No, You're Not Imagining It. Minions Are Everywhere

The henchmen became shorter, more humanoid – now they looked like Oompa Loompas. The team decided that the characters should be similar to moles – small, pale creatures with goggles on, burrowing in the dark. Somehow, they became more like frogs. A few changes here, a scribble there, and suddenly they were aliens. The team decided to “simplify, simplify, simply”.  

“And then they became what they are today,” says director Pierre Coffin, who relayed the origin story of the Minions outlined above. The characters were bought to life by Pablos, Coffin, co-director Chris Renaud, producer Chris Meledandri, and illustrator Eric Guillon. After all that trial and error, they were left with, “these very simple, pill-shaped, yellow things in blue overalls that we could multiply thousands of times without hurting our computers.” And go forth and multiply they did. 

You do not need me to tell you what a Minion is; they were introduced in 2010’s computer-animated comedy Despicable Me, but since then have starred in four more films, approximately 40 million Facebook memes, and their own ride in Universal Studios, Florida. 

Most recently, the Minions have become part of a suit-wearing, cinema-going fad. Teen boys across the globe are donning supervillain suits, steepling their fingers, and watching the new movie Minions: The Rise of Gru en masse. The #Gentleminions trend has been the subject of much furore (suits have been banned from some showings), but it raises crucial questions. How exactly did the Minions take over the world? Why, exactly, are they beloved by everyone from middle-aged mums to teenaged boys? 

Pixar, apparently, know exactly how round to draw the eyes of clownfish, robots, and bereaved old men in order to ensure they’re maximally cute. There was no such science at Paris-based animation studio Mac Guff when Coffin and the others were working on a movie then titled Evil Me. “We don’t do that,” Coffin says, explaining the team were “limited technically” – the Minions were not the product of a big Hollywood boardroom, and up until he started working on the film, Coffin mainly made commercials. “The budget of the movie was like one-third of a Pixar film,” he says. 

In the end, the limited budget was a blessing. Orcs were off the table, and the Minions were stripped back to their rawest and cutest form. Coffin – who is also an animator – said this made them easy to “give character to”: “Just with a ball, you can animate it so that it feels sad or angry, and the Minions had that simplicity graphically.” And then came Minionese. 

Banana. Bapple. Para tú. Poulet tikka masala. Minionese is largely a gibberish language, but it also contains the odd English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, French, Russian, Filipino and Korean word. “I started mixing up all sorts of languages just so that it felt more universal,” Coffin, who also voices the Minions, says. “The magic of understanding what they’re feeling or saying isn’t the words, but more the music. Just by the melody of a sentence, you could understand if they were angry, if they were pissed, if one was telling a joke and the other wasn’t finding it funny.” 

It’s silent films, ultimately, that we have to thank. Coffin is personally a fan, and has also studied them to inform his work. “I think it asks, unconsciously, for a little effort from the audience,” Coffin says of Minionese, and the accompanying action-based animation that was necessary to bring it to life. “You can’t cook or do the dishes while watching a silent movie. Animation at its best is that: when you ask an audience to make that effort to be open to magic.” 

In hindsight, Minionese’s mix of languages paved the way for global domination. But, crucially, the fact that Minions largely spoke in gibberish meant that people could easily put words into their mouths. For the better part of the last decade, Minions have belonged to babies and boomers – the latter have laughing-faced their way through endless yellow memes on Facebook. Although much is made of the wine-based jokes (“I don’t need a reason to enjoy wine, I just need a glass”), the truth is that every single human emotion and experience can – and has – been projected onto the overall-clad workmen. 

Grief: “I will always miss my dad,” says the text above the dejected face of the Minion known as Kevin. Pain: “My mind says, ‘Who cares?’. But then my heart whispers, ‘You do, stupid.’” Longing: “Who is horny?? Me! Me! Me!!” Minions are also regularly used in acts of worship. “Dear God, I want to take a minute not to ask you for anything, but simply to say thank you for all I have,” says a Minion, its gloved fingers raised to the sky. 

On a 240,000-member Facebook fan page, one user wrote in 2019: “Don’t mean to be disrespectful, but Minions are probably one of the most devilish creatures I’ve ever seen! Can someone help me understand why people love them?”. A sample of the answers:

“They remind me of a dog. They are loyal and adorable!!! I LOVE MINIONS!!!”

“They represent the little kid in us.”

“They get away with things that we wish we could.” 

“You shouldn’t be in this Group.” 

The irony poisoning was inevitable. It’s only natural that children who watched older relatives post silly Minion memes for years would one day grow up and reclaim them as their own. “It just used to cringe me out,” says James Norman, a 21-year-old TikToker and engineer from Coventry who participated in the Gentleminions trend. Norman has no memories of watching Despicable Me as a child, but hated seeing Minion memes on Facebook or Minion bumper stickers on cars: “I just used to think ahh, it’s really cringe.” 

In early July, Norman and his brother dressed up in suits (hidden under tracksuits to avoid the ban) and went to watch Rise Of Gru. They didn’t do it out of any particular love for the Minions – Norman jumps on TikTok trends in the hopes of being a full-time content creator. But once they’d filmed their 22-second TikTok (which now has 10 million views), they stayed and watched the entire film. “I thought if it wasn’t good we’d leave after ten minutes, but we got into it,” Norman says, “It was actually really good.” 

Asked why mums and teens alike enjoy Minions, Coffin says: “I really don’t know.” Typically, he says, animation studios want teens and don’t “know how to get them”, but there’s no real learning to be taken forward in this instance – “somehow,” it happened, Coffin says, “I really can’t explain why.” Someone who perhaps can explain is Arthur Asa Berger, a professor emeritus of communication arts at San Francisco State University, and author of Searching for a Self: Identity in Popular Culture, Media and Society. 

“Why do people find Minions amusing and entertaining?” Berger says, “First, they identify with the Minions because so many of them feel that they are minions themselves.”

Berger explains that fads typically resonate with “generally unrecognised” needs that large numbers of people have. “So the question is, what do the Minions help us deal with?” he asks. He hypothesises that many of us are leading lives of “quiet desperation” and are “relatively powerless” thanks to the pandemic and the current state of modern capitalism. “We are all, as a character in The Prisoner put it many years ago, just ‘cogs in the machine.’”

According to Berger, Minions also “facilitate a regression” to infancy – after all, Minionese is a form of baby talk. “Modern societies have become difficult to deal with and so Minions provide a kind of silly escapism for people who may feel their lives are, in some way, unfulfilled – and whose situation is ‘despicable’,” Berger says. Astutely, he also argues that Minions reinforce childish pleasures because the characters “more or less do whatever they want with no penalties” – a sentiment that mirrors the one expressed by the earlier Facebook commenter. 

Of course, none of this was exactly planned. Minions: Rise of Gru smashed box office records on its opening weekend, and has now earned $400 million worldwide (Disney’s latest offering, Lightyear, has made just $200m). But Coffin says that when the Minions got their first stand-alone movie, way back in 2015, the team had no idea whether it would be a success. 

“When we did the Minions movie, we didn’t set out with a state of mind that we’re going to make a billion dollars with this one,” he says (ultimately, it made $1.1m worldwide). “Our goal was almost out of fear: Is it going to be possible to make a whole movie, an hour and half of just gibberish, these creatures? Is it going to be the last movie I’m going to be making?” Clearly not. The Minions live on. Another film is inevitable. Banana. Bapple. Para tú.

@ameliargh