Some Much Needed Love for Megamind

    Following this year's Oscars ceremony, filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directors of The Lego Movie, penned an op-ed for Variety bemoaning the stigma around animated films. They report taking issue with Naomi Scott, one of the presenters for best animated film, saying that animated films are some of the most formative experiences a kid has, and that kids tend to watch these films over and over, further noting "I think some of the parents out there know exactly what I'm talking about." Lord and Miller seemed to take this as implying that adults can't appreciate animated films, saying "Surely no one set out to diminish animated films, but it’s high time we set out to elevate them."

               I didn't personally find Scott's observation that kids make their parents watch the same animated films over and over again innately demeaning--certainly not any more than Schumer joking that her toddler made her watch Encanto 109 times, and that wasn't called out. That said, I share Lord and Miller's sentiment that animation has always fought an uphill battle to be seen as "real" cinema.

     If you've been following this blog for long at all, you'll notice that I give quite a bit of space for Disney animation. I do this in part to combat some of the lazy rhetoric around those films being just for kids and whatnot. Just so, animation encompasses a lot more than just the work from Walt Disney Animation Studios. I guess the responsibility falls on bloggers like me to keep the conversation varied, and today I'm going to do that by spotlighting Dreamworks' 2010 superhero parody, Megamind.

    My attention falls to this film because it occupies this weird middle ground where it's nobody's favorite, but everyone I know agrees that it's genius. Its reputation mirrors something like Disney's The Emperor's New Groove, a light-hearted romp that limped at the box office but found tremendous cultural adoration once it leaked into the world of home viewing. 

     I suppose I also need to own up to my own participation in this mindset that has poisoned the reputation of animated films, and this movie specifically. My school had actually set up a sort of field trip to see Megamind in theaters as a reward to the kids with high grades, and I remember passing on the opportunity because the movie simply looked like more Dreamworks nonsense. (Adolescence was not too early a stage for The Professor to develop film tastes most snobbish.) When I finally did see it, as it was playing in the car that my aunt and uncle were using to pick me up from the airport, I had to acknowledge my wrongdoing, and as I've revisited the film many times over the years, my appreciation for the film has not wavered.

   Because it's not just that the film is funny or even just that it's coherent. Megamind is a sort of reclamation of Dreamworks of the 2000s had been trying to do for basically a decade. A part of the reason why animated films struggle for legitimacy in the eyes of the public doesn't really have anything to do with the capability of the medium, but the space in which it has been expected to occupy. 

Monsters vs Aliens (2009)

    We could go on for a while debating to what extent Dreamworks and its Flushed Aways or Bee Movies were contributing to that perception and whether or not this is all their fault, but I think most who are privy to this discussion would mark 2010 as a turning point in that conversation. (2010 was also the year the first How to Train Your Dragon movie would come out, widely considered to be the best thing from the studio.) There's not a lot at a glance that separates Megamind from those older Dreamworks films, which to me says that they were onto something during that pivotal decade, but this film's microscopic variations have a compounding effect that ultimately make for a much stronger movie and a herald of things to come.

    So, this is me atoning for my mistake. Here it is: Megamind is a certifiably great film, and we should all be talking about it.

Full Disclosure of Bias

                     It must needs be established that I really don’t like Shrek, and my distaste for it has only ossified over time. I find its shallow targeting of the Disney tradition petty, and the film also popularized a lot of what made American animated films of the 2000s so juvenile, and this in part contributed to a sort of bias that I held against Dreamworks Animation for the longest time, a bias which I still live in the shadow of.

    Western animation has always had an element of slapstick since before Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote were chucking anvils at one another. Just so, not only did Dreamworks twist the volume up to intolerable levels, but they also stuffed the cast with celebrities who didn’t know how to act with just their voice. That last element in particular is, in my opinion, a large part of what makes animated films feel like little day trips that A-lister can merely dabble in between "real projects." And yet, these movies were frighteningly successful, and animation in the U.S. took its lead from the likes of Madagascar and Over the Hedge. (I lose sleep some nights imagining how different the output of Dreamworks, and American animation as a whole, would look today if Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron or The Prince of Egypt had done Shrek levels of business.) 

        I describe the films as “nonsense,” but as with most brands of film there is some internal logic and thematic dialogue at work. Dreamworks films usually followed someone out of place in their own community. The outcast protagonists of these films differed from, say, the noble dreamers of 90s Disney, what with Aladdin literally being modeled after Tom Cruise. 

