Minions & Monsters

I had a lot of fun at an animation double feature last night.  I started with Minions & Monsters and this homage to Old Hollywood is so much better than I was expecting!  A tour guide (Allison Janney) leading a group through a film history museum tells the story of how minions James, Henry, and Ed influenced Hollywood and saved the world.  A tribe, led by Dick, serve a series of evil villains throughout history, with disastrous results, until they discover a Wild West train robbery and decide to become the robber's henchmen.  They pursue the train only to discover that they have disrupted an elaborate movie shoot.  The director Max (Christoph Waltz) is furious because he believes all of his footage has been ruined but Frank and Elwood Bright (Jeff Bridges), the heads of Bright Brothers Studios, love the scene and demand that the minions be hired.  They become big stars but, when silent movies transition to "talkies," they are unable to adapt because they are incomprehensible and are fired.  James, Henry, and Ed decide to make their own movie, called Minions and Monsters, but Dick and the rest of the minions leave the studio to find another evil villain to serve.  They become henchmen to Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), an alien robot who intends to invade Earth, but his plans are sidetracked when he meets a suffragette named Debbie (Zoey Deutch) and the minions are used to woo her, instead.  Meanwhile, James uses a spellbook, once owned by the sorcerer they served during the Middle Ages, to summon a monster but is disappointed when a Cthulhu named Goomi (Trey Parker) appears because he is not scary enough.  Goomi helps them summon Irene, an amorphous blob of orange goo filled with eyeballs, but he has his own plans to use Irene for world domination.  James and Henry are soon overpowered until Dort and the other minions return in spaceships to help destroy Irene and they eventually cast another spell on Goomi.  It turns out that Ed was filming the whole attack and the movie Minions and Monsters becomes a huge hit!  I think the minions, who are all voiced by Pierre Coffin, are absolutely hilarious and I laughed out loud at all of their chaotic antics (I think I am even starting to understand their language).  However, as a self-described cinephile, I really enjoyed the story (which reminded me of Babylon and Singin' in the Rain) and all of the movie references, especially The Great Train Robbery, Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and, of course, The Blob.  The visuals are a lot of fun, particularly the train derailment, and the performances are great (Eisenberg is hilarious).  I loved this and, even though I still think the funniest scene with the minions is in Despicable Me (when they sing "I Swear" at Gru and Lucy's wedding), it is definitely my favorite movie in the franchise!