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As America turns 250 this week, the movies have a reason to join the festivities, as the medium has endured for more than half that time.
They were a global art form from the beginning, the product of innovations by late-nineteenth-century American innovator Thomas Edison and British import Eadward Muybridge, as well as the French siblings Auguste and Louis Lumiere, whose seminal 1895 screening of a train inspired magician Georges Melies to invent the earliest special effects.
Cinema emerged as a result of global efforts, but came of age in America, with the birth of Hollywood at the turn of the century. The latest and most unexpected chronicle of that story arrives in theaters this week with the animated crowdpleaser Minions and Monsters, which may end up as the most patriotic movie of the year. In a country filled with many unexpected twists, this one is more than welcome.
A charming and inspired celebration of film history through the lens of the yellow troublemakers who first appeared in 2010’s Despicable Me, the seventh Minions entry journeys back to the 1920s and pays homage to the earliest days of cinema as well as the international forces that shaped it. In this playful alternate timeline, the Minions journey across the world, failing to find a villain they can serve for long, before inadvertently stumbling onto a film set in Los Angeles and becoming movie stars.
Through a series of ridiculous slapstick developments, the entourage wind up as filmmakers themselves, as they attempt to make a monster movie by conjuring actual monsters that wreck plenty of havoc. There’s also a branch of Minions who join forces with a robot alien voiced by Jesse Eisenberg, who falls for an activist in the women’s suffrage movement. All of which is to say that despite the veneer of ludicrous family-friendly animation aimed at younger viewers, Minions and Monsters is decidedly highbrow when it comes to the historical context of early Hollywood.
As directed by Pierre Coffin, the movie careens through clever homages to virtually every significant cinematic achievement of the era. The opening credits put the Minions into the most iconic early cinema experiments, including Muybridge’s groundbreaking 1878 Horse in Motion (which was previously referenced in Jordan Peele’s sci-fi thriller Nope) and the Lumiere brothers’ The Workers Leaving the Factory and The Waterer Watered, the latter of which is the first silent comedy film. The montage culminates with Melies’ brilliant 1902 sci-fi short A Trip to the Moon, with the iconic image of a lunar face swapped for an even sillier Minion one.
And that’s just the opening moments. The narrative of Minions and Monsters is built around a modern-day tour of Hollywood history, set at a vast museum that bears some resemblance to the real Academy Museum in Los Angeles. The hallways are loaded with statues of legendary Hollywood figures, from Kirk Douglas to Orson Welles, not to mention a real-life George Lucas (who voices himself in a clever cameo with its own layered implications). The tour guide leads visitors through the cavernous spaces to a statue of Minions named James and Henry, the apparent forgotten figures who played a seminal role in the industry.
The ensuing storyline keeps the historical citations going. When they first happen upon Hollywood, the Minions inadvertently stumble through famous scenes across town. Early slapstick artists like Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, the Keystone Cops, and Charlie Chaplin make cameos. The latter comic shows up in the midst of his brilliant 1936 workplace comedy Modern Times in which he gets lost in a series of factory gears. (In this version, the Minions join him in the machine; I was thrilled when my young daughter, a Chaplin fan, noticed the reference.)
For a while, I tried to keep tabs on every major historical acknowledgement, from The Maltese Falcon to Battleship Potemkin, but gave up. Plenty of outlets have unpacked the details strewn throughout, but there’s a bigger picture going on here beyond the adorable citations. The Minions of Minions and Monsters show up in Hollywood by accident and discover an opportunity to find a permanent home. These goofy yellow figures speak in a made-up language that sounds like a hodgepodge of various European and Latin dialects. They’re fictional beings, but avatars of a very real migrant experience.
It’s hardly a stretch to acknowledge that the Minions reflect the ethnic communities that made Hollywood — and, by extension, America itself. The wide-eyed humans who encounter the Minions (including a parody of early movie moguls Jack and Sam Warner) find the creatures baffling and incomprehensible, but they also sense an opportunity. To paraphrase Hamilton: Immigrants get the job done.
While the Minions are exploited by the business, they ultimately find their own way to take control of it. That sets up a brilliant twist ending, one I won’t spoil here, except to acknowledge that they learn how to tell their own story on American soil. And there’s nothing more American than that.
Minions and Monsters is now showing at the Southampton Playhouse.
Happy July 4th — and see you at the movies!