    The leads of Dreamworks weren’t just misunderstood, they were awkward. Maybe they were always crashing into things, maybe they weren’t conventionally attractive, but they generally represented a class of people who weren’t normally admired in common society. If you came across Po or Shrek in real life, you’d probably pray they wouldn’t take the seat next to you on the bus. The nicest thing I can say about Dreamworks films of the 2000s is that they were, in their own third-grade kind of way, interested in championing your average joe, making heroes out of someone that society has low expectations for. Which brings us to the film at hand. 

       The titular character is a master supervillain who has dedicated his whole life to defeating his arch-nemesis, Metro Man, in elaborate and theatrical schemes that always end in Megamind's defeat. The two of them have played through this ritual countless times their whole life, with good guy and local celebrity Metro Man inevitably coming out on top. Megamind is a perpetual loser, so he’s just as surprised as anyone when one of his evil schemes actually works and he eliminates Metro Man. (We actually later found out that Metro Man actually faked his death after simply getting tired of being the superhero everyone expected him to be. If you're reading this, I assume you either know the story or don't care to be spoiled.)

    Megamind relishes his victory for a hot minute, but it doesn’t take long for this supervillain to miss his archnemesis. Turns out world domination isn’t as fun as he’d thought it would be, and without his weekly duels with his rival, he has nothing to look forward to. So Megamind goes to extreme lengths to get back in the game, and he creates a new superhero for him to fight. This backfires very quickly, and suddenly Megamind is the only one who can save the city from his own fabricated superhero.

               On paper, Megamind resembles much of the studio’s early output: a CG comedy-fest poking fun at a popular genre or style, following some random Joe who was obviously out of his element, stuffed to the brim with celebrity voice actors.

    So what is it about Megamind that separates it from the Open Seasons of the animation world?

 

 

Parody

Love and Death (1975)

               Now is a good time to discuss parody and its close cousin, spoof. The term “parody” refers to a text that references some other item of media and incorporates a comedic sensibility to comment on said piece of media. Parody has been around for a while, but it has become an increasingly popular form of comedy for the way it rewards the pop culture literacy of both the creator and the consumer. 

Shrek is famously a parody of Disney animated fairy-tales. Coming after a decade of Disney dominance, and just when the Disney brand was starting to lose grace, this worked for a lot of people. And so, Dreamworks would try this out again. 

                   Megamind is clearly a spoof of superhero mythology, especially Superman. The origin stories of both Megamind and Metro Man are clear homages to Superman and Krypton, and Roxanne Ritchie is basically a reincarnation of Lois Lane. And so, the film becomes a comment on the way that superhero stories reinforce how we define good and bad. Megamind has come to identify himself as the “bad guy” because that’s how he was typed growing up, and so he took on the role of supervillain to the beloved Metro Man.

                Parody isn’t an innately mean-spirited medium. Often the best parody comes from fans of a given property or genre. Parody can read as derisive if the film’s authors are incurious or glib about the texts they are referencing, but parody also provides a space to explore the love surrounding a specific genre or text. Ribbing a beloved film or genre isn’t the same thing as utilizing genre shorthand. With Megamind, invoking the epic conflict between a Superman-grade hero and his arch-nemesis sets the expectation for the scale of goodness we are dealing with in this film. It’s one thing to say that Megamind is a loser, it’s another to position him as the punching bag to an undefeatable Superman-insert.

    Parody differs from satire in that the former reacts to a specific genre, style, or text. Satire turns the focus not on any pop culture artifact but on society as a whole. Example, Don’t Look Up is a satire of how the news and social media condition the masses to respond to genuine crises like climate change or a pandemic with apathy.

    At the same time, it’s not fair to say that parody isn’t also interested in deeper questions or ideas. There’s usually a “point” to the comedy. Metatextual by design, parody provides an opportunity to examine how social identity is shaped by trends within the media. A common takeaway in parody type movies is that real-life people are not bound to the fates they are trained to expect from popular storytelling.

    The Scream movies, for example, examine how concepts like victimhood are reinforced within slasher movies. The recurring antagonist is some masked killer, usually a teenager, who sets out to make their own real-life horror movie. Because the characters are a bunch of horror-enthused teenagers, they quickly catch on to the fact that they are now living in a scary movie, and they try to make sense of their situation by abiding by the “rules” of the scary movies they observe, which is where the metatextual commentary comes in. Scream also works really well as parody because while it pokes fun at the conventions of the genre, it also respects them. Scream isn’t just a thought piece about scary movies–it’s a scary movie too. You jump when the killer bursts through the window and wince when the knife cuts through the kids, just like in a "real" scary movie.

