When the French animation studio Illumination was developing “Despicable Me,” an ingratiating family comedy about a second rate supervillain and his adopted children, the team decided that the movie needed some lighthearted relief to help make the movie’s antihero, Gru (Steve Carell), more sympathetic.
So the directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, alongside the character designer Eric Guillon and the producer Chris Meledandri, came up with the Minions, a flock of mischievous yellow creatures that would scurry about in the background and cheer on their nefarious leader.
Coffin, a French Indonesian animator, offered to improvise some high-pitched gibberish dialogue for the characters, which he’d occasionally done working previously in commercials, until a celebrity voice actor could be added at a later date.
But as it turned out, Coffin’s voice stuck: Test audiences loved his distinctive staccato giggle and melodic nonsense speak. And so, since 2010, Coffin has been the unlikely star of one of the largest pop cultural phenomena of the century, reprising the role for the sixth time on the big screen in the new sequel “Despicable Me 4,” which comes to theaters Wednesday.
“After the last movie, I told Chris Meledandri, ‘I have to stop doing anything Minion-related, I’ve got to do something else,’” Coffin said in a recent video interview from an animation festival he was attending in southeastern France. “But there’s something very appealing that I really like about those characters. So even when I say that I want to get out of it, then I think, ‘Oh, I should do that, it’s fun!’”
Born in France in 1967 to the novelist Nh. Dini and the diplomat Yves Coffin, Pierre’s childhood was spent partly in the United States, which made an outsized impression on his young mind. “I was overwhelmed, like ‘This is the greatest country ever: They have all these movies!’” he said.
He loved musicals and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and after seeing “The Pirates of Penzance,” became enamored with “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” its famous rapid-fire patter song. “I knew that if I ever got to make a movie myself,” he said, “I would put that song in there somehow.” Decades later, he made it the rousing centerpiece of the 2017 sequel “Despicable Me 3.”
The “Despicable” films, as well as the spinoffs “Minions” and “Minions: Rise of Gru,” have been enormously lucrative for Illumination, and Universal, their distributor. They have earned $4.6 billion worldwide, making them one of the most successful film franchises ever.
The Minions themselves have also become ubiquitous beyond the films: omnipresent as licensed merchandise, theme park rides, TikTok trends and Facebook memes. “The design of them and the feel of them is very toy-friendly,” said Renauld, who also directed “Despicable Me 4.” “It’s got this simplicity. You can create memes, they’re easy to draw — it’s something you want to park on your desk.”
But while the ubiquity of the Minions may be a testament to their popularity, Coffin seemed to have some regrets, creatively. “When ‘Minions’ came out, I had two reactions,” he said. “Firstly, the marketing is overwhelming, and I think they’ve overdone it. And second: How in the hell did we make a billion dollars with this movie?”
Yes, the first “Minions” movie, directed by Coffin and Kyle Balda, is one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. But in Coffin’s view, “it was the marketing that made the movie a financial success, and not necessarily a creative one.” In short, he said, “we could have done better.”
When Coffin catches “Minions” on TV in Paris, where he lives with his family, he finds himself thinking about what the film might have been: simpler, less conventional, maybe more like “Shaun the Sheep,” an 84-minute British comedy featuring no dialogue, just pure pratfalls. Renauld disagreed. “I think ‘Shaun the Sheep’ is great,” he said. But, “our films swung for the fences in a way that ‘Shaun the Sheep’ did not. If you’re going for a broad audience, it would be very tricky to do it straight-up with no dialogue.”
Meledandri, the producer, suggested that Coffin’s resistance to the conventional style of the Minions movies is emblematic of a “rebellious quality” that is “so important to who Pierre is as an artist.” He described working with Coffin as a process involving “a really healthy tension” between his independent spirit and the demands of a broadly accessible family film.
“He would not like me saying this, but there’s a lot about Pierre that reminds me of the Minions,” Meledandri said. “At the core he’s incredibly sweet, but that sweetness is combined with a subversiveness. His fierce independence is an essential part of continually surprising us as we worked on the films — and ultimately surprising the audience.”
Meledandri said that Coffin might feel “constrained” by the needs of the studio — but Coffin is clearly thrilled by the creative possibilities of those little yellow critters. He compared them to the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons by Tex Avery: loose, imaginative, even daring.
“I feel like with the Minions,” Coffin said, “I can do anything.”