But that’s all going to change soon, as audiences will discover the best martial artists in cinema history have been hiding in plain sight for the last decade: the Minions.
For their latest big screen adventure, the seventies set prequel Minions: The Rise Of Gru, Stuart, Kevin, and Bob join forces with Steve Carell’s would-be supervillain for the first time, but disaster quickly strikes.
After failing his audition to join the evil supergroup The Vicious 6, Gru plots for revenge, but it doesn’t go to plan. Sent on the run, the Minions are the only ones who can save him.
However, that relies on them becoming kung fu experts in order to take down the martial arts trained villains - a mission that they accept. With the movie set in the seventies, when Hong Kong produced action spectaculars started gaining prominence in the west, it was a no-brainer for director Kyle Balda to look to the genre for inspiration.
“This movie is very action-packed, but at the same time, they’re still the Minions”, Balda told Zavvi. “So, a lot of our big touchstones were films that combined action with comedy, like Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle or Shaolin Soccer.
"However, it’s still a love letter to classic kung fu films, so we were definitely looking towards Jackie Chan, who has the most incredible physicality. The Minions have previously been compared to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and I think Jackie Chan also actually comes from that Chaplin school of comic acting.
"I mean, the amount of pantomime acting that he’s doing and how you know what he’s thinking and feeling without the use of dialogue - that’s certainly what we have to do with the Minions because nobody has any idea what they’re saying. It’s a really tricky skill for an actor to communicate all their emotions through body language alone.”
But this isn’t the only way The Rise Of Gru functions as a love letter to classic action cinema. The Minions are trained in martial arts by another legend, Michelle Yeoh’s Master Chow, while members of the Vicious 6 are voiced by the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Lucy Lawless, and Danny Trejo.
For Balda, one of the biggest challenges was carrying over their legacies as action stars to help cement the film’s high stakes, but without compromising on the silliness audiences expect from a Minions movie.
“The Vicious 6 are like all the other villains in this universe: they’re the bad guys and have to carry the stakes of the movie. That’s why we need actors like Trejo or Van Damme – performers who have gravitas in their voices and can bring the menace, but are also these fun-loving people in real life. They can still be evil even as the film goes further into the realms of the ridiculous!”
The film acts as an origin story for the young Gru, who we see a glimpse of at the end of the first Minions adventure, stealing the Queen’s crown. This has made the Minions want him as their new leader in all things evil, but there’s a catch: he’s still a young child.
Carell has returned to voice the character, but was a different actor ever considered to step into his shoes for the younger version?
“We never thought for a second we’d have anybody other than Steve Carell. When he did that voice cameo at the end of the first Minions, we had to pitch his vocals slightly to give it a more youthful tone.
"But his talent as a voice actor is that he tunes into that really quickly, so this time he could do it without us needing to alter the sound. Plus, there’s just so much of Carell in Gru, you can’t replace him.
"He does so much ad-libbing and improvisation in character that through the course of these films he has helped shape who Gru is. It’s important that he remains the custodian of this character.”
Balda, working with screenwriters Brian Lynch and Matthew Fogel, aimed to “reverse engineer” a villain origin story for Gru. We’re introduced to him in Despicable Me as a bad guy whose heart is opened through adopting three girls, which turned out to be the perfect mirror image for his evil awakening as a child.
“Seeing him as this bad guy who goes on to become one of the good guys through being a father had us thinking – what’s the root of this? And we realised it’s what makes him and the Minions perfect for each other.
"What ultimately brings them together is just wanting to belong to something bigger than themselves. The Minions want to follow bad guys even though the irony is they’re not fundamentally bad, and the same is true for Gru too.”
As someone born in the early seventies, taking the Minions to the decade stirred up some nostalgia within the director – in particular, a sequence where the characters go to see Jaws, the film that made Balda want to make movies in the first place. There’s plenty of references to the decade’s music and fashion trends (the soundtrack features covers of the era’s best songs by several major artists), with the team also wanting to emulate the kung fu movies of the ‘70s in the visual language of the fight scenes.
It’s a heightened tribute but as Balda points out, the key to the ongoing success of the Minions isn’t because they’re tied to any specific personal experience. They are comic characters who remain surprisingly relatable on a universal level, no matter which time period you throw them into.
“They’re not human at all in the way they look, but in the way they act and the things they want, they’re very relatable. There’s something hopeful about them where even when they fail, it sort of works out in some way.
"Some of the most rewarding feedback for me as an animator is when people can suspend their disbelief, believing that a character is alive and can do whatever they want. I think it’s that relatable nature of the characters that has contributed to that.
“You don’t need to know what they’re saying to understand what they’re feeling. The words they use go all the way from Italian to Indonesian - it’s truly multicultural and nobody can fully comprehend it even if you string everything they say together. But the way they act makes it so easy to understand.”
With a Despicable Me 4 in the works, the Minions are going to be with us for some time to come – so let’s hope this isn’t the last time we see them putting their kung fu moves to use.
Minions: The Rise Of Gru releases in UK cinemas on 1st July.Shop our range of Minions merchandise.
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