The Minions and the irresistible fascination with evil

• Premiere The Minions parody the iconic header of The Office

• Summer School holidays: and now, what do we do with the children?

The school holidays start with an unavoidable date for parents and children:

, starting next July 1, an hour and a half of refrigerated escapism, with the occasional shadow that clouds our understanding, even if it is very fleeting .

After all, they are nothing but

From the perspective of a respectable age, at first we saw them as if Burt Simpson and the blonde smurf had procreated.

From the father they would have inherited the radioactive yellow and, from the mother, let us remember that created by Gargamel to sow discord in a masculine universe and with its own language, well that's it.

As is known, dubbed by their creator, the Frenchman

the Minions speak an unintelligible jargon, sprinkled with some recognizable words such as "for you", "kampai" or

.

Although they love to cross-dress and lick bananas (sic), there are still no female Minion in sight.

Already questioned on the matter, Coffin went off on a tangent by pointing out that there were no Minion ladies because their creatures were too stupid to think feminine.

We don't care if the minions are

when it comes to our children we are more concerned about their eternal fascination with Evil. They already explained to us, at the beginning of that spin-off (The Minions, 2015), that They've been searching for an evil leader to worship since prehistory, passing through some pharaoh of Egypt, Count Dracula and throwing a stupid veil through the

before arriving at Gru, at the end of that same film, when he has just steal the British crown.

From Swinging London we will now move on to the explosion of

in San Francisco, infinite winks-elbows for adults and explicit tributes to

and

's films , sprinkled with great successes of this prodigious new decade, with

scoring a

with vocoder and a long etcetera.

But, deep down, deep down, we will continue to wonder to what extent we are being pedagogical by recreating our offspring with these minions (minion, in English, means

) so

(very cute, in French).

It is true that Gru always finds someone more evil than himself, and that Minions are fundamentally innocent, and only truly evil when they turn purple.

The fact that they didn't just lead Gru to his own Waterloo, as they did with

, also seems to indicate that they redeem each other.

But, no matter how much they are becoming a little more personalized -Kevin, Stuart, Bob, and now also Otto-, they are still a mass of worshipers of an Evil personified by

, something that makes us uncomfortable as democrats.

Otto's appearance leads us to think that, instead of denim overalls, they could have opted for Tyrolean trousers.

In fact, there was already a hoax on the internet that attributed a murky Nazi origin to them.

But Gru is not one of those.

He is rather an affable exploiter of his dedicated workers who, as we said, always finds someone more evil than him, whether it is a Hispanic like El Macho (in Gru2) or an

whom, on this occasion, he puts voice

in the Spanish version.

From his home in classic suburbia (like those of the Addams or Munster families), Gru is the somewhat old-fashioned, haggard defender of the American way of life, not

of everything.

Just as the Queen of England is preferable to an evil like Scarlett Overkill, Gru also personifies that lesser evil that we embrace to avoid the worst, as in life itself.

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