by Matt McKenna
Avoiding ads featuring Universal Pictures' Minions is almost as difficult as avoiding political ads for the upcoming presidential election. In case you're somehow not familiar with the minion characters, they are small Tic-Tac-looking creatures who speak half-gibberish and first appeared as bumbling sidekicks in the animated Despicable Me franchise. When it became clear the marketing potential of minions outgrew the confines of the passable children's movie from which they originated, Universal spun out a film focusing on the minions characters themselves. Thus, we have Minions, a story about the eponymous characters' attempt to find an evil leader to whom to pledge allegiance and fulfill their species' destiny. The film's premise may be simple, but it provides a view into our own election process by describing its apparent opposite–instead of politicians being forced to pander to the voting public in order to be elected, Minions inverts the who-must-ingratiate-themselves-to-whom situation and considers what the world would be like if voters (minions) had to convince politicians they are worthy followers. When reexamining American elections through the lens of Minions, it becomes clear that though the minions' leadership-acquiring process may appear to be the exact inverse of the American voters' leadership-acquiring process, they are, in fact, identical.
Minions opens by showing the evolution of the minion species from single cell organism to the plush-doll friendly form that they take in the Despicable Me franchise. Through narration, we learn that minions are a species who form a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with the most “despicable” organism in its ecosystem. Over time, minions are forced to find new villains to follow: from the biggest organism in the primordial soup, to the most fearsome dinosaur in the jungle, to eventually Napoleon, the fiercest dictator on the planet. Unfortunately, after failing Napoleon for the last time, the minions are banished to an ice-cave where they toil away until the 1960s, conveniently rendering them absent from Europe during World War II presumably so the filmmakers wouldn't have to grapple with the minions' desire to serve Hitler.