Nicely original story with a fine script and great voice acting from Carell.

Rating: Null/10 (6 January 2011)

Sometimes in the past while watching animated movies of all sorts, I've lulled myself into thinking most characters are interchangeable, in that it didn't matter who voiced the character, as long as they did it competently.
Now, after seeing and enjoying "Despicable Me" I'll never have those thoughts again. With absolute certainty I will say, Steve Carell voicing the main character Gru is what makes this movie rise above ordinary. He is just made for this kind of stuff and could make the rest of his career on it, never appearing on screen himself.
Steve Carell's character, Gru, views himself as the most despicable person ever, anywhere. But suddenly he is upstaged by a young man, Vector, who steals the shrinking machine. We see this early on when tourists find out the great pyramid is an inflatable prop, because Vector shrunk the real one and stole it.
So Gru decides to steal the shrinking machine from Vector, and to pull the most audacious theft in history, will build a rocket to take him to the moon, shrink the moon, and bring it back with him.
Pretty ambitious stuff! But he needs help to get into Vector's fortress and, when he notices three orphan girls get in easily, decides to adopt the girls and use them in his scheme.
Somewhere along the path to his crimes Gru, the most despicable person on Earth, begins to care about the three girls, and that is the humanity of the story.
But all in all it is just a silly cartoon story, fun to watch, but Steve Carell with his superb vocal acting makes it worth seeing.
I was fascinated by the extras on the DVD. This movie was made by a large number of people scattered all over the world, never all at the same place. They used modern communications and linking technology to operate as one big team, rather than being physically together.