A new trailer (or TV spot) for Despicable Me 4 brilliantly parodies the rise of AI in all its glitchy, six-fingered nightmarishness.
Over the weekend, something we believe was called the ‘super game’ or perhaps ‘the big bowl’ happened. Basically, it’s like rugby but with crash helmets – and lots of trailers are shown while the players have a break. This year we’ve seen promos for Twisters, Deadpool & Wolverine, and witchy origin musical Wicked all appear for our viewing pleasure.
Perhaps the funniest – or at least mischievous – trailer of the lot was the one for this year’s Despicable Me 4. Amounting to just 30 seconds, the promo – a TV spot, really – serves as a succinct put-down of the generative AI boom that has sparked so much debate (and Hollywood strikes) over the past year.
Six-fingered hands, robotic synth voices, smeary images and dreadful typography are all packed into the TV spot’s scant few seconds. Basically, if you’ve seen anything generated by the likes Midjourney or Dall-E, then you’ll likely recognise the stuff the animators at Illumination are parodying here.
Exactly how AI will affect creative industries – not least animation – has resulted in a mixture of fascination, fear and excitement of late. For people on the executive side of the equation, there’s excitement that AI tools could be used to make movies at a fraction of the cost and time; last November, for example, DreamWorks Animation founder Jeffrey Katzenberg predicted that a “world-class animated movie” could be made in as little as six months, and by a much smaller crew of animators than something like The Prince Of Egypt, which Katzenberg co-produced in the late 1990s.
All that hype is joined by fears that huge numbers of creative people could be put out of their jobs, and arguments that AI could be used to cut corners. It’s refreshing, then, to see the subject tackled head-on by a sector of the filmmaking industry that may soon by greatly affected by the AI boom – if it happens.
“Dog and pony show,” is the prompt we see plugged into an AI program by one Minion – a disdainful term used to describe “an event that is designed to impress people in order to make them buy something or invest money” according to the Cambridge Dictionary. That could be a dig at the convention of making trailers, but we suspect it’s more likely a snipe at the speculative AI hype bubble.
In short, it’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, all packed into one dinky, mischievous promo.
Directed by Chris Renaud and his team of human animators at Illumination, Despicable Me 4 is out in UK cinemas on the 12th July.
