Something you’d expect from Minions & Monsters, the latest film featuring everyone’s favorite yellow creatures: it’s funny and pitch-perfect family entertainment. Something you might not expect: it’s an ode to Classic Hollywood.
The latest movie from Illumination Studios and the Despicable Me franchise takes place in 1927, and follows the Minions as they stumble upon Hollywood and become major film stars. Yes, really! Their journey to the top of tinseltown is a pure delight, and its rapid pacing and joke-a-minute structure is in the vein of the classic silent comedies that provided the very foundation of cinema. It's also jam packed with delightful nods to film history.
From the jump, Minions & Monsters shows it is firmly rooted in film history, as the opening titles are a montage of minions interacting with classic early silent films, including the work of Eadweard Muybridge, George Méliès and the Lumière brothers. The Minions gallop on a horse in The Horse in Motion (1878) or run alongside a dog in Dog Running (1887). They also trick a gardner in L’Arroseur Arrosé (1895), and leave a long day of work in Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895). That’s not all: the minions are at the train station for Train Pulling Into a Station (1896), and in perhaps the most famous silent movie, A Trip to the Moon (1902), one of the minions becomes the moon, and the shuttle lands right in his eye, just as Méliès intended.
After the montage, the references come thick and fast as the film beings in a movie museum. A tour guide (voiced by Allison Janney) takes a group through the exhibits, which include displays of Neo in The Matrix (1999), Elliot and E.T. from E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982), Kirk Douglas in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942). There’s also the robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), the titular Mummy from The Mummy (1932) and even The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1953). There’s also
