ANI-MOVIES, *Despicable Me

Illumination's first animated feature-length movie was the begining of the infamous Despicable Me franchise. The company was founded in 2007 when former Fox producer Chris Meledandri started his own studio partially owned by Universal and Comcast. Klaus creator Sergio Pablos pitched the idea to do a film about a well-meaning supervillain who is trying to make it big. Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio wrote the screenplay and borrowed some visual cues from Pixar's superhero movie The Incredibles into a world modeled after Silver Age comic books and 1960's tons. In 2010, it released to moderate success but must have gotten a good run near the tail end of the video rental store era as it has so far spawned off a trio of sequels and two spinoffs of the Illumination mascot characters, Minions. The fully CGI movie does have some admirable animation considering that 3D cartoons weren't fully polished over at the time.

Veteran amateur supervillain Gru has plans to capture the moon by stealing an experimental shrink ray device. His heist gets sandbagged by up-and-coming bad guy Vector who takes the shrink gun from him, and Gru's attempts to storm Vector's suburban stronghold keep getting met with failure. Vector has a sweet tooth for a certain kind of cookies sold by orphan girls, so Gru adopts a trio of sisters to infiltrate his adversary's home and steal the shrink ray. The flaw in Gru's plan is that he begins to become attached to the girls, even after he's gotten the shrink ray back. Gru's partner Dr. Nefario has the girls sent back to the orphanage after their recital gets in the way of their moon mission. Gru shrinks the moon after a trip in his homemade spaceship and just misses the girls' recital as Vector nabbed them in exchange for the shrunken moon. Gru manages to rescue the girls and returns the moon as the shrinking effects don't last very long, plus deserting Vector on the moon even though his emergency air bubble is bound to run out eventually.

Despicable Me starts out as an interesting idea for a film about criminal masterminds trying to outdo each other with super-science, but Illumination gave into the wider market and played it down for younger audiences. This could have been an appealing take on cartoon bad guys like Boris Badenov or Dick Dastardly where they get to take up the spotlight for once, even though they had to make it more sentimental by throwing some kids into the mix. There is some classic Looney Tunes-styled antics in this and impressive designs, however its hard to invest any interest in this outside of children who giggle at the mindless ramblings of the Minions to the point so badly that they got their own series of movies. Despite how much better this movie took on the idea of bad guys than Megamind did, it's still a major letdown.