Director Chris Renaud on Rise of Mega Minions

With Despicable Me 4, director Chris Renaud finally managed to create a superhero vibe with the creation of the yellow Mega Minions. Thanks to a super serum, they are called into service after Gru (Steve Carrell) and his extended family are forced into hiding when they are threatened by their vengeful childhood rival Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell): a supervillain who uses the power of cockroaches.

“It’s been a long-held desire of mine to be able to play with these (superhero) archetypes from Marvel and DC comics,” Renaud told IndieWire. “And bringing new configurations and visual ideas and new animations to the Minions (from Illumination) can be a challenge. In ‘DM2,’ they were the subject of a conspiracy to turn them evil; in ‘DM3,’ they were in prison.”

“So in DM4, they’re in this witness protection city and we started with them as just AVL (Anti-Villain League) agents,” Renaud continued. “But then it just didn’t feel like it went far enough, because we saw Minions in suits and we saw them testing weapons, and that’s how the idea of ​​the Mega Minions came about, giving them superpowers.

However, since screen time was limited, the director decided to give the Mega Minions very simple superpowers to help them defeat the formidable Maxime: Dave grows and becomes super-powerful, Jerry turns into a spherical, rock-like structure that can eat through tough material, Tim becomes super-stretchy, Mel develops a heat ray, and Gus grows a cone-shaped head like a bullet or rocket and can fly using his cape.

“We wanted to get a little bit of sparkle out of their looks,” said the director. “Tim was the tall one and went well with the stretchy guy. We gave one-eyed Mel laser glasses. Dave and Jerry are the strong guys and Gus is new and has curly Q hair.”

The Illumination team also outfitted them in yellow costumes and blue tights. “The service looks a lot like all the Marvel stuff,” added Renaud. “It has this kind of honeycomb pattern, and if you look at the back, there are zippers.”

The Mega Minions also demanded the most attention in animation, showing off their superpowers in the high-class witness protection city of Mayflower. “For the stretchy guy, we played with a lot of ideas,” Renaud said. “We saw Elastigirl and Mr. Fantastic and they can take shapes and things. Ultimately, we landed on Mega Tim with his arms outstretched and walking with his head down. Their powers may not be that great. They’re ambitious.”

While DM4 has certain parallels to Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, it turns out that the introduction of antagonistic baby Gru Jr. (Carrell) has very little in common with baby Jack-Jack. “We’ve talked about it, but honestly, for me, it starts and ends with the fact that they’re both babies with red hair,” Renaud said. “We wanted him to have some of his mother in him, so that’s why we gave him the red hair. They did that a little bit in The Incredibles, but our point of view on that was that we wanted to give the character a way for Gru to have this antagonistic relationship with the baby. He just doesn’t seem to like him and prefers his mother, which I think is a very relatable experience when people are holding a baby and the baby doesn’t seem to care about them.”