Mooned

'Mooned (2023)' is the latest 'Despicable Me'/'Minions' short from Illumination. It plays in front of 'Migration (2023)', one of the studio's few non-Minion-starring features, and its inclusion forces you to endure those increasingly inescapable, annoying little yellow grubs even though you quite literally did not sign up for any of their nonsense. I saw the piece in 4DX, a so-called 'special format' that 'enhances' the cinematic experience by shaking the seats and jabbing you in the back and spraying you with water and blasting you with wind and pumping strange smells into the auditorium, which definitely made it far more uncomfortable than it otherwise would have been. After all, the bulk of the narrative involves Vector getting violently injured by his own ineptitude; let's just say that the 4DX programing ensures we can empathise with him a little bit too much. There's very little to comment on if you divorce the film from the format in which I viewed it, as it's a generic and mostly humorless effort that doesn't have any real charm to it. It's not terrible, but it's just entirely uninspiring. It doesn't help that every character we see is annoying in one form or another. It's fine, I guess, but certainly nothing more.

"Vector" clad simply in a spacesuit and with a polythene goldfish bowl for an helmet finds himself stranded on the moon. Luckily, he has loads of gadgets at his disposal but he's so inept that most of the time he just flails about as if he were in a Laurel & Hardy movie. It's then that he encounters a bespectacled and friendly "Minion" but in typical human fashion becomes immediately hostile refusing to co-operate with his potential yellow ally. What now ensues is a rather characterless animation that reminded me a little of those over-narrated 1950s Disney cartoons with a scientific aspect to them. Let's learn about gravity, or aerodynamics, or rocketry - or, maybe just: let's learn about collaboration and not making snap judgements. There's quite a fun guest appearance at the end from a visitor from even further away, and it's an easy enough nine minutes of Illumination artistry to watch - just nothing to write home about.

The fastest minion outting but realistically, a copy of any of the old coyote-road runner cartoons from the 1970's.

At 8 minutes long, it's a short cute comical view of a man and the minions on the moon. Nothing too deep or meaningful, just a fun few minutes of giggling gags.

Quite surprising that slap-stick humour and what's called 'violence' today would be acceptable in cartoons anymore, but nothing over the top. Unusual considering what can be labelled as politically incorrect today though.

Overall, would b a great little show for kids to watch and would guarantee giggles and laughs along the way even if it's a look from the old days.

After what happened in the first installment of the Despicable Me franchise, no one was wondering what happened to Vector in the end. This short film answers that question by bringing Vector back, but stranded on the moon. The short film focuses on Vector's efforts to return to planet Earth, but he is not alone. The short film is quite entertaining with funny moments. It maintains the humor of the other installments of the franchise and its 9 minutes are guaranteed fun. Mooned is another installment of the Despicable Me franchise that doesn't fail to offer a fun time. My final rating for this short film is an 8/10.