Annecy ’26: Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd… and the Minions?

by Cláudio Alves

This year, I was lucky enough to attend the 50th edition of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and Market. The festivities ended this past weekend, with Ervin Han and Raúl García’s The Violinist taking the prestigious Cristal prize for Best Film from the feature competition. Past winners include such titles as Arco, Memoir of a Snail, Flee, I Lost My Body, Coraline, and many other unforgettable pictures. But it wasn’t all fun and games and glory. While the festival was underway in the Alps, France was suffering through its worst heatwave in recorded history, and before it all ended, the tragic death of animator Luis de La Rosa shrouded the event in a sense of collective grief. Between good and bad, triumph and unexpected sorrow, there is much to discuss. 

No better place to start than at the beginning, with the slapstick extravaganza that had the honor of opening the festivities – Minions & Monsters, which comes to theaters this week, worldwide…

During the opening ceremony, amid a sea of paper airplanes and sunflower-colored tote bags, it was said that “animation is freedom,” for it offers infinite invention within a medium that can be, otherwise, limited by the constraints of physical reality. This statement echoed in my mind through the ensuing screening of Minions & Monsters, the third feature to center the pill-shaped, banana-obsessed sidekicks from the Despicable Me franchise. Not because these movies represent a significant expansion of mainstream animation’s horizons, whether in form or theme. But because they can offer other sorts of freedom for the creatives in charge of expanding the yellow clowns’ adventures into perpetuity. 

When you take discernible dialogue away and focus on figures devised to be slapstick machines rather than characters, one liberates oneself from narrative expectations and the tropes, the specific structural devices that come with them. The next day, in conversation with director Pierre Coffin, screenwriter Brian Lynch, and Illumination studio founder Chris Meledandri, I brought up this idea and was met with agreement. Moreover, there is still space to push this anarchic ethos further, as they were quick to point out that, compared to the 2015 Minions, there’s actually a fair amount of narrative to Minions & Monsters, even if it manifests in an odd shape.

And pushing themselves along with their denim-clad, chaotic blobs is a prerogative for the studio, whose head is insistent that they don’t want to rest on their laurels. For example, Coffin mentioned that they’ve been tweaking their characters' designs since day one, way back in the original Despicable Me production. Beyond such easy-to-miss nuances, you can easily spot a growth in ambition from film to film, shorts included. The virtual camera and set-piece staging are becoming increasingly baroque, the references ever more specific and outside what one would suppose from a saga so fond of scatological humor. To the point where it almost feels as if Coffin and company are risking alienating their target audience.

Minions & Monsters, not to be confused with Illumination’s 2021 Dungeons & Dragons parody short of the same name, announces itself as the work of film buffs indulging their own predilections from minute one. It feels joyous and playful, as if the animators are just having fun and asking you to join their merriment. Regard how the Minions appear, Forrest Gump-style, in passages from shorts by the Lumières, Muybridge, and Méliès. As someone who watched shows like the Animaniacs when I was young and felt emboldened to find the media the cartoons referenced, I can only hope some kid in 2026 will discover film history through having their curiosity sparked by the Minions.  

Even beyond its possible function as inspiration for young viewers, the movie’s a surprising delight - I certainly didn’t anticipate liking it half as much as I did - introducing new Minions to explore Old Hollywood in a history-breaking sojourn through the past that’s part Babylon, part Looney Tunes anarchy, and a whole lot of deliberate gibberish. The seed of the idea was simple: what would happen if a minion found themselves in the studio system of yore and decided to direct a monster movie with real monsters? From there, it expanded, from Homeric cyclops and medieval warlocks to Hollywood in the twilight of the silent era, where the Minions become unlikely stars before the advent of sound forces them to go behind the camera. 

For cinephiles everywhere, Minions & Monsters is sure to delight through its references alone, which go farther than those aforementioned pioneers to touch upon much of American mainstream moviedom in the first half of the last century. A lunatic chase sequence early on makes evident what was always true of the Minions by tying them directly to the comedic traditions of classic slapstick. Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd all make cameos, with Illumination’s mascots being retroactively credited for some of their best gags, including the falling house from Steamboat Bill Jr., the clock hijinks in Safety Last, the factory fantasy of Modern Times . When sound changes the game, the references fast-forward to the 40s, to noir and Citizen Kane.

And there’s more, so much more, an entire flick bursting with ideas about how to revisit film history as an absurdist action movie with a miniature Lovecraftian villain in store for the second half, not to mention flying saucers and a battalion of suffragettes - this is not a history lesson, but a circus.  Minions & Monsters remains in constant transformation, landing on a mélange of creature feature nonsense that pulls from midcentury B-movie sci-fi, horror literature, the sheer delight of a shapeless monstrosity that’s what would happen to the Blob if it had been designed by Kazuki Takahashi (so many eyes!), and a most unlikely romance taken straight out of those pesky side plots that padded many a Marx Brothers’ feature.

Again, we return to the notion that this was always where the Minions would end up, for they were born from the same styles of physical comedy that once jumped from the Vaudeville stage to the silver screen. Back in Despicable Me 3, there were already winks at Duck Soup with a Ruritanian kingdom called Freedonia. In the 2013 short, Training Wheels, the Illumination team remade and miniaturized Rocky, and Minions: The Rise of Gru is one clumsy love letter to James Bond, 70s kung fu and blaxploitation iconography through a kid-friendly lens and a whole lot of Esperanto-like gobbledygook. Minions & Monsters just foregrounds it. Still, some jokes might feel more erudite than they are – a recurring bit seems to reference writer Henry James, yet it’s actually an inside joke for the crew. 

All in all, Minions & Monsters is as messy as it is an unpretentious good time at the movies, with Pierre Coffin embracing the sheer unpredictability of his creation and confirming Illumination’s mission of disrupting expectations and always challenging itself is not an empty promise. I have to imagine this must feel monumental for the director, who first came to Annecy as an animator in the year when The Simpsons pilot first screened, and has now been honored with a place in the festival’s newly minted Walk of Fame. A cynical reading of this might be that, as long as they make money, the filmmakers have carte blanche to do whatever they want with the studio’s resources.

However, even they have grown tired of the conversation always being about money. Secure as they are in this franchise’s success, the filmmakers' priority is joy and experimentation, seeing how far they can twist this cinematic universe into a sandbox of endless possibility. Whatever the reason for how good Minions & Monsters turns out to be, I’m glad we got here, with Illumination’s best work yet. Hell, if you asked me, point-blank, what animated movie you should prioritize this week at the multiplex, I’d sooner recommend the Minions than Pixar’s latest attempt to prolong Toy Story’s life beyond the third movie, where it all should’ve ended. Can’t believe I just wrote that, but, alas, it’s the truth. 

Next up, a preview of DreamWorks’ Forgotten Island, plus a slew of festival highlights, including The Ribbon Hero and Cartoon Saloon’s foray into queer storytelling.