are not main characters nor are they complicated, they are just the best minions.