When Despicable Me was released in 2010, nobody could have predicted that the film – in which a supervillain voiced by Steve Carell inadvertently adopts three orphan girls – would make $543 million worldwide against its $69 million budget.
The computer-generated animation has since spawned an equally successful sequel, six short cartoons and simulator rides at Universal Orlando Resort and Universal Studios Hollywood.
A brief look at the juggernaut franchise's best-selling merchandise – the Halloween costumes, phone covers, bedroom slippers and backpacks – tells us that much of that success is owed to the babbling yellow army operating from the bowels of the operation. In life, as in Despicable Me, minions are now everywhere: on yoghurt cartons, in memes and on billboards.
Even Pierre Coffin, the creatures’ co-creator and the voice of the minions – all 899 of them – is feeling a little surrounded: “I’m not a marketing guy,” he laughs. “So I wonder if people aren’t irritated by seeing these guys everywhere.”
Minions take control
There’s a reason for the current ubiquity: the Minions finally have a marvellous major motion picture of their very own. It wasn’t easy. Creating an adventure for banana-obsessed characters that speak in fluent gobbledegook was, says Coffin, a trial and error process.
"When we tried to analyse what made these guys successful – and I'm not saying I'm right by the way – it was a simple answer: they were funny. Every time we needed a gag, every time things were getting emotional between Gru and the girls in Despicable Me, we'd cut to these guys . . . So during the three years we spent making Minions, we screwed up maybe five or six times. One of our first screw-ups was to actually make the minions do what they were doing in the two Despicable Me films.
“And it was unbearable. We had 20 minutes of minions yelling at each other and hitting each other over the head. There was no sense of character and even I didn’t care what happened to them.”
Undaunted, Coffin, his co-director Kyle Balda and writer Brian Lynch, sent the Minions on a quest, a journey that takes in dinosaurs and the yeti, before the yellow heroes finally fall foul of Queen Elizabeth II and Sandra Bullock’s super-villainess.
“In some ways the minions are a dream for any animator because, without language, we have to push the visual aspect to the extreme,” says Coffin. “The comedy is physical and it relies on timing and play. But now we had to give these guys believability because they are the ones carrying the story. So we looked to [Jacques] Tati and [Charlie] Chaplin. The film is kind of a tribute to these guys. Not just that most of their humour is silent. They bring a lot of emotional depth to comedy.”
Coffin, the son of diplomat Yves Coffin and the Indonesian feminist and novelist Nh. Dini, is an animation industry veteran who trained at Gobelins School and worked at Steven Spielberg's Amblimation, and Passion Pictures, before joining the Paris-based visual effects house Mac Guff, where the animation for the Despicable Me films is produced.
His international upbringing is evident in minion-speak, which brings together words from English ("banana"), French (poulet), Spanish ("para tú"), Korean ("Hana"), Russian ("Da") and plain nonsense. Are there linguistic rules governing minion-banter?
The internet has its theories. “Oh no. The script gives no indication of language. It gives a global, general outline of what’s happening. I’m afraid to say it’s just me. I’ll sit down in front of my mic and say the same silly things over and over again until it feels like a language rather than just funny words . . . It’s very fulfilling because you’re asking the audience to play along.”
Multiple roles
And now, having provided the voices of the Minions’ pioneering triumvirate Kevin, Stuart and Bob, Pierre Coffin joins an elite group of players that includes Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness: players who take on multiple roles in the same film.
“I had not thought of it that way,” says the animator, laughing. “I love the comparison but I can’t take the credit. It’s a collective effort. There’s also Chris Renaud and Kyle, my co-directors, and our producer, Chris Meledandri. We all breathed life into the Minions.”
Post-Minions, Coffin is back on, well, Minion duty, as a co-director of Despicable Me 3, due in cinemas in 2017. "I didn't want to do it," says Coffin. "But when I heard the pitch, it was too good to be true. I've been so lucky with all of these films so far . . . I feel like I'm dreaming. When I wake up it will all have been a very, very arrogant dream about me being super successful."
- Minions opens June 26th
