Mon Oncle

We looked at a lot of French movies from the '50s and '60s, like Jacques Tati's 'Mon Oncle,' just for the flavor of Paris and the sense of how they used architecture.

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Directors Renaud and Coffin studied Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle (1958), absorbing not jokes but Tati's visual language, humor built from production design and architectural absurdity. Gru's lair becomes Tati's modernist nightmare, all gleaming surfaces and impossible angles, where comedy lives in the space between character and environment.

Pierre Coffin has documented his obsession with Jacques Tati, specifically with the way Tati built comedy from physical bodies moving through space without dialogue, using the environment itself as co-star. The Minions' gibberish is an homage to Tati's wordlessness. Their relationship to objects, the way they treat the world as playground, is learned from Mon Oncle and Playtime. Coffin admits this in interviews as the foundational DNA. Both Tati films are on Criterion Channel.