Time editorial department | Yinyin
Heal life with movies.
Speaking of the last ten years, the most successful animation images in the world are definitely indispensable.
This group of yellow, wearing big round glasses and suspenders, jabbering "Minions" little guys.
In 2010, Universal Picture’s animated film "Despicable Me" was released. Unexpectedly, it was the cute and mean Minions around him who was even more popular than the hero Gru.
After being away from the audience for nearly five years, and a whole summer vacation later than North America, the big movie "Minions" finally came this week.
Little Yellow Man with Big Eyes 2: Prequel to Despicable Me
"Minions 2" arrived late.
Minions can be said to be the "strongest worker" in the animation industry.
In the play, the mission of serving the boss must be achieved, and outside the play, it is a diligent box office gold collector.
As of August 15th, the global box office of "Minions 2" has reached 790 million US dollars, surpassing "New Batman" and rising to the fourth place in the global box office list this year.
The box office in North America was $340 million, which set a new record for animated films and family movies in North America since the epidemic.
Since 2010, the super popularity accumulated by the two Despicable Me films has led Lighting Entertainment to launch an independent film "Little Yellow Man with Big Eyes" belonging to Minions in 2015, and another "Daddy Thief 3" was released in 2017.
Minions 2, which is now released, is a direct sequel to Little Yellow Man with Big Eyes, and also a derivative work of Despicable Me.
Its production process was quite bumpy. It was originally planned to be launched in 2020, and it experienced various twists and turns such as epidemic stoppage, production stagnation and director change. It was finally released two years later.
The new film tells the story of Minions and 12-year-old Gru when they first met.
Gru, a teenager bent on becoming a "super villain", met five rebels in "The Six Heavenly Kings".
Gru accidentally snatched a piece of Yu Pei with great magic, so he forged a contradiction with these five bad guys.
Gru, who was still a teenager, was not dominant in all aspects, but he joined hands with the former boss in "Six Heavenly Kings", and with the help of Minions’s god, he was upgraded all the way to become a "super villain".
The familiar Minions trio Kevin, Stewart and Bob welcomed their new friends, Odou.
This is a small "chatterbox" with braces, and he is as cute as Bob!
The new breakthrough of "Minions 2" this time should be a large number of China elements in the film.
In addition to the opening Chinese title song, we can also see Yu Pei, Chinatown, dragon and lion dances, Bruce Lee’s yellow suit, Chinese plaque and the Chinese zodiac. ……
For a moment, people seem to have strayed into Kung Fu Panda.
In the film, Minions practiced China Kung Fu-Kevin and Stewart, who juggled the meteor hammer, and Bob, who practiced iron fist, all stole the camera.
Master Zhou, a skilled acupuncturist in Chinatown, is voiced by Chinese movie star Yang Ziqiong. This stone is also linked with the dream of "Instant Universe" starring Yang Ziqiong.
It is true that there are many "China elements" in this film, but most of them seem to be superficial and have not been deeply explored.
The China market is a big cake. In 2017, "Daddy Thief 3" grossed 1.037 billion yuan in the mainland of China, ranking third in the box office of imported cartoons.
These details of showing kindness to the audience in China are also painstaking.
Many people are curious, what is the language that Minions is chanting in his mouth? In fact, they have their own language system.
The language of Minions is a mixture of Chinese, French, English, Japanese, Spanish and Italian.
For example, BANANAA is pronounced according to the English pronunciation of bananas. Gelato, which Minions shouted after the ice cream truck in "Daddy Thief 2", means Italian ice cream. In the new film, we can also hear "Kung Fu" in Chinese.
This design is wonderful, and audiences all over the world seem to understand it, but they all seem to understand it, and they feel very cordial because they can hear one or two sentences of their own language.
Minions Universe
Minions is indeed the most famous and commercially valuable cartoon image of the new generation in the past decade.
Nowadays, they not only have amazing box office gold absorption ability, but also their derivatives sell well in the streets all over the world.
In 2010, lighting entertainment, which was just established, launched "Despicable Me" in a bold way, hoping to get a share in the summer file.
Unexpectedly, it gained the global audience’s "preference" for these yellow capsules, and this love even achieved the effect of usurping the host’s role.
At the beginning, Gru’s image design referred to many classic spy movies, from "007" series to "Pink Panther" series, and even learned from "Bean" series.
Taking the villain in the spy movie as the protagonist is actually quite a bit "anti-type".
These are not enough, but some more creative elements are needed to enrich the film’s interest and commercial potential, and "Minions" was born.
The original Minions is a far cry from what you see now.
According to pierre coffin, director of Despicable Me series, his original design of Gru’s sidekick was a muscular orc, but later he gave up such an ambitious setting because of budget problems.
