Despite having voiced nearly every Minion since the yellow creatures made their grand cinematic debut in 2010’s Despicable Me, Pierre Coffin admits that their high-pitched gibberish isn’t something he can get his way, much to the dismay of many he meets.
“If someone asked me to do the Minion voice right now, I wouldn’t be able to do it,” he told Variety, with the resigned sigh of someone who’s been asked to say “Bello!” And “Banana!” I say that a lot.
There is a very simple reason for this. Minion’s voice is indeed Coffin’s own, but six semitones higher. And you have to record it in slow motion.
It all goes back to Despicable Me, which he directed (he directed Despicable Me 2, Despicable Me 3, and the first Minions spin-off, before taking a break from directing with Minions: The Rise of Me and Despicable Me 4, before returning with Minions and Monsters, released today by Universal).
Coffin says he originally didn’t intend to voice the diminutive, three-fingered supervillain’s henchmen. However, during the development of the first film, he was struck by a line in Cinco Paul and Ken Dalio’s script that read, “Gru comes on stage and the minions scream his name.”
Importantly, this showed that the minions weren’t actually mute (at the time, this was the only line they spoke). Coffin claims he consulted Chris Meledandri, producer and head of Illumination, and was told, “Well, I’ll ask the person whose job it is to find the sound for the character and I’ll get back to you.” But what eventually came back was “a very computer-like, very strange sound.”
A few years earlier, when Coffin was breaking into film (Despicable Me would be his feature directorial debut), he was also working in commercials, often adding his own voice “temporarily” just to get the timing right. “You just pitch it up and down and play all the characters, and it ends up being recorded by real comedians and real actors.”
So while he waited for professional voice actors to step in and give the Minions the sweet tone they needed, he did it with “Despicable Me.” Of course, there was no script and no instructions on how it should sound, so he just improvised.
“I didn’t really know what to say, so I just said some gibberish, but a few words came up here and there, and I think I said ‘pancake’ and ‘panna cotta’…the words just sounded weird,” he explains. I then used a computer plug-in to raise this recording by six semitones and sent it to Meledandri. After hearing Coffin’s fast-paced falsetto nonsense, the studio chief had only one answer: “Well, you can’t do that, can you?”
And surprisingly, the minions have voices.
Of course, at the time, there was no indication that Despicable Me would be embarking on a multi-billion dollar blockbuster series, or that Coffin would inadvertently sign himself up to voice the increasingly beloved yellowface in multiple sequels and spin-offs. And he never dreamed that he would soon start creating almost an entire language out of it.
It was Despicable Me 2, which came after Coffin realized that the local distributor had somehow decided to translate the Minions’ gibberish in the Italian version of the first film. “I thought, ‘No, let’s not do that.’ I think there’s a magic that somehow you do understand something even though you don’t understand it.”
So the sequels began liberally sprinkling their squeaky nonsense with actual words and phrases derived from or inspired by the language. There were also lots of Italian words (like “tulaliloo ti amo”, which means “I love you”), French (“et pis c’est tout”, which means “that’s all”), and Spanish words (like “para tú”, which means “for you”).
Since then, Minion (as it came to be called) has evolved, with Coffin adding elements from Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Hindi, German, Indonesian, and more with each new language. Seven films and several shorts later, he estimates that “about a dozen” languages are now represented, which he admits is a lot like the film’s own comically nonsensical Esperanto.
This had its advantages. Adding a significant amount of Spanish early on was “in hindsight very smart,” he says, given the language’s popularity. (Sadly, Mandarin was too difficult for Coffin to learn; the only word he could handle was “shey-shay” (thank you), which he added at the end of “Minions and Monsters.”)
“We also found that having recognizable words made people less likely to fall asleep while speaking gibberish,” he says.
But carefully chosen words have little to do with their meaning and more to do with the melody and rhythm with which they are added to a sentence. As Coffin says, “the music is more important than the words,” and it’s all about getting the Minions across what they’re trying to express, whether it’s a question or an insult.
And the development of Minionese is often simply driven by what makes its creators laugh.
“That comes from me bumping into someone and they say something funny or have a funny name and I’m like, ‘Oh, that would be perfect for a Minion,’ or I’ll go to a restaurant and see some weird Asian or Indian food and think, ‘Oh my god, this is great,'” he says. Minion linguists will note that many international dishes are increasingly appearing in random dictionaries, alongside pancakes and panna cotta, along with nasi goreng, tikka masala, and carbonara.
Some words are more random than others. In Coffin’s short film “Mooned,” a group of minions are stranded on the moon with the “Despicable Me” villain Vector, who, after failing to return to Earth, disdainfully yells “Rosamund Pike!” in his direction.
“When I made this short, I had just seen a Rosamund Pike movie the day before, and I thought, oh, that’s a cool name.”
Coffin acknowledges that in exercising the power to produce such language, he inadvertently throws in a variety of gibberish that people can take to mean unpleasant things. “Most of the time, people hear things that I don’t say, and I do it again,” he says. Some words work better in some areas than others. In most countries, the minions refer to their evil masters as “Big Boss,” but Coffin was told that this would not be understood in Latin America, so he re-recorded it as “Gran Jefe.”
By the time of Despicable Me 2, Coffin knew he needed to record the Minions’ lines (which, interestingly, he says were all written in English before “putting them in the Minions”) in slow motion.
In the second film, the Minions sang songs like “I Swear” and “YMCA” in cheerful falsetto, but Coffin realized that raising his voice six semitones would cause it to be out of key and degrade the sound quality. Since then, he has been using special software that allows him to record in slow motion and accelerate it back to real time at the correct pitch. And this is what he’s doing now with everything in Minions.
It’s been a long and difficult process, and it’s also the reason he stepped back from directing the second Minions spin-off and Despicable Me. “There was a price to be paid by directing and doing voices. My head was a mess. So I told Chris I couldn’t do that anymore, I couldn’t direct or do voices.” So he chose voices.
But Meledandri was able to lure him back to Minions and Monsters with the simple idea of making a movie about the Minions, taking the story back to the early days of Hollywood.
But there was never any question that Coffin would allow someone else to lend his larynx to the Minions and free his vocal cords from all the “Bello!” or “Banana!” Funnily enough, more than 9 out of 10 coined words are nonsense simply because the creator, gatekeeper, and world’s foremost expert on Minion language doesn’t think it sounds right.
“The reason I don’t feel comfortable sharing that with other people is that sometimes in marketing, they mix up all my sentences and words, and that’s weird to me. When I hear that, I’m like, no, that doesn’t apply, they worded it wrong,” he says. “I don’t know why, but it feels wrong. And when I look at the animation they pasted in, it doesn’t apply either. So I guess there’s something magical between the words I’m saying and the animation that goes with those words. And somehow, if I change one of the two, it stops working.”
