MINION BANANA MOVIE FULL SERIES

Am I thinking too hard about this? Absolutely, but it’s difficult not to in a year that gave us the Pixar instant-classic Turning Red. Their millennial parents? Maybe, but the film’s 1970s setting leads to a flood of period-specific allusions aimed at Boomers and Gen X’ers. Wrapped up in all this is the question of who this movie is for, if the Minions rose to prominence over a decade ago? The teens who were children during the first Despicable Me? Probably not.

MINION BANANA MOVIE FULL SERIES

The Minions, with their speech comprising made-up French, bits of English and Spanish, and near-total gibberish, are the kind of babbling caricatures used to entertain babies, yet they’ve taken on a life of their own on social media, as digital stationery for wine aunts and weird uncles to type up harmless mundanities (“Exercise? I thought you said extra fries!”) The Despicable Me series has an entire history behind it (or rather, ahead of it The Rise of Gru is a prequel), so it must serve a narrative function, and as a movie, it technically has a story and characters, but they all exist in service of slapstick gags that may as well be isolated vignettes. It would be a fool’s errand to judge a Minions movie on anything except its own terms, but figuring out what those terms even are is a challenge.

Minion banana movie full