Evolutionary history of "Minions"
But Chris Reynolds, the artistic director, had a flash of inspiration and suggested that "simply make the minions look like small workers", which was both economical and easy to operate.
"Don’t be so human", "Just paint them all yellow" and "Put glasses on them" … After brainstorming again and again, the silly yellow little people that the audience saw were born.
The setting of "Despicable Me" is also very clever: when the hero Gru appeared, he was an out-and-out "villain", thinking about how to become "the first villain in the universe".
Despicable Me’s preview
Despicable Me, in which the leading role is unconventional and the supporting role is good at selling cute, was well received in North America as soon as it was released.
The film finally earned $543 million at the box office around the world, and the scene of "stealing the moon" has been talked about by many fans.
The fame of "Minions" was quickly started. At the end of 2010, Lighting Entertainment launched four animated short films featuring Minions, and sequel to the movie of "Despicable Me" naturally followed suit.
Minions has achieved historic success in the market.
Minions’s silly temperament was fully displayed in "Daddy Thief 2", and Gru’s villain setting began to be washed away. This film earned $970 million at the box office around the world.
Lighting and entertainment went with the tide, and in 2015, Minions’s independent drama film "Little Yellow Man with Big Eyes" was released.
There are 899 Minions in the film. Although there is still suspicion of excessive consumption in the presentation of Minions, the film has grossed 1.159 billion US dollars in the world, which is the highest in the whole series.
In 2017, although the word-of-mouth of "Stealing Daddy 3" declined, the global box office also reached 1.034 billion US dollars.
Daddy Thief 3
Up to now, the "Minions" series of films, including three true stories and two prequels, have grossed nearly $4.5 billion in the global box office, which is a well-deserved "ceiling" of the global animated film box office.
Minions’s routine
Minions 2 is an interesting supplement between the derivative film Little Yellow Man with Big Eyes and the official story Despicable Me.
From these films, we can also see that the "routines" about Minions’s films are gradually changing.
In Despicable Me, Minions, the supporting role, is a simple laboratory product, a capsule-like creature composed of two cups of banana puree, mutant DNA and fatty acids by the protagonists Gru and Dr. Navalio.
They are born to follow the bad guy Gru, and they don’t need to choose. They are only responsible for selling cute and decorating the bad guy Gru.
In The Little Yellow Man’s Eyes Are Big, Minions, the protagonist, became a single-celled creature hundreds of millions of years ago, and Minions’s history can be traced back to the dinosaur period at least.
Minions is a product of evolution, and they deeply understand the essence of the law of the jungle. From dinosaurs to Napoleon, they followed all kinds of the best villains, and they also inadvertently pitted one big BOSS after another.
Minions’s history of selling cute, thus completed the transformation from passive to active.
We can sum it up as follows: the big bad guy with flowing water, Minions made of iron. Bad guys are always limited, but selling cute is infinite.
As one of the most successful original animated films in Hollywood in the past decade, Minions has become the most valuable IP for global and lighting entertainment.
However, the dazzling aura of the previous work, the highly similar plot mode and film elements are also slowly overdrawing the enthusiasm of the audience.
Starting from "Daddy Thief 2", the whole series has increasingly returned to the traditional family animation+action comedy routine, trying to find the "greatest common denominator" of family fun movies.
But from the villain to the protagonist, it seems that it is getting less and less "bad" and the black humor is getting weaker and weaker.
Now DreamWorks, another animation production company under Universal, has created League of Bad Guys with similar themes.
However, Minions’s films, which used to take "bad guys" as the leading role, gradually lost their original edge.
Although there are many "bad guys" in Minions 2, Gru is still young, just playing some practical jokes, and other bad guys make the audience have little memory.
The president of the "bad bank" and his son Victor in Minions 2.
In addition, Minions series animation has always had the problem of weak stories.
Of course, everyone wants to see Minions selling cute, but simply relying on Minions selling cute can’t afford an animated film that lasts more than 90 minutes.
People don’t care about the extended stories of other characters.
There are too many story lines in "Daddy Thief 3", such as how Gru’s wife is a good mother, and the engagement of Gru’s daughter and boy, etc., which are considered by many viewers to be too sloppy.
In "Minions 2", such problems still exist, and many story lines go hand in hand, with the emphasis on "Despicable Me prequel".
How to keep this "longevity" sequel animation fresh, and there are always surprises, which is really a difficult problem.
However, for many audiences, the expectation of Minions’s films is very simple, and "selling cute is the last word". It is enough to see this group of chirping little fat people in the cinema.
I don’t know whether this Minions 2 can rely on the China market to create the highest box office record in the whole series.