    That series follows Sidney Prescott, a girl who seems fated for a certain ending, one that involves a lot of stabbing, because she’s that kind of “character.” In the first film, a lot of attention is given to her mother's sexual promiscuity as well as Sidney's own burgeoning sexuality--a central theme in slasher films. Sidney’s franchise-long conflict of staying one step ahead of the knife is a metaphor for her fight for control over her own identity. Just because there are things in her history that type Sidney as a “victim,” that doesn’t mean she is destined to become prey to Ghostface.

    This psychology factors heavily into the plot of Megamind. Megamind has accepted that his lot in life to play the villain who always loses to his lifelong nemesis, Metro Man. This has been reinforced through years of people treating him different because he did not fit a certain mold. It’s only when Megamind adopts the persona of “Bernard” the regular guy that he is able to step outside of the social construct built for him and see just how performative his “villainy” always was.

   The only person who ever really took Megamind on his own terms, aside from Minion, was Roxanne. She writes him off at first, yes, but not without good reason. Where others look down at him simply for being blue, Roxanne holds him accountable for ruining the city. But she’s also fair. When he makes an effort, she acknowledges and recognizes his virtues, and she plays a big part in helping him see that he does in fact have the capacity to play the hero.

               The popularity of the genre being referenced is also a significant aspect of parody, and this piece is especially relevant to the Megamind conversation. Unlike fairy-tales at the turn of the century, there wasn’t an appetite for punching superhero movies in the early 2010s. Remember also that in 2010, we were only two Iron Man movies into the MCU—superhero movies weren’t the golden goose of Hollywood. They had a place at the table, sure, but we weren’t inundated with them.

               This movie could have easily been a mean-spirited look at the MCU and DCEU war, and had this been made five years later, I’m certain that’s what we would have ended up with. But we wouldn't start talking about "superhero fatigue" for another few years. Megamind's honest examination of the genre is what makes the film so much fun in this era of superhero plentitude. It acknowledges and plays with the infrastructure of these movies without presuming it knows better than them. You as an audience member probably don’t feel attacked for liking Superman to begin with. 

         Just so, I can’t help but notice how the film predicted how the superhero renaissance that followed would be similarly preoccupied with who society says gets to be a hero--who is worthy of admiration. You certainly see this with films that have redefined “the superhero” along lines of gender or race, but I’m also thinking of films like Guardians of the Galaxy which make good guys out of literal criminals, outcasts who were severely out of their element yet became exactly the heroes the world needed. When a theme resonates, you see it play out again and again. Turns out we all like to know that anyone has the capacity to play the hero.

 

Humor and Character

               Remember what I said about Dreamworks movies having the worst sense of humor?

               In the U.S. especially, animation is generally seen as a medium specially for children. As a result, there’s a special incentive to keep the tone light and easy, and there are really simple ways to accomplish this. Early Dreamworks films scouted these out pretty well. Fart jokes. Underwear jokes. Pop culture references. The use of any one of these doesn’t automatically wreck your film—even an animated epic like The Lion King still creates a space for a character like Pumbaa the flatulent—it all just comes down to percentage and timing. 

    So what's the humor of Megamind like, then?

    Well, it's a lot more varied than it's given credit for. There are a few underwear jokes, sure, but it also traffics in other brands of humor. The film dwells in this happy medium where it doesn't take itself too seriously, but it also puts real thought into its jokes, jokes that are very well set up. There's a sense of fulfillment for example when, after earlier being held captive in Megamind's hideout, Roxie discovers the location of Megamind's secret lair because “It’s the only building in Metro City with a fake observatory on top!"

    But more than just having a balanced humor diet, the film is much more deliberate with how it employs humor. 

     Let me explain by detailing a scene from Dreamworks’ Shark Tale. At one point, Robert De Niro’s shark is in the middle of intimidating Martin Scorsese’s pufferfish. This is one of the rare scenes where the film makes a bid for seriousness, but that tone is undone when a hiccup on the record player makes it play “I Like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie.” This is a safe way to get laughs, but there’s a cost to constantly undercutting your film’s tension like this. It’s really easy to go overboard with this type of humor.

