Fanboys Anonymous

Yesterday, I went to go see Despicable Me 2 with my little sister and I thought this would be a good write up for this site. Overall, I really enjoyed the movie and if I had to compare it to another animated blockbuster that came out this year in terms of enjoyment, it would have to be Monsters University. However, that is not what this post is about. Today, I will be comparing the two main themes of Despicable Me 1 and Despicable Me 2 (which from here on out will be referred to as DM1 and DM2). After I talk about the two, I will write a conclusion that will let you know which theme I enjoyed more.



I am going to start this off with a look at DM1 and its theme: family. Gru, the main character and the tall bald guy in the picture above, lives alone and is a super villain. He adopts 3 orphans (Margo, Edith and Agnes) with the idea that he will use the girls to help break into another villain's home in order to steal a shrink ray. He had no plans to keep the girls after this and was planning on sending back, but after a day at an amusement park his views on the little girls began to change and began to treat them like his own kids. Eventually they accept each other as family after Gru saves them from death and as the movie ends it shows Gru telling the kids a bedtime story that he made that had all of them in it. Sounds like a perfect family right? WRONG! What's a family without a mother?

Gru with Margo, Edith, and Agnes

This is where the second movies theme comes in, as DM2's theme just so happens to be love.... awwwww. Most of the second film is about Gru and love as he deals with a neighbor who is constantly trying to hook him up with her friends, an agent who he begins to feel affectionate about, and dealing with Margo and her new boyfriend, Antonio. You find out about why he is never a man of love as in the movie they go back to when he was a child and was pretty much rejected as friends and anything else by his colleagues in elementary school as he failed miserably at asking a girl out. He does eventually end getting married and saving the day by the end of the film.

So which theme did a better job telling a story? these two themes are constantly used in animated films, so these two films did nothing ground breaking in that regard. If I were to choose one, it would have to be DM1's family theme. Now that's not saying there is anything wrong with DM2's theme, but I believe DM1's theme was there throughout the movie and was always an issue from the moment he adopted the girls. In DM2 the love theme wasn't there at times, which is why it lost at the end, but it played as big of a role at the end of the films as family did at the end of DM1. With that being said both of these films deserve to be seen if you haven't done so yet. You can find DM1 on Blu-Ray and DVD, where DM2 is still in theatres. Until next time, so long fanboys.