Country:
USA
Recognizable Voices:
Steve Carrell
Russell Brand
Will Arnett
Julie Andrews
Directed By:
Pierre Coffin
Chris Renaud
It's a safe statement that Pixar revolutionized animation movie business. They changed the technical approach to making cartoons, but they also change the way those movies are marketed and perceived by the public. Since Toy Story, it's not dorky or nerdy to go see animation in the theaters. It became some sort of neutral ground for couples, where they can watch a movie together without having one of the two fall asleep. Some goes for families. You cannot stereotype an animation movie audience anymore. The "Pixar Way" became a culture of its own. Proof? Despicable Me isn't even Pixar, yet I can't stop referring to it. The latest Universal Studio animation flick completely registers in that new kind of cinema.
Despicable Me is refreshing, yet it's an idea that has been around forever. It's the story of Gru (Steve Carrell), a villain of James Bond proportions, who enjoys his villainy up to the point where he gets blown off stage by the new kid in town Vector (Jason Segel) who managed to steal an Egyptian pyramid (who he hilariously keeps in his backyard, painted to camouflage in the sky). As a proper villain should do, Gru schemes an even bigger plan: stealing the moon. But since it involves using a shrink ray (I loves this wacky villain gear), a weapon possessed by the now superior Vector, he has to find a way to get inside the youngster's HQ. Of course, he needs the innocence of kids to achieve that...and whoever approaches kids in an animation movie is fucked. His life is doomed to change.
As much as I love the new generation of animation movies, there's this thing with me, making me fall asleep during the first twenty minutes. I'm not clear to why it happens. It can happen at nine in the morning or at midnight, it doesn't matter. It's not that it's terribly boring, but the movies follow such a similar template that my body has broken down those movies to the nano-seconds. I instinctively know when are they going to turn interesting. My mind shuts off during the character building scenes, because I know that two unlikely allies (Gru & the girls) will end up together, struggle with each other's personality, but end up joining forces in taking down a greater task. That was also the story of Up (Carl Fredericksen & Russell), of Toy Story (Buzz & Woody), you see my point. Family movie still have a job to do and while it's blowing off the mind of a six years old, it's a little less impressive to people who already broke down the formula to its essence.
That off my chest, Despicable Me is a top-tier family animation movie. It's channeling enough clichés and ironies from film history to keep is relevant for the older viewers, yet its moral grounds are so solid it's not even funny. Villains have been themselves a figure of speech in a narrative moral point for many years, so it's an interesting exercise to dig up the humanity in these highly metaphorical characters without turning the story into a tear jerking piece of crap. Gru is just over-the-top enough as a character to keep running into wacky situations without having to alter the rotten core of his being. This feels like a pretty empty review to me, but that's one of the major problems with animation movies. You've seen one, you know what they are and you know what they're trying to tell you. And it's OK, those movies know their places in the bigger scheme of things. They are just a little manufactured.
SCORE: 74%