               There’s a similar scene in Megamind where, immediately following his defeat of Metro Man, Megamind frolics his way up to city hall with AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” blasting on the boom box. Megamind gives Minion the signal to cut the sound, but instead the box starts playing “Loving You.” There’s a gag where Minion can’t turn the machine off, and so the speakers just jump between the two songs while Megamind just stands there awkwardly as his moment of power unravels in realtime. This gag undercuts Megamind’s victory, revealing that even following his triumph, Megamind is still just a clown who has no idea what he’s doing.

     So, is Megamind just incompetent? Is he just our punching bag? Not exactly. This self-deprecating humor actually carries weight in the larger scheme of the movie—it means something.

      The gag works in Megamind because it belays the deeper truth at work with this film: Megamind is not truly a supervillain, and as long as he tries to fit that mold, there will always be friction. Unlike Robert de Niro’s shark, we’re not supposed to be threatened by Megamind. The faulty radio sabotaging his moment of glory is funny, yes, but more importantly it reinforces how out of place he is in this situation. 

     If I had to identify one single aspect that sets Megamind apart from other animated films of less ambition, it’s probably the symbiotic relationship between the humor and the story. The constant discrepancies we run into just underline the fact that Megamind is out of place in his current life as a bad guy. Megamind doesn’t necessarily use a different brand of humor than your standard Dreamworks film, but it is much more deliberate in when it invokes it. Megamind reaffirms that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the Dreamworks model when it’s applied to sound storytelling methods.

    Poking holes tends to be the default in parody or other films with a somewhat post-modern bend. It's comfortable to look down on the all the dum-dums stuck in the mire of plot convention, but wallowing in this kind of thing runs a very real risk. You spend too much time knocking down pillars of the shared cinematic event, and sooner or later the foundation of your own shared cinematic event will start to crumble. Megamind doesn't have that problem because its dismantling the artifice of the genre runs parallel to its protagonist's evolution.

Megamind's Character Arc

    Megamind’s arc is hard to articulate because he makes the jump from “bad guy” to “good guy,” but I wouldn’t call his story a redemption arc per se because Megamind was never evil. I guess his repeated kidnapping of Roxanne Richie isn’t very polite, but otherwise his moral failings amount to little more than annoying the law enforcement. 

    Megamind thrived on the presentation and performance of being a master villain, but he didn’t have to learn to, say, value human life. On a basic level, he understands this, which is why he’s so quick to feel disgust at Hal after he makes the jump to genuine bad guy. Megamind recognizes and values goodness, he just never thought he could fit the bill. It would be better to describe his arc as one of self-actualizing rather than redemption.

  Megamind shares some foundational similarities with something like Elia Kazan's 1955 film, East of Eden, a story following two brothers, one seemingly destined for righteousness, the other for corruption. In this story, the "villain's" name is Cal, and he struggles to earn the affection that his stern father willingly bestows on his more upstanding brother, Aron. Watching the film, we see that Cal is prone to minor fits and long periods of sulking, but these are generally petty offenses that type him as being a juvenile. When Cal is allowed to be himself, we see that he is both sensitive and thoughtful, and he really does want to do right. Moreover, we understand that his outbursts are in many ways direct results of the lack of care and attention he is given by the world and especially by his father. The anchoring belief that Cal is a bad seed winds up leaving way more scars than anything Cal actually does.

              There's a very similar setup here. It’s understood that Megamind actually has the capacity to be a hero right from the start. He’s smart, resourceful, he’s persistent, he and Minion have a healthy friendship, and by all means he appears to be a just and equitable employer. Megamind is “bad” not because he's internalized some warped values, but because he's playing in a role which he was assigned to him arbitrarily. (There’s even some social commentary buried here. Metro Man gets to be the good guy because he had a privileged upbringing, Megamind is the bad guy because he was literally raised in jail.) People worship Metro Man not because he is virtuous, per se, but they project virtue onto him because he is the kind of man who would be voiced by Brad Pitt.

    Early on, Roxie teases Megamind (who is in disguise) with the idea that heroes aren't born, they're made. Megamind takes this idea and runs with it in the wrong direction, thinking that heroism is a collection of random external features, which is what inspires him to literally craft a hero in a microwave. It is lost on him that heroism is a matter of principles. That disconnect is obviously a symptom of his immaturity, but can we blame the guy? He was typed as a pariah very early on based on not his moral goodness but because of, well, random external features.

