Review of Despicable Me (2010) by Emma C — 12 Dec 2016

When Gru steals the moon above the set of Despicable Me, tides stop, surfers fall, and we enter an imaginary world close enough to reality to comment on it. Throughout the film, the line between "good" and "evil" is blurred, leaving the viewer to question their own assumptions regarding criminality.

Gru, a supervillain who dreamed of stealing the moon since childhood, adopts three orphaned girls to execute his grand scheme. As the film unfolds, we see why the cold exoskeleton of this world-class criminal was formed: a lifelong search for his mother's approval. And as LED frequencies illuminate my son in slack-jawed awe, I wonder briefly why I've allowed us to spend one of our precious moments together in front of a screen.

As I chew over a microcosm of my parenting, the film trails this paradigm-shifting heist and I find in the plot a deeper reason to the evening's entertainment. The subversion of reality makes it both preposterous and worthwhile to put critical thought into the plot of Despicable Me, the first collaboration between Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin. In 2010 they turned Sergio Pablo's storyline into $500 million profit and launched the first film of the Despicable Me franchise. I can't help but look with excitement into my son's future, a place where creative visions become wellsprings of wealth with just the right combination of vision, collaboration, and discipline. I want him to learn that he is not a consumer of culture but a producer of it, and that relaxation can include critical thought. I jot down notes while he reaches for popcorn.

Abstraction plays a crucial role in problem solving. By humanizing the characters typically presented as villains, the film proposes that there are no bad people, just bad actions. And the simplicity of this value holds transformative power for many issues we face in the "real world." Perhaps - between popcorn and tooth - a kernel of truth slips in, too.