The animated blockbuster Despicable Me 2 has much to celebrate. The international hit is Illumination Entertainment’s first film ever to receive a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination. As icing on the cake, it also earned a Best Song Oscar nomination for “Happy,” written and performed by Pharrell Williams.
Industry acclaim for the film has been matched by robust international box office; since it’s release last July, Despicable Me 2 has grossed more than $935 million. It’s sat atop the U.S. home-video sales chart since its December 10, 2013 debut.
SSN spoke with Illumination founder Chris Meledandri about the film’s success, the history of his company and his decision to leave his job as president of 20th Century Fox Animation in 2007 to found it.
SSN: What is it about Despicable Me 2 that’s struck a chord with world audiences?
Meledandri: At the core of it, it’s the relationship the audience forms with the central characters. In this case, the anchor of the film is Gru [voiced by Steve Carell], a protagonist who is a classic antagonist. Yes, he’s capable of being really nasty, but his flaws and his vulnerabilities are right there for everybody to relate to. Then undeniably these minions have forged this connection that just leaves everybody feeling delighted, the articulation of this language that, on one hand, nobody understands, but actually everybody understands.
SSN: A June, 2017 release is set for Despicable Me 3. The Minions will debut in their own spin-off movie July, 2015. How will you take supporting characters from a successful franchise and maximize it to the extent that it can be a stand-alone film?
Meledandri: While [the spin-off] comes out of the Despicable Me world, it’s a movie that starts at the dawn of time with Minions as single-cell creatures. Then it takes us all the way through to 1960s in New York and London. There are three leads along with our Minions, including Sandra Bullock’s super villain Scarlet Overkill. It’s an entirely different universe of storytelling and very distinct from the Despicable films.
SSN: Does Illumination have any mandates when it comes to creating movies?
Meledandri: The objectives that I set out for the company when I started it six and a half years ago was to tell original stories, adaptations of Dr. Seuss books and, if we were so fortunate, extensions of original stories that we’d already produced. It’s very similar to the strategy I had at Fox when I started Fox Animation. [The studio’s] Ice Age was an entirely original film we developed from scratch, and then we went on to do Dr. Seuss adaptations [like Horton Hears a Who].
SSN: Despicable Me is Illumination’s first franchise. What do you think about making films based on pre-existing properties versus original storytelling?
Meledandri: Original storytelling remains very important to the company. Our next two films after The Minion movie will be wholly original stories. We’re [also] working on our next Dr. Seuss adaptation. So the strategy remains the same.
SSN: With all the success you had at Fox Animation, what made you decide to leave and start your own company with Universal?
Meledandri:. I had been at Fox for 13 years and never expected to stay in any one place for 13 years. The rhythms started to become familiar. I started to yearn for a new challenge. I really enjoyed the building phase of Fox Animation [and] wanted to build something based on what I had learned. I wanted to adopt some of the things that worked so well and create a company [that] embraced risk and innovation.
SSN: What made you think there could be room for another animation studio in a field already so competitive?
Meledandri: What gave me the confidence was that, [after] working in animation for nearly 10 years, I realized the key to making great animated films is great talent. If you can gather extraordinary artistic talent together, you have the capacity to make a really special animated film. I believed in my own ability to identify and attract talented people.
SSN: Who were some of them?
Meledandri: [Despicable Me] screenwriters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio became a fundamental part of the creative fabric of Illumination. Chris Renaud had never directed a feature film, but I knew how talented he was as a story artist and as a short-film director when I was at Fox. Janet Healy was a producer I admired and followed. I knew she was capable of things that are industry-defining in terms of how you structure a studio and how you create an artistic culture.
SSN: The 2011 live-action film Hop is Illumination’s lowest-grossing film. Is that considered a stumble?
Meledandri: It’s all relative for me. At Fox, prior to Ice Age, I came off of a movie, Titan AE, where $100 million was written down. For me, that’s a stumble. Actually, that’s more like a fall-flat-on-your face. Then we had Ice Age, which was one of the most profitable films in the [Fox] history. After that was Robots, which made probably a sixth of the profit that was made on Ice Age and people began to perceive that as a stumble. Yet it was making vastly more money than most of the films that were being produced at Fox at the time.
SSN: So Hop was profitable for the company?
Meledandri: Hop is absolutely a profitable film … in terms of an overall studio slate. We’re just shy of $200 million in global box office.
SSN: What did you think of it?
Meledandri: While there are a lot of aspects of Hop that I think that are delightful, simply put, it wasn’t a good enough film. I look at it and go, ‘Did I push that into production before the script was ready? Did I hold the budget down so low and did that prevent the film from really being able to find itself? I look at it from a variety of different aspects. That’s what’s part of the fun of doing what we do, which is to remain on a steep learning curve.
SSN: Do you worry about having that one big stumble? That Titan AE, if you will?
Meledandri: I know that we’re going to stumble in the future. I don’t believe we can continue to make films that are distinctive and that we can be proud of unless we venture into terrain that we haven’t been in before or that we don’t have a precedent for succeeding in.
SSN: Where do you see animation headed in the future?
Meledandri: Technologically, the medium continues to evolve. What I look forward to is using the medium to tell a wider range of stories. For me, it’s how to push beyond the type of storytelling that we’ve seen work so well and … allowing animation to be a magnificent tool to tell a range of different kinds of stories.
SSN: How important is having animation as a category at the Academy Awards?
Meledandri: If you look at Despicable Me 2 and [its audience], you’ll see that half of [it is] what we call a traditional family audience—parents and kids. The other half is entirely non-family. So the medium, when it’s working, is reaching the broadest of audiences. To have that celebrated and recognized by the Academy is wonderful and critically important.