REVIEW: Despicable Me Delivers With Retro Zest to Spare

How much you like Despicable Me may depend on how much you like Gru. I happen to find him kind of sexy, albeit in a despicable way. His parental impulses are a bit misguided, but at least he's trying: At night, he tucks the orphans into bunk beds made from discarded missiles; in the morning, he makes them pancakes in the shape of dead guys. And even when he undergoes his transformation of the heart -- as, with those cute little orphan tykes around, he inevitably must -- the picture refuses to let too much sentimentality seep in.

Still, I've heard some colleagues dismiss Despicable Me as being slight and inconsequential -- it's not as "deep" as the Pixar films, is the unspoken subtext. But that only makes me wonder if it's become harder to appreciate relaxed but confident filmmaking, particularly when it comes to animation. I know I picked on Pixar earlier, but that was just my bratty inner schoolgirl talking: The studio has made some wonderful pictures, among them The Incredibles and Ratatouille (both directed by Brad Bird), as well as the recent Toy Story 3. But at this point, a Pixar movie can never feel relaxed. By now we've all seen or heard or read quotes from Pixar animators explaining that it takes 2,246 hours of work for each millisecond of movie, or something like that. We had better like those pictures, or else.

The point, of course, is that the animation we've become used to seeing in theaters is one of the most time-consuming pursuits in filmmaking. And thinking back on Despicable Me, I recall quite a few gags having to do with toilets and/or bodily functions; in total, they probably represent 80 hours or more of some poor animation elf's workload.

Is it a waste, figuratively speaking, to flush hard work and expensive technology down the toilet, just for the sake of a few poo jokes? In the case of Despicable Me, I don't think so. Kids love poo jokes, and adults often deplore them, sometimes because we feel we need to set a good example and sometimes simply because we feel we've gotten beyond them. But even those of us who don't enjoy crude humor have to accept that, in the end, our bodies will betray us. Better to laugh about it now, preferably in a movie theater filled with other people. Why not enjoy every minute, before that anvil finally hits?

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