Despicable Me 2, Monsters University and the Virtue of Cleverness
July 26, 2013
By Kevin Hyde
July 26, 2013
Children’s movies do not have to be all that good to be huge hits these days. Exhibit A: Despicable Me 2; Exhibit B: Monsters University.
I have two young daughters, and I get to try and entertain them fulltime during their summers away from school. Actually, I often point out that I am not the household cruise director as I implore them to make their own fun in ways that do not involve a television or a computer. It would be nice to just send them off into the neighborhood like my mom did with my brothers and me.
Unfortunately, we live in the constant swirl of a 24-hour news cycle that has created a paranoid fear culture, one in which child molesters in unmarked, white vans are parked at every corner waiting for young victims whose parents sent them out into our impossibly dangerous world without constant supervision.
I honestly don’t know what is lamer—modern childhood or modern parenthood.
But hey, let’s all go to the movies, that dark, air-conditioned respite during the heat of the summer. Good children’s fare at the cinema is more welcomed now than ever. Just look at this year’s box office receipts so far, with Despicable Me 2 ($284 million) and Monsters University ($251 million) ranked third and fourth, just on the heels of second-place Superman reboot Man of Steel ($285 million) and runaway top earner Iron Man 3 ($407 million). Even the critically lamented Oz the Great and Powerful and The Croods are in the top 10, ranked sixth and ninth respectively. (Those rankings are as of July 25.)
My family’s movie-going cash certainly is included in those box office returns, but that doesn’t stop me from being sufficiently surprised by the financial success of the sequel Despicable Me 2 (or as one friend described it, Despicable Meh) and the prequel Monsters University, a lower-shelf Pixar film.
In Despicable Me 2, we find the ex-super villain Gru (voiced bySteve Carell) adjusting to family life. He is attempting to make alegit, honest living when he is recruited by an internationalorganization—the Anti-Villain League—to offer a former bad guy’sperspective into an investigation into a stolen arctic laboratory. Along the way, Gru meets the delightfully weird secret agent, Lucy Wilde(voiced memorably by Kristen Wiig), and must deal with a variety ofparenting issues, including his oldest daughter Margo’s first ventureinto dating.
I liked the movie just fine. It was often crafty and heartfelt, and most importantly my daughters seemed to really enjoy it. To be honest, I was expecting it to be funnier. Both Despicable Me 2 and Monsters University were superbly marketed, with DM2 utilizing the little, yellow minions to great effect and Monsters University offering a pitch-perfect parody of excruciatingly lame college commercials.
The actual movie Monsters University relies pretty heavily on parody. It tells the story of how Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sulley (John Goodman), the inseparable pair of professional scarers from Pixar’s classic Monsters Inc. (2001), first met in college. With some pretty effective lampooning of college movies as well as the university experience overall, Monsters University shows how the two buddies overcame their initial differences to become best friends. There is also a solid message about the value of persistence and confidence when trying to accomplish your goals, no matter what the odds.
But when I reflect on these two hit summer movies—and it is kind of hard because I can’t jot down notes with a 4-year-old on my lap and, frankly, these films are not terribly memorable—the word that keeps coming to mind is clever. That is the biggest compliment I can offer. I am starting to believe that the virtue of cleverness overrides all else in youth entertainment? And that’s a problem.
I recently had to block my daughters from watching the youth sit-coms that are so prevalent on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon because I didn’t like the way they were starting to talk and interact. Sarcasm is ugly in young children. Witty one-liners and sassy retorts? Not cute. I guess what I find most disturbing about modern entertainment geared toward kids is what I perceive as the death of whimsy, those playful, fanciful, idiosyncratic, even quaint qualities of storytelling in which Pixar movies used to revel so effortlessly. Whimsy is hard to describe. You know it when you see it. And we haven’t seen much of it this summer.
Everybody is just too damn clever.
Kevin Hyde is a freelance writer who has worked as a reporter for daily and weekly newspapers, edited regional and national magazines, written on pop culture for an international newspaper as well as several local, alternative newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected].
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