               Sidenote, the one problem I have with this film is that Metro Man never really owns up to the part he played in Megamind’s self-sabotage. I don’t know how much responsibility we can lay on a fifth-grader, but there’s something missing when Metro Man is telling Megamind that he’s got it in him to be a good guy … like an acknowledgment that he is a large part of why Megamind in adulthood feels stuck in his broken self-perception? That even a “good guy” like him once bought into the preposition that Megamind’s deviation made him an acceptable target? Maybe an apology for always picking him last at dodgeball and encouraging others to do the same? … anyways.

               In storytelling, there’s a character type known as a foil, a sort of living counterargument to a given character, often the protagonist. In Les Miserables, Javert the just is a clear foil to Jean Valjean the merciful. Foils don’t necessarily have to be the antagonist–in The Shawshank Redemption, Andy and Red are foils to one another, and they’re best friends–but that’s a tried and true method because it sets up a movie’s thesis and antithesis really clearly.

    In this film, Hal is a natural foil to Megamind. Hal didn’t deserve the mantle of superherodom any more than Megamind deserved the infamy of villainhood. Hal gives no thought to anything but his own gratification and has no moral compass of any kind. Much in the same way Megamind views “goodness” as a set of external characteristics, Hal wants to be the “good guy” only because the hero is entitled to certain rewards, most pointedly the leading lady.

    That Hal is a horrible candidate for heroism is totally lost on Megamind because, again, virtue has never been part of the equation for him. It’s not that Megamind is without morals, it’s just that he’s been trained by a life of disenfranchisement to not see personal morality as a determiner of worth. Megamind’s villainy is ultimately rooted in the way society labeled him at an early age because he was different. “Good guy”-ness isn’t a matter of having a good heart, it’s just a matter of opportunity that can fall upon anyone. So why not this underachieving fart-bag?

       The disaster that ensues confronts Megamind with the error of his logic. Maybe the amoral stalker wasn’t the best choice for superman-like powers. Megamind learns that being a hero isn’t a matter of circumstances or resources but of choosing to dedicate one’s self to the wellbeing of the collective good.

        And I’m not saying this is the most profound illustration of morality there ever was, but it works. Animated films of less ambition will skip these steps and just go straight for the fart gags, and the results speak for themselves.

 

Conclusion

    By the early 2010s, Shrek was nearly ten years down the pike, and the model that movie had set was finally starting to lose its punch, so the studio finally started looking to reinvent its brand, aiming for something more substantive than silly string. This is a good thing in my book since many of Dreamworks’ most interesting films came after Jeffrey Katzenberg finally got over his break-up with Disney. 

               The twisted irony is that the reason why Megamind’s parody feels appropriate where Shrek did not is also the reason why Shrek was a box-office knockout where Megamind was not. Shrek was capitalizing on the public’s growing disenchantment with the Disney brand, which was only aided by the animation studio starting to lose its creative grip. Megamind, on the other hand, was ahead of its time. Superhero movies weren’t fun to deconstruct yet. Had Megamind premiered even two years later, audiences would have likely received the film with much more enthusiasm.

       Fondness for the film has only increased in the decade since this movie's release. Even while I was in the process of writing this piece, Peacock announced it was ordering a sequel series for this film. Yet despite all this, Dreamworks is still facing the same uphill battle most studios are in the wake of Corona. How many parents see animation as theater-level priority these days? Hence animation is making the great exodus to streaming exclusively. Even Disney’s Encanto only became a megastorm after it premiered on Disney+ after a very brief theatrical run. 

    In my quest to make film literacy a greater priority for the masses, my efforts are usually directed toward reminding everyone to have their regular intake of Capra and Hitchcock. In the popular film discourse, there are clear signposts that designate a film as classic or worthy of discussion. I'm grateful for AFI, IMDb's Top 250, and all the folks that introduced me to all the important films on the roster.

    But I also worry about the Megaminds on the list--the movies that lack a marketable gimmick but remain undeniably delightful just the same. I don't doubt that a lot of love went into the making of the film. And doesn't that love deserve to be recognized? Celebrated? Is it fair that an intelligent, entertaining piece like Megamind should always be picked last for dodgeball just because it was a little too soon to the conversation, or because animated films will always face an uphill battle?

    It's easy to take for granted that we've already scoped out all the films that are worth celebrating, but I hope that we keep ourselves guessing. For the sake of the films we overlook, and for our own sake as well.

        --The Professor

And I love you, Megamind