After All, Why Not? Why Shouldn’t the Minions Make a Love Letter to Cinema?

Before Minions & Monsters, I’d never seen a Minions movie. I’d never seen a Despicable Me, the movies that introduced the yellow Tic Tac–shaped henchmen to the world, either. I nevertheless have a pretty good sense of what their whole deal is, because I live in the world and, more important, because I spend too much time online. A decade ago, around the time the Minions first got a spinoff movie of their own, the Illumination animation brand’s mascots became so entwined with meme culture as to merit multiple investigations into their omnipresence, among them an Awl post about “How Minions Destroyed the Internet.” While the internet is still, regrettably, around in 2026, the Minions are, too, and they’ve become so powerful that, like a Gen Alpha kid who’s too savvy to submit to the temptations of a smartphone, they’ve turned to more analog interests. Minions & Monsters, which is directed by Minions creator and voice actor Pierre Coffin and co-written by Brian Lynch, doesn’t just take place in 1920s Hollywood, where a new set of Minions, led by besties James and Henry, get swept up into the early days of movie-making. It’s a full-blown love letter to cinema along the lines of The Artist and Babylon, only with a giant orange blob-monster attack at the end.

And it’s going to take a stronger critic than me to resist being pandered to by a kiddie comedy that opens with references to the Muybridge horse and Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and later nods to the most famous images from Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Modern Times. Before it surrenders to the conventional in its final act, Minions & Monsters is irresistibly awash with the liberty of being the seventh installment in a franchise so consistently successful that the powers that be approved a story line that pivots on the advent of sound. That development even makes a punch-drunk kind of sense in the context of the characters, who are adorable, but who — we’re all friends here, right? — do wear out their welcome over the course of a feature runtime. The Minions, some of whom have one eye and some of whom have two, who roam the world looking for supervillains to support and accidentally destroy, are far from silent-film stars, snickering and babbling in a gibberish Esperanto peppered with the occasional recognizable word. But they are creatures of physical comedy, emphasized in an opening scene in which James inadvertently takes down the massive cyclops his tribe has been serving by inventing a proto form of LEGO for the giant to step on. So it’s a funny bit that, when the talkies arrive, their onscreen celebrity is undone by not an irksome speaking voice or an unexpected accent but their inability to speak anything other than Minionese.

James and Henry, their hard-of-hearing buddy Ed, and their appropriately named leader Dick are all members of apparently one of many Minions tribes roaming the planet (a revelation that reopens the dark question at the heart of Minions lore: What exactly were these guys up to during World War II?). An unfortunate incident involving a warlock master and his magic tome lands the group in Los Angeles, where they stumble onto the set of a Bright Brothers Studio picture helmed by Max (Christoph Waltz). The director is enraged at their intrusion, which has ruined his big set piece, then bemusedly amenable when his bosses declare “these sickly children” are obviously stars. Being invited onto the enchanted kingdom of a studio soundstage is an especially thrilling development for James, a born storyteller who never had much enthusiasm for being an evil lackey anyway, and who discovers his true calling is to direct. His passion project is a monster movie starring him and his friends, which he decides to make a reality by summoning a Cthulhu type using the wizard’s spell book. While Goomi (Trey Parker) doesn’t turn out to be as forbidding-looking as the book’s illustration, he does promise to help the project out by leading James and Henry to some bigger monster friends.

Back in 2022, we got a slate of tear-stained odes to cinema that doubled as elegies to a medium whose death their makers almost seemed to want to accelerate for more effective awards campaigning. Despite all those wistful shots of audiences gazing up at the screen together, the movie persist, having weathered shifts to digital, the pressures of real estate, dwindling contemporary attention spans, and the advent of streaming. We apparently have to mourn the movies in order to really celebrate them, as though it’s only by looking at them in the rearview that we can unabashedly appreciate what we’ve had. But one of the weird pleasures of Minions & Monsters, in its joyful silliness, is that it’s both one of these earnest mash notes to the medium and a parody of them (there’s even a party shot that is fully a re-creation of the big bash at the start of Damien Chazelle’s Old Hollywood opus). Maybe loving the movies is fundamentally a postlapsarian experience, demanding a feeling that their golden age is always past, that something essential is lost with each leap forward. What Minions & Monsters has going for it is a willingness to tweak that sense of melancholy, to treat our eternal enshrining of what used to be as just another part of the process, another emotion to tap into before yelling “Cut!” and starting all over again.

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