'Minions & Monsters' review: the yellow horde turns black and white

Imagine a black and white shot of a wintery mansion where a Minion lies dying in an upstairs bedroom. A snowball in his hand falls to the ground. The Minion squawks his last words: “Oh, poop.”

That scene is in “Minions & Monsters,” a delightful homage to Tinseltown set during the transition from silence to sound. The Minion is a movie star who misses that jump. You, a person of film scholarship, may be laughing at the truth of how difficult it was for early actors to speak dialogue (the Minions babble in their own made-up language) or at the delirious inaccuracy of setting “Citizen Kane” a decade and a half too soon. Children in the crowd howl at the creature's dirty mouth. Anyway, director Pierre Coffin makes the entire audience laugh. That is Classic Hollywood.

Coffin, the co-creator and voice of the Minions, was born in France to Franco-Indonesian intellectuals who only turned on the television to watch old movies. As such, it's a step out of sync with contemporary children's filmmakers who tend to chase trends or resurrect the retro toys of their own youth. Coffin is not pleased. It relies on telling fast, funny, anarchic stories that reward attention: an old formula that seems new simply because not many others are doing it.

Like the early silent artists, the animated Minions are silent, expressive ids designed to act as worldwide bestsellers. Their frenetic energy would fit right in alongside Mack Sennett's pie-throwing and early Felix the Cat animated shorts. An even earlier rewind that opens the film flashes back to Eadweard Muybridge and the Lumière brothers, then fast-forwards to Georges Méliès' dazzling 1902 film, “A Trip to the Moon,” whose clownish, agitated aliens could be the Minions' second cousins.

Clearly, these influences have been on Coffin's mind since long before there was a Minions sticker on half the minivans at school. Here, he's pulling back the curtain to show kids exactly where his magic comes from. It's the climax of a trick Coffin has been working on since “Minions,” his 2015 billion-dollar blockbuster (co-directed by Kyle Balda), infused itself with images of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Great Dictator,” carving grooves into the minds of young viewers so they can grow up to recognize and appreciate the originals, just as “The Simpsons” and “The Muppets” and Rossini's Rossini fetish trained him. Bugs Bunny. previous generations.

I'll admit, I snorted the first time I saw a TikTok of teenagers dressed in suits to watch a Minions movie. But after seeing “Minions & Monsters” make nods to “Metropolis” and “Casablanca,” I get it. Coffin and co-writer Brian Lynch's almost non-verbal comedy treats today's youth with the same respect that Charlie Chaplin treated his great-grandparents. On a subconscious level, his fans are returning the favor.

Don't worry about not seeing the two previous “Minions” entries or the four “Despicable Me” movies they came from. In short: The Minions are an immortal but childish tribe of yellow creatures who continually seek to serve an evil master. They look and act like pills. Arriving by mistake at the first film sets in Los Angeles, they can't tell which bad guys are real or fictional. Jokingly, we can't either. A loud robot named Dort (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg), discovered outside a proto-Comic-Con, claims to be a world conqueror from outer space, but lives in a one-room shack with a roommate. (Despite the enveloping madness, the estranged roommate is itself an authentic representation of the type of person an L.A. transplant moves in with via Craigslist.)

The silent film era had many real villains, but a R-rated movie is not going to burst onto the set of “The Birth of a Nation,” much less into a casting call. Instead, Coffin outlines his idea of ​​a Hollywood scoundrel, the faux-let's-make-lunch huckster, with Jeff Bridges voicing a group of twin studio moguls playing a bad boss/ambiguous boss. One brother waves goodbye, the other waves goodbye and coos, “We hope we can still be friends who never speak.”

However, James, a dreamy Minion, promises to put together a monster movie with real monsters. (The Minions prefer prosaic nicknames; others are clearly named Steven, Quentin, Erich, Federico and Ridley, as in Spielberg, Tarantino, Von Stroheim, Fellini and Scott.) James is every ambitious director threatening to topple this city in a narcissistic quest to create the ultimate special effects epic. Instead of an out-of-control budget, it's the beasts themselves, particularly Irene, an impressive creation resembling a mass of marmalade with eyeballs bubbling to the surface. The translucency of Irene's top layer is magnificently done; so are its insides, reminiscent of the tornado in “The Wizard of Oz” trapped in quivering gelatin.

The visuals in “Minions & Monsters” can be clever, like the galloping tentacles of an oversized squid or the close-up that goes inside the director's megaphone to see his tongue wagging on the screen. Yet the cinematography rarely chooses to draw attention to itself in the moment, forcefully pushing us toward the next visual episode and the next, trusting that we'll applaud the details later on an umpteenth repeat. Taking a cue from Nickelodeon's pianists, composer John Powell steers the mood with a vibrantly eclectic score of jaunty ragtime, violin pathos, and popcorn crescendos.

The setting of the main story is a mix of historical references from the teens to the 1950s, with the Minions clashing with suffragettes, prohibitionists, Roaring Twenties revelers, Keystone cops, Oscar presenters, film noir set designers, and, in a wild fit, Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. Not including Mary Pickford or Mabel Normand is a missed opportunity; They were fun too. Shirley Temple gains passing recognition, only through her eponymous drink when the Minions visit a nightclub and drink cherry-laden virgin cocktails. At least in the background, Coffin reminds us that women also worked behind the scenes from the beginning. Likewise, the head director with whom the Minions befriend, Max (Christoph Waltz), has a European accent, a clear indication of the industry's immigrant roots.

Hollywood was founded by daredevils, from the cowboys who galloped here to become stuntmen, to the small-town girls who resisted the pressure to marry and moved west to pursue one in a million dream. My favorite representations of this city know their real the story is too crazy to honestly grasp; Straight recreations make producing 35mm masterpieces look as easy as Shrinky Dinks. However, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” got closer to the truth by tapping into L.A.'s chaotic trifecta of bigotry, naïveté, and cynicism.

“Minions & Monsters” does not aim for precision; At its core, it's just child's play, but it achieves the first two qualities and rubs shoulders with the last, say when a scheming green villain (Trey Parker) pretends to help James direct his masterpiece, assuring him: “This is your project, I don't want to step on anyone.” Parker's voice is too familiar from “South Park” to disappear into character, and he honestly doesn't try that hard to bother. But as he utters that line, he can be heard mocking the studio executives he's tangled with, now that much of Hollywood has been taken over by conglomerates that don't fully understand his humor, much less Coffin's.

Those MBA types may know a “Rosebud” reference when they see one, but back in the day, they probably would have allied themselves with aggrieved tycoon William Randolph Hearst trying to run Orson Welles out of town. Still, Coffin is fine inviting them into the big top with the rest of us, if only to show where the Hollywood hit machine can find its next gear. Get back to the basics, your film says. Entertain, invigorate and enchant. Not every movie has to be “Citizen Kane.” Make everyone laugh.