Crunchy humor, richly textured animation, melt-your-heart recipe

Rating: 9/10 (25 October 2010)

Every three minutes or so, "Despicable Me" doles out cookies. They're alternately of the crispy, chewy or melt-in-your-mouth variety, but never crumbly or too sugary. This is just one way of describing the delights of this movie, its crunchy humor, richly textured animation and melt-your-heart recipe.
Cookies happen to be a crucial device in the plot, the one that brings three little sisters and a super-villain together. They're unloved orphans from Miss Hattie's Home for Girls while he, Gru, is a heist artist of the first order who's in danger of losing his standing to an upstart geek (drawn with shades of Woody Allen). The villainous rivals start a madcap race to the moon to put the ultimate prize, literally, on the palms of their hands: the moon itself. In order to have any hope of winning, Gru maneuvers to adopt the trio. This situation is fraught with danger, namely the slide into triteness, and the predictability of the story's outcome could only be outweighed by clever filmmaking. By many a yardstick, "Despicable Me" has beat the odds.
Save for a cruel pointy nose, there's really not much particularly gruesome about Gru. Neither his menacing eyes, his SUV from hell nor freeze gun could terrify the younger kids in the audience, or even Agnes, the youngest of the orphans. "Yeah, he's scary. Like Santa," she says with a yawn. With a thick Transylvanian or Gothic accent that recalls The Count in "Sesame Street," Steve Carell's voice captures the put-on quality of Gru's gruffness and his frustration over the put-downs by his frigidly aloof mommy (Julie Andrews).
Ms. Andrews is just one of the "Despicable Me's" multicultural assets and sources of its insistent charm. Wry English humor is evident in many lines, written by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio with understated wit and a sense of decorum.
The only juvenile joke in the movie, about bodily functions, uses another four-letter word, "dart". And parents in the audience may recall some visual motifs from the James Bond movies, especially "Goldfinger" and "Moonraker" -- veddy English. To dupe Miss Hattie into letting him adopt the girls, Gru uses words dripping with false sentiment then butters her up by telling her that she has a face "como un burro", Spanish for like a donkey, by implication, an ass. She doesn't speak the language and is completely taken in.
France (where the French-voiced version is "Moi, moche et mechant" -- Ugly and Mean Me) has provided the technical finesse. French directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud kept the story progression fluid and every technical and artistic business under control. A team of some 280 artists and technicians from Mac Guff Ligne worked on the finely-styled digital animation and design for over two years. Around 50 of them also acted out the parts. Mac Guff still doesn't measure up to the resources and inventiveness of Pixar, though. For instance, those much-publicized impish tube-like minions, cute as they are, may have only a slim chance to catch on in an overcrowded toy market.
American audacity and feel-good cravings drive the storyline of "Despicable Me." The premise of the theft of the moon, the giddy roller-coaster sequence and the family-values sentimentality over Gru's failure to attend the orphans' ballet recital are vintage Hollywood.
When Gru's mommy finally utters words of praise for him, slyly of course, he basks in the glow of the moment. The moon was his, no matter how briefly, and he has become a full- fledged dad, and son as well. That's three cookies for Gru, and a whole box of wholesome goodness for us.