We should be clear that the persistent question, “Did the Dreamworks Animation mascot characters the Minions work for the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler?” is a problem entirely of the franchise’s own making—mixed, admittedly, with a healthy dose of the usual online contrarianism. We didn’t invent the idea of “little yellow guys who are instinctively drawn to serve the most evil person they can find;” nor did we muddy the waters surrounding the series’ previously cartoonish conception of evil by asserting, in 2015’s Minions, that your boys Bob and Stuart served under a real-ass nationalistic European dictator in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte. It could all have been Draculas and super-scientists, and nobody would have made a peep.
Of course, that same movie also addressed the Hitler question indirectly, by having the Minions it depicts decide to hang out in a cave from 1812 to 1968, thus skipping what would turn out to be a pretty staggering number of war crimes and genocides in the process. While a tad transparent, this handwave was also, basically, fine: A clear statement of “We’re not talking about those particular 156 years, so stop asking.” Until, that is, the franchise decided to roll out a (surprisingly pretty good) new movie, and bafflingly set it during that same interregnum—thus kicking off a whole new round of “Okay, but where were these new guys in 1936?”
All of which was brought to the door of long-time franchise director and voice actor Pierre Coffin this week, who made the perhaps foolhardy decision to take some questions about Minions from the folks over at Polygon. That included “How do they reproduce?” (Coffin implies that all extant Minions have been present since the Big Bang) and “Can they die?” (No.) But then, inevitably: The Hitler question, which Coffin sounded genuinely distressed to have to answer. “I knew you were going to ask me that question,” he says in response to the query. “Shame on you.” He tries to feint toward the cave thing, but is then reminded that the Minions from Minions And Monsters are some whole other tribe of Minions that were off having Hollywood movie adventures while their buddies were chilling. “I was trying to avoid the answer,” Coffin admits, before stating, hopefully definitively this time, that the Minions did not participate on any side in World War II, or any other major global conflicts since: “The Minions that we know from Minions 1 were stuck in the cave. These ones, I don’t know where they were, but they were not part of the Big History.” Which, again, feels like it would have been pretty easy to avoid by just skipping the Napoleon gag a decade ago—but that’s simply not the world we, or Coffin, are now forced to live in.
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