With children’s entertainment nowadays, there is a feeling you are being sat down and forced to eat your greens. The Toy Story series has grown increasingly melancholic, dealing with age, loss and irrelevance – topics no child has any time for – and that’s at the lighter end of the Pixar spectrum. At the other, you will find depressive Oscar-bait such as 2017’s Coco and the recent Inside Out 2 – a meditation on death, the importance of being true to your emotions and the deeper meaning of life. Just what every nine-year-old wants when the school term is over and they’re full to the brim with Haribo Starmix. 

Parents often make the mistake of thinking children’s entertainment should have loftier goals than “something their offspring can watch while they binge on popcorn”. Ask a trendy mother or father what their children’s favourite film is, and they might claim it’s voguish fare, such as Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro or last year’s Academy Award-winning The Boy and the Heron. 

Memo to the hipsters: your 10-year-old did not enjoy The Boy and the Heron nearly as much as you wanted them to and spent the second half of the run-time wondering what was going on with all the angry parrots. Take them to Despicable Me 4, by contrast, and they’ll be delighted with the fart gags, Gru’s ongoing incompetence and the Minions firing off catchphrases such as “banaaanaaaa”. This franchise has become the kids’ series to rule them all because it knows what children really want: colourful fun, an easy-to-follow story and mischievous gags fired off with rat-a-tat gusto.

In 2010, this B-list animation about a down-on-his-luck mega villain and his banana-hued sidekicks was released in cinemas to little immediate fanfare. The film revolved around Gru’s plan to revive his career by stealing the moon. But when the shrink-ray device he needs to complete his mission is swiped, the only way he can get it back is by adopting three orphaned girls (after he notes how they can gain access to almost any address when knocking on the door as cookie-sellers). There’s a twist, though, as he develops a parental attachment to the kids – a reversal that reveals Gru to be a baddie with a heart of gold. 

Critics called it diverting, yet hardly earth-shattering. “Ultimately forgettable,” said the Village Voice. “No first-rank CGI cartoon,” agreed Empire, which judged it “mid list”. But this “mid-list” release would quickly soar to the top, pushing aside Disney’s ailing Pixar studio. It did so by making cartoons that actually appealed to kids.

Fourteen years and five movies later it’s shaping up to be all yellow at the box office yet again this month, as having already notched up a huge £60m opening weekend in the United States, Despicable Me 4 arrives in the UK. Parents are braced for impact. 

When the original Despicable Me was released it was easy to mistake it for just another unremarkable cartoon, with seemingly little to distinguish it from other forgettable animations released in 2010: Megamind, Yogi Bear, Legends of the Guardians (and the sequel Shrek Forever After, which underscored Shrek’s status as the biggest band in kid’s entertainment). But the series has transformed into a brightly coloured steamroller, grossing more than £3.6bn globally – ahead of the more critically lauded Toy Story movies (£2.5bn), and the aforementioned Shrek and its sequels (£1.25bn). 

How to explain its success? The answer, surely, is that Despicable Me and its sequels are kids’ movies that never lose sight of their target audience. They’re fun, fast-paced and crammed with zesty humour – for instance, the first movie opens with a scene in which a kid bounces off the Great Pyramid of Giza, which has been covertly swapped with a blow-up replacement. There’s nothing devastatingly witty about watching a child bounce off a pyramid but it is extremely funny and just the sort of thing to reduce a cinema full of them to hysterics. 

Just as significantly, Despicable Me has left its mark upon popular culture in a way no other kids’ franchise has this century. Adorable and hilarious, the pill-shaped, gibberish-spouting Minions have spawned internet memes, double-jobbed as advertising mascots for Sky in the UK and in 2015 appeared on a road sign in the village of Minions in Cornwall (it had to be removed after selfie-taking tourists created traffic issues). Meanwhile, Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” – written to order for the first Despicable Me – has become a song to which everyone, aged eight to 80, knows the words.

The degree to which the movies have gone viral was confirmed in 2022 when prequel Minions: The Rise of Gru spawned the “GentleMinions” craze, in which younger teenagers attended screenings in suits. The trend baffled adults, delighted Universal Pictures – and horrified management at cinemas worldwide. The Odeon group confirmed that in several cases it had to refuse entry to unruly teens, saying “due to a small number of incidents in our cinemas over the weekend we have had to restrict access in some circumstances”.

