{"id":505487,"date":"2026-07-02T02:52:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T02:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/505487\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T02:52:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T02:52:08","slug":"minions-and-monsters-director-forced-to-address-the-hitler-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/505487\/","title":{"rendered":"Minions And Monsters director forced to address the Hitler question"},"content":{"rendered":"

We should be clear that the persistent question, \u201cDid the Dreamworks Animation mascot characters the Minions work for the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler?\u201d is a problem entirely of the franchise\u2019s own making\u2014mixed, admittedly, with a healthy dose of the usual online contrarianism. We didn\u2019t invent the idea of \u201clittle yellow guys who are instinctively drawn to serve the most evil person they can find;\u201d nor did we muddy the waters surrounding the series\u2019 previously cartoonish conception of evil by asserting, in 2015\u2019s Minions<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cWe\u2019re not talking about those particular 156 years, so stop asking.\u201d Until, that is, the franchise decided to roll out a (surprisingly pretty good) new movie<\/a>, and bafflingly set it during that same interregnum\u2014thus kicking off a whole new round of \u201cOkay, but where were these new guys in 1936?\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Polygon<\/a>. That included \u201cHow do they reproduce?\u201d (Coffin implies that all extant Minions have been present since the Big Bang) and \u201cCan they die?\u201d (No.) But then, inevitably: The Hitler question, which Coffin sounded genuinely distressed to have to answer. \u201cI knew you were going to ask me that question,\u201d he says in response to the query. \u201cShame on you.\u201d He tries to feint toward the cave thing, but is then reminded that the Minions from\u00a0Minions And Monsters\u00a0are some whole other tribe of Minions that were off having Hollywood movie adventures while their buddies were chilling. \u201cI was trying to avoid the answer,\u201d 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: \u201cThe Minions that we know from\u00a0Minions 1\u00a0were stuck in the cave. These ones, I don\u2019t know where they were, but they were not part of the Big History.\u201d Which, again, feels like it would have been pretty easy to avoid by just skipping the Napoleon gag a decade ago\u2014but that\u2019s simply not the world we, or Coffin, are now forced to live in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We should be clear that the persistent question, \u201cDid the Dreamworks Animation mascot characters the Minions work for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505488,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-505487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}