The best film Pixar never made

Rating: 7/10 (18 February 2013)

This was a huge surprise. As a supposedly mature grown-up, there was no reason for me to watch Despicable Me, let alone enjoy it, and yet I did watch it and found out there was every reason. This French-made and English-spoken animation is funny, sweet, imaginative, surreal, and touching without resorting to sentimentality.
At the centre of it all is a pitch-perfect vocal performance from Steve Carrell as Gru (spot the "Gru-ray Disc" visual gag at the end), a wannabe global villain who covets a shrink ray in the possession of his arch-nemesis Vector (Jason Segel). With it he intends to go into space and steal the Moon. That's the plot, but the real story is Gru's relationship with three orphans, whom he intends at first to exploit, but who will ultimately tap into his coal-black heart.
I like the dynamic between Gru and the orphans in that they don't so much inspire a magical change in each other as come to accept each other. The orphans, at a cruel and mischievous age themselves, learn to adore Gru's monstrous behaviour, and in return Gru comes to appreciate and respond to their neediness - a neediness that he himself possesses, locked deep inside. Gru is correcting the mistakes of his own loveless upbringing.
Of course, this is all fairly implicit. The winning Disney-Pixar formula demands tearshed and laughter in equal quantities; Illumination Entertainment's equation seems heavily weighted toward the latter. There are slapstick moments of Marx Brothers-like contrivance and timing, and silliness dominates. The scene where Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand) creates an army of "boogie robots" (after mishearing "cookie robots") is a keeper. And Gru's minions - homogenous yellow babblers seemingly designed with a squeezy toy in mind - are so entertaining that they've spawned their own spin-off movie, to be released later this year.
The film doesn't quite have the narrative or technical sophistication of Pixar's finest (for me, Monsters Inc. and Wall-E), but it is way more than a wannabe, and considerably funnier than the Ice Age or Madagascar sequels, franchises which are offering diminishing returns. Despicable Me has a humour and a warmth capable of melting through our iciest defences. I hope the sequel can match it.