I only realized yesterday when I was putting together my belated review of Inception that I had not posted my review of Despicable Me. So, here it is. And, for the curious among you, my Inception review will be up tomorrow.
DESPICABLE ME
Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud
Ken Daurio, Cinco Paul, Sergio Pablos
95 min.
Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Julie Andrews, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, Elsie Fisher
PG for rude humor and mild action.
Super heroes are exceedingly popular choices for features these days and occasionally a super villain slips in, but until now most computer animated features have primarily focused on heroes. What will the future of villains as central characters be in animated pictures? It’s hard to tell, but Despicable Me gives us one potential destination for the sub-genre.
The story revolves around a world-famous villain Gru (Steve Carell) whose latest goal is to steal the moon based on a childhood obsession with the celestial object. His plan involves building a rocket to fly by the moon and employing a shrink ray to bring it down to portable size. The problem is he doesn’t have the shrink ray or the money to pay for the rocket. When the Bank of Evil refuses to float him a loan without the shrink ray in hand, he sets out to collect the shrink ray only to have it stolen from him by an upstart villain named Vector (Jason Segel).
When all attempts fail to break into Vector’s fortress and retrieve the ray gun, he concocts a plan to adopt the three adorable orphans who managed to get past Vector’s defenses and use them to sneak special cookie robots into the facility and abscond with the shrink ray.
It is not a terribly complicated plot, but anything more difficult to follow would have been a detriment to the film. Despicable Me focuses not just on one villain’s nefarious plans, but how the three orphans he adopts slowly corrupt his heart and turn him into a loving and worthy father who must still rectify his love of villainy, and craft a balance between the two extremes.
With a cast that includes Carell, Segel, Russell Brand and Julie Andrews, one might think the producers are trying to stunt-cast the film. Yet in all of the advertisements I saw, Carell was the only person touted widely. Additionally, when watching the film, other than tinges of Carell, none of the characters sound a lot like their real life counter parts. And further proof stunt casting wasn’t necessarily an issue, the three talented young vocal artists providing the speech for Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher) aren’t household names and could easily have been replaced by the likes of Dakota Fanning or Miley Cyrus, but thankfully they weren’t.
There are plenty of ways to destroy an animated feature. Rely on talentless voice artists, over-sentimentalize your story, dumb down your plot for the most basic imbecile, focus on idiotic humor and more. Despicable Me exceeded my expectations going in by toning down or eliminating most of those problems. The vocal work is solid. The story is sympathetic but not sappy. The plot is focused and not pushy. And the humor is more simply broad than broadly simple. It’s a cute little distraction that doesn’t offend, nor does it really excel.
The domination of Pixar in the animation market isn’t really in question. Movies like Despicable Me aren’t going to suddenly destroy the inestimable foundation Pixar has built; However, since Pixar will only put out one film a year, it’s imperative that the surrounding market improve their product to please audiences without pandering to them. If Despicable Me can overcome a rather silly ad campaign to create a cute, entertaining film, hope remains high that others can continue to follow in its path.
July 16, 2010
DespicableMe
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