Shades of nostalgia, from 1920s Minions to 1980s henchmen

(from my Economic Times column. Don't miss my profile illustration, further down in the post – I'm quite chuffed with it)
------------------------

Sometime last month I was sitting in a fancy auditorium watching what, in common parlance, is a “children’s movie” – with more than a dozen kids (and a few adults) at a birthday screening for my nine-year-old. It was an animated feature, wonderfully imagined and realised, and perfectly suited to the 3D format we watched it in. Laughs and titters emanated from the seats around me. And yet I’m certain that I appreciated Minions & Monsters more than any of the younglings in the room.

Because apart from being perfectly enjoyable on its own terms, this film is also a reverential, homage-drenched fever dream for anyone who loves deep cinema history. The plot has the squawking yellow Minions stumbling onto a movie shoot in silent-era Hollywood, getting employed in films, and having to negotiate the transition to the sound era – and this is rich ground for many cinematic references.

I was spellbound by the opening moments, where the present-day Universal Pictures logo transforms – in reverse chronology – into its earlier iterations, bright colour yielding to grainy black and white. After which we get vignettes ranging from Eardweard Muybridge’s 1870s series “The Horse in Motion” (which heralded the “motion pictures” we know) to the Lumiere Brothers’s train arriving at a station. And the legendary “moon gets it in the eye” shot from Georges Melies’s 1903 film Le Voyage dans la Lune (with a Minion-face in place of the Moon-face).

A kid in the hall made whimpering sounds as all this happened: “I hope this won’t be a black and white film!” he said. If this plebeian wretch had been sitting next to me, I would have emptied a sack of hot buttery popcorn over his head, but I ignored him, much as I have done undergrad students who say monochrome makes their eyes hurt.

Meanwhile, onscreen, there were recreations of classic scenes featuring Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd: from Steamboat Bill Jr, Safety Last, Modern Times. And later, films like The Maltese Falcon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Citizen Kane (with a Minion as the dying Kane in the opening scene, saying everything but the required “Rosebud”).

Watching all this as someone who fell in love with early cinema as an adolescent, it was magic. If this movie had come out when I was teaching a film-history course a few years ago, I would have shown these scenes alongside the originals.

For many grown-ups, watching a good (contemporary) animated film is like a time-machine ride to a past when they loved such movies without filters, without the terrible burden of being an indulgent “adult” (or having to perform adultness, for themselves or for others). Minions & Monsters gave me that sensation (a memory of being rapt by the 1960s version of The Jungle Book, for instance) as well as a different form of nostalgia – "Anemoia", a wistful yearning for a time and place that one never actually knew firsthand (in this case, early Hollywood at the dawn of movie-making).

But a month ago I also experienced a nostalgia that had to do with my training in mainstream Hindi films as a child. And again, it involved a henchman. If the Minions universe gets laughs from its audacious premise – cute little yellow creatures who end up serving the most evil masters they can find – 1980s Hindi cinema was populated by sidekicks who stood by, drinks in hand, smirking at every booming proclamation made by Amrish Puri or Kader Khan, leering at the heroines as they performed the climactic dance number (before the heroes showed up to save the day).

Those films were my pop-cultural wellsprings, and so it was gratifying to encounter Dan Dhanoa – who was one of those minions in beloved films like Tridev and Zalzala – in Chandigarh. “Captain Dan”, as he is widely known, runs a homestay called Anchorage42, a warm space filled with photos from his stint in films.

Walking through this shrine was as exciting for me as those Old Hollywood scenes in Minions & Monsters had been. But there was nothing silent-movie-ish about this experience. For days afterwards, I watched song sequences like “Gajar ne kiya hai ishaara” – with Dan and other rogues jiggling along in the background – on loop. Oye Oye, went my cinephile heart.