Movie Review: Despicable Me

LITTLE ROCK — While cleaning out my father-in-law Yanko’s basement after his death at age 91 earlier this year, my sister-in-law Barbara came across a trove of books from her - and my wife Karen’s - childhood. Many of these were Little Golden Books from the ’50s, in excellent shape, which she recognized as collectibles. She thought Karen would enjoy them so she shipped them to us.

As I unpacked the books, I felt the occasional frisson of recognition, a series of little soft explosions like muted fireworks in my chest. I remembered a lot of these titles. I’d read them too, andsome sat for years on low shelves in my bedroom. Exactly how I felt about them was hard to say, but it was a feeling drenched in warmth, with a little mingled sadness, not nostalgia precisely but still an admittedly self-indulgent tenderness directed at the child I once was.

Examining the books, I discovered that some I remembered liking best weren’t actually Little Golden Books, but knockoffs like Whitman Publishing Co.’s Tell-a-Tale series or Rand McNally’s Elf books. (Two of my recovered favorites, Helen Wing’s Playtime Poodles and Ruth Dixon’s Three Little Puppies - photo books that anticipated Wil-liam Wegman’s work with his Weimaraners - were actually from the Elf line.) This surprised me, though I supposed it shouldn’t have - at the age I consumed the books, I gave no thought at all to how they were branded, or to the (certainly impure) motives of the people in the offices who decided how the books should be produced and marketed. All I cared about was the story.

I thought about this as I sat down to write about Despicable Me, which has all the hallmarks of a sterling Pixar product. Pixar has never made a bad movie. Even their lesser efforts, such as Cars (and to my mind Finding Nemo and Toy Story 3) are excellent, inventive films that can be enjoyed by all but the most determined contrarians.

But Despicable Me is not a Pixar product - it was made by the French special effects house Mac Guff Ligne in association with Chris Meledandri’s Illumination Entertainment for Universal Pictures. As someone who thinks and writes about movies and what they do to us, this raises some interesting questions for me, questions that won’t matter at all to the children who are the movie’s intended audience (or for that matter, to most of their parents).

So, while it might be possible to spend the whole review talking about how Despicable Me cribs from Pixar’s winning formula, the truth is you can’t copyright warmth or quirky character-driven humor. What matters in the end is not even how good you think a movie is, but how much you enjoy it. (I think Toy Story 3 is a better movie, but I got more pleasure from Despicable Me.)

The story is little more than a riff, a variation on the theme of The Incredibles (which itself owed something to the more interesting parts of the Spider-Man myth): If superheroes can have quotidian problems, then why not supervillains? (Expect this question to be further worried in Dreamworks’ Megamind, an animated feature scheduled for November release.)

Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) is one very human supervillain; he’s never impressed his domineering mother (Julie Andrews), and his banker is concerned that none of his evil plots has proved sufficiently remunerative. Now, he’s been eclipsed by an upstart, Vector (Jason Segel), who has managed to snitch a pyramid. To recapture his mojo, Gru has to outdo Vector, so he revives an old plan to steal the moon.

In order to do so, he’s required to obtain a shrink ray, which cannot simply be ordered from an in-flight catalog. Gru’s best option may be filching the shrink ray in Vector’s seemingly impregnable lair. But how?

Enter three little girls, whom Gru adopts from an orphanage run by Miss Hattie (Kristen Wiig), who comes off as Miss Hannigan from Annie as voiced by Paula Deen. While the girls - the sensible, bespectacled eldest Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), the refreshingly odd Edith (Dana Gaier) and the unicorn-obsessed Agnes (Elsie Fisher) - are essentially pawns in Gru’s evil plot, he soon finds it easier to accede to their demands of ballet lessons and roller-coaster rides than to fight them. In the end, Gru turns out (surprise, surprise) not to be so bad.

While the script is fairlythin, Carell’s performance - he plays Gru with an eccentric but somehow apt Eastern European accent that may remind National Public Radio listeners of Andrei Codrescu - carries the day, and any flat jokes are soon swept away in the nonstop banter. And I haven’t even mentioned the minions - who will no doubt go on to star in their own shorts - or Russell Brand’s hearing-impaired Dr. Nefarious. Or the fact that it uses 3-D in relatively subtle, unobtrusive ways. (I am at least an agnostic when it comes to 3-D; I don’t like the glasses and don’t think it’s worth the extra couple of bucks.)

Despicable Me does what it is supposed to do, is relatively fresh and colorful, and probably won’t give anyone bad dreams. It’s not a Little Golden Book, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be remembered with affection.