Despicable Me (2010)

There is, perhaps, no elegant way to begin an essay about this movie that doesn't leave something out. In Despicable Me, we have an unabashedly silly animated film that uses every trick in the book to appeal to the broadest market possible, while still maintaining some cohesion as a story. In this it succeeds, but just what that means for the film itself is quite another matter.

Like many of my peers, I grew up with a steady diet of some of the great animated films of the past century. Many happy days were spent watching the classics of Disney, and when new ones - Aladdin and its sequels, The Lion King, Mulan, Pocahontas, and Fantasia 2000, just to name a few - hit the big screen, I soaked those up with all the vim and vigor a slightly neurotic prepubescent could muster. But as we all now know, the world of animation was in transition. With Toy Story and A Bug's Life, Pixar was changing the way we look at animated films; the introduction of the "Best Animated Feature" category at the Oscars allocated some long-overdue accolades to films that had long been passed over for major hardware (Beauty and the Beast, which lost to The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, remains the only animated film considered in a 5-nomination format). Nor were Disney and Pixar the only production companies devoting serious effort (and money) into legitimizing animation's seat at the table of respectable film.

The genesis of this trend, if you consider it, has as much to do with the expansion of filming techniques (live-action and animated) as anything else. Consider the state of film in 1937: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs revolutionized the animation world with its use of a moving camera to capture depth of field. IMDb lists Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion as the next most popular film of the year - a tremendous film, to be sure, but as cinematically different as could be imagined. Visual effects and post-production as we think of them now were unthinkable; it would be no more possible to create an animated Gone With The Wind in the style of Cinderella with 1939 technology than it would be to do the inverse. Now, fast-forward sixty-four years or so, and we find entire scenes in The Matrix Reloaded that have been completely integrated with computer generated figures, as well as characters digitally captured and given life only on computers (such as Andy Serkis' Gollum from The Lord of the Rings). Sixty years ago, all of these images would have to be captured in-camera, a daunting task for anyone trying to film the Neo-Smith fight from Reloaded; good fucking luck finding sixty identical siblings to play Agent Smith.

All of this history really boils down to this: our improvements in technology and filmmaking have, in the last two decades, allowed us to significantly blur the line between reality and surreality and fantasy. There's a simple reason Tron sucked and Tron: Legacy was awesome; the sequel could create a world that felt real enough to for an audience to believe it for two hours. Animated films rely on this suspension of disbelief even more heavily than do more "realistic" movies, but our collective expectation as an audience has been irreversibly altered. Now more than ever, we look to animation for reality and, sadly, we accept reality as a freak show and a carnival fun house. A glance at today's headlines might tell you that this may be the only way the real world makes sense.

It is with all this in mind that I finally turn to Despicable Me. The plot is fairly straightforward, and hinges on our anti-hero, Gru (Steve Carell), experiencing a change in his evil ways after his heart is won over by his adopted daughters, who he is manipulating to steal a shrink ray. It doesn't matter why; in the end, everything works out happily, and we are left to wonder how much fun Carell, Jason Segel, and Russell Brand must have had in the studio together whilst recording their voiceovers. This is an animated movie, a term formerly synonymous with "kid's movie." It's that, too, and although I can't fault it for what it is, I wish it had explored some deeper ground; aside from some well-timed film references, including one to The Godfather that had me laughing out loud, there's not much new here. Its lack of real depth frustrated me as I watched, and I couldn't help but think of Ratatouille and Up and the other groundbreaking "kid's movies" of recent years. In fact, even in 2010 there were probably two or three other animated films that merit more serious discussion, because they weren't afraid to go the extra mile in storytelling. What a waste of some awesome animation and voice talent.

I will, however, give this to Despicable Me. It offers, through the three little girls whom Gru adopts, almost a clinic in characterization. Watch the movie again and notice how instantly and subtly the audience is introduced to the girls. We get a sense that they are real people; they have a back-story, distinct personalities, and although we very rarely see any one of the three independent of the other two, they are vastly more interesting than any supporting character I can think of in any Pixar film. As an educator, I appreciated the effort that went into these characters, and I appreciated that Gru would pay enough attention to the children to let himself be positively affected. We as adults too often fail to consider what is right, or what is best, for children. Why is that? Our distance from childhood most certainly does not enable us to understand it better. But this film treats the girls with dignity and respect while still allowing them to just be kids. We could learn something from this.

Oh yeah, and there are minions.