The Despicable Me story began in 2007 when Madrid-born animator and director Sergio Pablos cold-called Universal Pictures with a script he had written called Evil Me – about a depressed master-criminal who wondered if he’d picked the wrong job. With his animation career in a slump, Pablos didn’t have to look far for inspiration. “The money was running out, no jobs were coming in, none of our ideas had landed, we were essentially waiting to die,” he said in a subsequent YouTube interview. 

As it happened, Universal was about to launch a new animation division, Illumination Entertainment, and was in the market for original franchises. Seeing the potential in Pablos’s idea, Illumination chief executive Chris Meledandri brought on board French director Pierre Coffin and American artist Chris Renaud to shepherd the project to the screen. 

That project would prove to be unexpected delight. An irreverent yet charming movie stuffed with sight gags – that bouncy pyramid sequence, Gru struggling to hold his dignity as his spaceship is zapped by his shrink ray and gets smaller and smaller – that zipped along, firing off jokes with endless pep. Despicable Me also had heart – Gru’s villainy, we learned, was rooted in childhood rejection by his mother. Crucially, though, that message was left in the background – rather than preaching from a pulpit, the tone was irascible, fast-paced and had an energy as bright and bouncy as those squishy Minions. Kids couldn’t get enough of it.  

The international make-up of the team behind the film surely goes some way towards explaining its universality. In contrast to the perennially preachy Pixar, Despicable Me and its follow-ups don’t hit kids over the head with a cloying, Hollywood message (Up’s plea to the audience to not become prisoners to their past, or A Bug’s Life and its sermonising lesson that, when we work together, people can accomplish anything).

Nor do they have the winking, “here’s a sneaky joke for the grown-ups” aspect of the Shrek series (in Shrek II, when the eponymous ogre sets off for the capital city of Far, Far Away on Donkey’s back, he is described as “riding a White Bronco” – a reference to the notorious OJ Simpson police chase). Instead, the humour has a global reach and does not require translation – fuelled, as it is, by slapstick and a gleeful tone that harks back to the glory days of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

“Much of what makes the Despicable Me movies fun is that they avoid any sense of seriousness like the plague,” begins an Associated Press review of Despicable Me 4. “They stand proudly in the Looney Tunes realm of animation, with little aim beyond loosely stitching slapstick sequences together. There’s a good chance you might cry during a Pixar movie, but if you wept during a Despicable Me movie, someone might call for help.”

Much of the impact of Despicable Me is accidental. Take the Minions, the calling card for the franchise and some of the most iconic popular culture figures of the 21st century. In the original script, they were big muscular monsters. Only at the last minute did Coffin and Renaud decide they needed a cutesy makeover. 

“They were depicted as this big army of muscular thugs doing the dirty work of the arch villain Gru and we quickly realised that they were very unappealing and made Gru a totally unsympathetic anti-hero,” Renaud told The Guardian.

“To make him charming, we had this idea that he’d know all of his little helpers by their forenames, even though there were hundreds, and suddenly Gru was sympathetic. We then put goggles on them, added workers’ overalls, making them look like these subterranean mole men-type creatures, gave them an increasingly saturated yellow skin tone and then they became the Minions.” 

With that, a billion-pound franchise was born. And now, a decade and a half later, Despicable Me benefits from the nostalgia today’s teenagers feel for a series they first encountered as children – and which they feel ownership over (in contrast to “old person” franchises such as Ghostbusters and Transformers.  

“I grew up watching all the Despicable Me movies,” said Bill Hirst, the 18-year-old Australian who began the GentleMinions craze in 2022 when he posted a TikTok video of himself and a friend attending a screening of The Rise of Gru in the suits they’d worn for a formal event at their school. “It’s a good movie, and it brought back the memories of watching the Despicable Me movies with my family.”

Too often, children’s films preach or talk down to their audience – and it’s something kids can sniff miles away. Despicable Me takes the opposite approach. Young or old, earnest or jaded, we could all do with more madcap silliness in our lives – and that is the not-so-secret key to the success of Gru and his marvellous Minions. 

‘Despicable Me 4’ is in cinemas tomorrow