"Minions" and the Rise of Bad Animation

Alright. So there is a second minions movie coming out next year and the first thought that comes to mind is Stanley Tucci in “The Devil Wears Prada” yelling, “Alright everybody! Gird your loins!” 

I understand it’s not really a hot take to say, “The Minions are lame” since everyone’s been saying that since the “Minions” movie stumbled onto the silver screen in 2015. But "Minions” has made over a billion dollars in ticket sales, as well as being one of the single most popular animated movies of all time, and frankly, I don’t think it belongs there. It’s like seeing “The Masked Singer” trend on Twitter. Who are these people that watch it, and why is something so dumb so popular? 

As a lover of animation I would normally be pleased to see a cartoon have such high acceptance in the film industry. I think it’s a net positive when you see animated movies sell at the box office because it adds diversity to a generally stuck up community of film critics. However, there is a more devious nature behind the minions themselves and how the animated films at illumination are made. And that’s because Illumination does not care to make a good movie, they make movies to make profits. Again, not a very hot take, but “Minions” takes the story structure of a normal film and simplifies it to be the most simplistic and digestible to keep the attention span of an audience. 

(Here is the first 6 minutes of “Minions” for reference)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NgKz3ZInzA

The movie begins for the first 6 minutes cataloging the Minions’ past and their various evil bosses in their search to serve the baddest bad guy. It’s a wonderful vignette of ideas and jokes. But the movie never extends past that intellectual viewpoint. The entire movie is essentially a 6 minute idea that is drawn out over an hour and a half. It’s like if DreamWorks had made an entire movie and TV franchise out of “Puss in Boots” after “Shrek 2”... Hold on, i’ve just been informed by the voices in my head that Dreamworks actually did that… Kinda proves my point though. 

To be fair, a lot of animated movies pander to a child audience and not every movie needs to have a specific lesson or viewpoint to share. Animation studios can’t spend all their time aiming to please an audience that is looking to dissect the movie the same way i am doing now. Except “Minions” is one of the most lucrative movies of all time. That means these techniques have not gone unnoticed in the industry, and now studios are being rewarded for “bad animation”

Walt Disney once said, “I don’t make movies to make money, I make money to make movies.” It goes to show 10 of the highest rated animated movies average out to have a budget of around 140 million dollars. That’s because a good movie takes time planning and a certain degree of trial and error. However Illumination lets studios like Pixar or Dreamworks do the investing in animation and storytelling, while they piggyback off the technology and techniques. With Illumination, the goal is to shorten the time it takes as much as possible, while also spending as little as possible on celebrity talent and expensive machinery. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/business/media/04illumination.html

This helps drive the competition of the industry, but not the medium itself. Marketing and marketing alone begins taking over the box office, drastically changing the perspective of how we consume animation. Although this problem doesn’t exist in animation alone, nearly every studio today leans on the marketability of pre-established ideas rather than original concepts. But again, Animation takes it to a more insidious level. 

“Minions” and it’s “stretch 6 minutes into 120” method of movie making is all about short interactions that movie from one vignette to the next. It’s not about piecing together a cohesive story, instead, it’s laser focused on piecing together engagement. That’s exactly why you aren’t really able to name any of the characteristics of the minions unless you’ve explicitly been told in the plot. And when you don’t even know the characteristics of the main characters, you start losing track of themes, growth, and the entire point of the movie. 

And you look at the minions design and ask yourself, why does this story require them to be minions in the first place? What about them or their stories requires the minions to be yellow non-speaking blobs. The short answer is nothing. Compare it to “Wall-e”, “Finding Nemo”, “Shrek”, or “Up”. The problems facing our characters are specifically problems set up through who the characters are. In “Toy Story”, the problems facing the characters are all related to being a toy. If you change them into different objects or animals the framework of the movie itself falls apart. 

Illumination’s films are like cinematic hot dogs.They’re pieced together using a lot of different scraps, and to most people they going to taste just fine, but the lack of diversity and nuance will only weakens the medium as a whole. Thus causing a trend of really terrible films like “The Emoji Movie”, “Boss Baby” or the 4th Ice Age that are there solely for the purpose of audience manipulation. But thats marketing 101 baby. It’s not about the product, The perception of the product is more important.

There is nothing wrong with making a movie with nothing to say, there is nothing wrong with people seeing a movie where they have cash to burn. Plus, studios are always going to want to make their money as efficiently as possible. But it's sad to see a movie be created not as art, but as a marketing tool that is used to sell more t-shirts. 

There will always be highly competitive ways to market and sell movies to the public. Marketing swerves it’s way in and out of what feels like everything these days. The idea that high ticket sales equate a quality experience is becoming more and more disjointed. So if there is one thing you should get from this entire read is that Angry Birds 2 is a jam and you should all go see it.