MINIONS & MONSTERS – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Minions & Monsters is adorably meta, a loving salute not just to movies but to filmmakers, artists, and audiences. It’s easily the best of the three Minions films, packed with affectionate and funny nods to silent and Golden Age movies, from Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon to Citizen Kane.

I’ve long been a fan of these yellow fellows, yet 2024’s Despicable Me 4, with its buggy villain and scattershot story, gave me more ick than entertainment. Minions & Monsters happily rights the ship, with an endearing film-focused plot that’s also a thank-you to fans who have turned the Minions and Despicable Me franchises into a multibillion-dollar worldwide bonanza.

Illumination Entertainment’s typical opener of three greeting Minions becomes black-and-white rubber-hose-style animation this go-round as Minions & Monsters begins, teasing the references in store. These immortal imps soon gallop behind Eadweard Muybridge’s horse in motion and wait for the Lumière brothers’ train as a modern-day tour guide (Allison Janney, Palm Royale) schools children and adults on their place in Hollywood history.

As we learned in 2015’s Minions and 2022’s Minions: The Rise of Gru, Minions love to serve the biggest, baddest boss they can find when they’re not cracking up or causing trouble. Before falling in with their beloved Gru, they tried a few others, eventually chasing an Old West bandit and upending a train robbery that turns out to be a Hollywood film shoot. (A wild sequence of their arrival brings down the house, and not just on Buster Keaton.)

Here, the artistic James (voiced, as are the others, by the indefatigable co-director Pierre Coffin), discovers his calling. From the outset, James has been an outlier, literally sketching stories in the back of the boat instead of rowing along with the others. This creative bent annoys Dick, the Minion in charge, but aligns him with the similarly independent Henry and Ed, who speaks in sign language.

James finds a supportive mentor in Max, a director voiced by Christoph Waltz (Only Murders in the Building) with genuine enthusiasm and tender encouragement. As Minion mayhem impresses two fatcat studio heads (both voiced by Jeff Bridges, Tron: Ares), the little guys take over Hollywood, influencing everything from Babylon-style bacchanals to fashion until a cruel twist of fate rolls up the red carpet.

James can’t quash his storytelling drive, so he sketches out a monster movie featuring his buddies. To help, Henry and Ed soon conjure a pint-sized Cthulhu-like creature named Goomi (South Park’s Trey Parker). Goomi’s full name ends with “the deceiver,” but as usual, the banana-crazed cuties aren’t quite paying attention.

Goomi whips up other creatures (voiced by Bobby Moynihan, NCIS: Origins, and Phil LaMarr, American Dad!), ostensibly for James’s movie but with more nefarious plans. Meanwhile, the other Minions, seeking a new boss, encounter Dort (Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain), a humanoid robot via The Day the Earth Stood Still who sets his world-conquering thoughts aside once he meets a pretty suffragette (Zoey Deutch, Voicemails for Isabelle).

To be sure, that’s an odd tangent, but Minions & Monsters is such a fun pastiche that the charm carries the day. Screenwriter Brian Lynch (Minions, The Secret Life of Pets series), along with co-screenwriter Coffin, and the animators pepper the visuals and dialogue with so many details, I can only imagine viewers unpacking them all. I loved the pastel smudges on James’s nubby gloves and overalls from all his drawing and the jokes adults and Lovecraft aficionados will catch in the Minionese. (One spell mentions both “R’lyeh” and “caramel macchiato.”)

Aside from the seamlessly funny film references, co-director Patrick Delage (Despicable Me 4) weaves in different visual styles, from wide overhead shots showing off James’s dramatic lighting to black-and-white extreme closeups and a slapstick chase reminiscent of hand-drawn classics like Looney Tunes. Composer John Powell (TV’s Hocus Pocus, the Wicked series) deserves applause for a grand score befitting 1920s jazz and James’s big dreams (as do the filmmakers for noting in the credits that this is not to be used to train AI).

In sharing its love for movies, Minions & Monsters celebrates the community film lovers share. Film aficionados will go bananas