With a tight 90-minute runtime, “Minions & Monsters” presents a memorable ode to early cinema and the Golden Age of 1920s Hollywood.
The latest entry in the beloved “Minions” franchise, set nearly a century before “Despicable Me” and fifty years before “The Rise of Gru,” Pierre Coffin’s film addresses the rise of Hollywood with an intimate, childishly-innocent-yet-realistically-conflicted angle. Rather than reduce the narrative to its glittering front, he lingers on the industry’s behind-the-scenes hierarchies, power struggles and the quiet perseverance of those working within the industry. The film entangles the Minions’ fictional plight with a real historical rupture — the film industry’s transition from silent cinema to sound — all while keeping its nostalgic, cartoonish register intact for its six-and-up audience. That same nostalgic-yet-unassuming tone makes the film unexpectedly emotional as it turns a well-documented chapter of film history into a collective struggle.
The movie opens with a tour guide (Allison Janney) showing visitors around a Hollywood film history museum. The visitors are unfamiliar with the Minions, and are introduced to Minions James (Pierre Coffin) and Henry (Pierre Coffin), both of whom are former Hollywood stars. By filtering its main characters through this opening scene, the film immediately signals its cinephile point of view. From there, the museum visitors are taken out of an ordinary tour and into the guide’s retelling of James and Henry’s adventure going into Hollywood. This framing establishes the film’s central narrative layer, where the recounting of a historical period gives way to a cartoonish, bedtime-story tone.
James, Henry and the rest of their Minion tribe, led by the one-eyed Dick (Pierre Coffin), spend their days serving a rotating cast of “big bosses,” several of whom end up dying accidentally along the way. The casualties include a wicked warlock, killed by a spellbook that the Minions then keep for themselves. In the middle of this chaos, James develops a secretive? passion? for sketching on bricks. Murmuring “big boss, big boss” to himself, he dreams of creating something unique of his own. Using this spellbook, James, Henry and their mute friend Ed (Pierre Coffin) create Goomi (Trey Parker), resembling H.P. Lovecraft’s 1920s’ monster character Cthulhu, hoping to defeat monsters. In one of the film’s strongest moments, James and Henry lead the Minions to flee and hijack a train. This sequence reinforces the film's clearest statement on the power of togetherness, as the minions wrestle with the machinery around them.
A central focus of the film is art as a means of breaking free from hierarchies, revolutionizing the art space and inciting collective change. After fleeing from the Hollywood staff, the Minions ignite the first wave by gaining independence from their. Here, art becomes a tool to invert the master-slave hierarchy. The Minions? go on to star in a cowboy film and a range of other genres, riding the sudden wealth of the era. In this endearing part of the movie, Coffin pays tribute to Old Hollywood, referencing modern classics like “Modern Times” and “Casablanca” through period-style animation.
However, all good things must end, and the arrival of sound cinema concludes the minions’ run. Unable to speak intelligible dialogue, they get fired by their studio bosses. Before their firing, Max hands James a camera so he, Henry and Ed can make a film of their own. Ed still holds onto the spellbook left behind by the slain warlock, and it is with this that they summon Goomi, and the film moves into its second half.
The second half of the movie has a noticeably more chaotic pace than the first half and stages the struggle to stay afloat in the aftermath of sound cinema. The rest of the minions embrace the alien robot Dort (Jesse Eisenberg) as their new “big boss.” Dort’s plan, however, is to ultimately enslave humans, which complicates his burgeoning relationship with the suffragette Debbie (Zoey Deutch). This is how the movie signals its ultimate themes regarding the victory of good against the alien power of the machine.
This is a recurring lesson in the movie, particularly evident at closing — Coffin highlights the importance of creating and consuming art collectively, and honors the cultural milestones of American cinema by making Hollywood central to his animation.
