Director – Pierre Coffin, Patrick Delage – 2026 – US, France – Cert. PG – 90m
****
How two Minions named Henry and James made their indelible mark in 1920s Hollywood – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June, then out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 1st
It’s clear from its opening frames that this new Minions movie is going to be something a little bit different. It opens with the present day Universal Pictures logo which then turns into a montage of the same Studio’s logos going right back to the 1920s. After that, there’s a montage of Minions appearing in seminal moments of early movie history – leaving the factory with workers or catching a train at the railway station in the Lumière Brothers films, appearing in the queue for the rocket and as the face of the moon in A Trip to the Moon, (Georges Méliès, 1902).
Next, an enthusiastic guide (voice: Alison Janney) is showing a party of bored tourists round a Universal Studios museum dedicated to the history of Hollywood. After even the spectacle of George Lucas (voice: himself) in a glass case (make that imprisoned in a glass case) fails to excite them, she is astonished to discover that, approaching another exhibit, none of them have heard of Minion movie pioneers James and Henry. An irate little girl points out that she knows the Minions, but not these two. (You and me both. Along with the rest of the audience.) The outraged guide loses it and makes the group sit down right then and there to listen to the pioneering movie duo’s story.
For the benefit of anyone new to the Minions, she explains their purpose: to find the most evil being they can and unquestioning serve them. Thus, we watch them find and serve a series of evil beings starting with a none-too-intelligent cyclops and subsequently including a necromancer with a big book containing spells for summoning assorted unearthly beings to this world. Each evil being falls victim one way or another to the Minions’ enthusiasm to serve them.
James likes to draw pictures to tell stories, and as such is ostracised by his fellow Minions who would rather he did something more useful, like pull his oar in the boat they’re rowing in their quest for a suitable master. Yet he finds a friend in the sympathetic Henry, and the pair become inseparable, lazily operating their oars with their feet and talking about the meaning of life up to the wee small hours (when all their fellow Minions are trying to get some sleep).
Their quest for suitable evil masters to serve runs into the twentieth century, where in the 1920s they find themselves in Hollywood inadvertently pursuing a horse-riding robber atop a train and onto a dangling rope ladder, unaware that they are ruining the movie shoot of director Max (voice: Christoph Waltz). Except that, as it turns out when he shows the footage to his Studio bosses the Bright Brothers (voice: Jeff Bridges), the Minions light up the screen and the brothers want more, so Max has to go out and find them and bring them into the Hollywood Studio complex.
Talking to Max, James becomes entranced and drifts off into a daydream about winning an Oscar. Max encourages him to make his own movie.
Meanwhile, the Minions’ earlier encounter with the necromancer has caused Henry and James to start summoning unearthly demons from the beyond, starting with one resembling a cute bunny rabbit (which despite its initial appearance is indeed a terrifying demon) then progressing through to a Cthulu type who once his entrance smoke clears turns out to be Goomi (voice: Trey Parker), a cute, little creature the Minions’ size. However, Goomi is more dangerous than he seems, encouraging James and Henry to summon a trio of demons culminating in the malevolent Irene, a gargantuan, carrot-coloured blob festooned with hundreds of eyes. Along with the obvious dangers, this presents James with the chance to capture everything on film and create his dreamed of monster movie…
The final third also throws in a further, completely redundant, plot strand about an alien robot named Dort (voice: Jesse Eisenberg), whose character is neatly summed up by his name – an amalgam of the robot Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) and the socially awkward or inept label dork. Going off at a tangent, the script romantically pairs him with Women’s Suffrage campaigned Debbie (voice: Zoey Deutch), which presumably seemed like a good idea to someone at the time.
Ever since animation production house Illuminations first delivered the Minions in Despicable Me (Chris Renard, Pierre Coffin, 2010), they’ve been a huge hit with audiences, and director Pierre Coffin (who also does their collective voice performances) appears blessed with an ability to generated more and more stories with them. As long as the movies don’t screw up, which they haven’t yet, they are probably critic proof.
As in other Minions outings, there is much to love and admire here. For a start, rapid-fire gags, such as a procession of Minions with famous director names including Steven, Quentin and Frederico, or a boundary pushing moment in toilet humour involving Universal horror icon the Mummy and an offscreen minion in desperate need of a roll of lavatory paper. Then, movie homages from Harold Lloyd dangling from a clocktower in Safety Last (Fred Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1923) to the opening “Rosebud” moment from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) with the word Rosebud replaced by something less memorable.
Numerous set pieces impress, not least the Minions’ pursuit of a horseriding cowboy thief with a bag of loot along the top of a train and up a rope ladder dangling from an aircraft, evoking at once the Western and the finale of Jackie Chan vehicle Police Story 3 Supercop (Stanley Tong, 1992). Visually, the whole thing is a joy, with perhaps its most indelible image that of hapless film director Max stuck squeezed between the two fat bodies of Studio bosses the Bright Brothers on a screening room sofa.
Before it hits Hollywood, the cyclops sequence is particularly affecting and enjoyable. This monster loves grinding things (e.g. people’s homes) into the dirt for the sheer pleasure of the act, a trait that at once endears him to the Minions as a possible candidate to follow as master. There’s a lot more to be said about this: we love the Minions’ desire to serve the right master, and are satisfyingly appalled by their choices of evil villains, and yet, this may well lead to grief because villains perpetuate evil – for example, the cyclops delights (good) in stomping on things (bad).
So James makes a couple of simple, even endearing, Lego-brick-like sculptures as a present for the cyclops who stomps on the first and in the ensuing mayhem sit on the second, a pointy tower shaped structure beneath his rear end as he descends, leading to his rising swiftly and accidentally running over a precipice edge. The orchestration and choreography of this sequence (as with many others here) is a joy to behold.
If the film seems slightly less effective as it builds towards its monsters / Hollywood conclusion, that scarcely seems to matter. We love watching the Minions and their antics, and in this latest entry they appear as unstoppable as ever. And it’s gratifying to see Illuminations trying to do something slightly different with the property this time round instead of playing it safe and merely repeating what they’ve done before.
A heap of fun, and with its surfeit of creativity and anarchic spirit, the perfect choice for Annecy opening night.
Minions & Monsters plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June, and then is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, July 1st.
Trailer: