Illumination Light & Despicableness

It's saying something that in Dreamworks Animation's long history, dating all the way back to Antz in 1998, that it's taken them until 2010 to produce a movie as good as How To Train Your Dragon. It says almost as much the Illumination Entertainment (which seems to be Universal's in-house animation company) produced something as great as Despicable Me on their very first outing.

Dreamworks should be doubly ashamed as Illumination beat them at their own game in several ways. There's the starry voice talent, in this case Steve Carell, Julie Andrews, Russell Brand and half the current batch of SNL actors. There's the hip plot, this time focusing on the current trend for super-heroics and super villains (see also Dreamwork's Megamind). And there's the Shrek-inspired soundtrack of
rap, ballads and pop to make it more contemporary feeling.

But here's where Despicable champions most Dreamworks stuff. They got a great, beautifully structured, streamlined story. Great characters voiced by actors that are perfectly cast and on inspired form. A great, offbeat look to the animation. And comedy that really, really works. This kind of reminds me of seeing Ice Age for the first time and being blown away by the Scrat sequences in terms of character animation and exaggerated comic timing. In Despicable, you have the super-villain's little, non-verbal minions that provide many of the gut busting visual gags. But, unlike Ice Age, the humour isn't just reserved for the sidekicks and the pratfalls and physical humour is incorporated into the film in a way that furthers the plot too. It's sweet and touching in a non-nauseating way and the tone is perfectly balanced between appealing to youngsters and adults alike.

A great achievement for a first time company. Think of it on a par with lower ranking Pixar (A Bug's Life / Monsters Inc). If it wasn't for Toy Story 3 being so darned good, this would be battling it out with How To Train Your Dragon for best animated feature of 2010.