Review: 'Minions & Monsters' is a daffy summer comedy over 100 years in the making

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Set us as preferred Picture a black-and-white shot of a wintry mansion where a Minion lies dying in an upstairs bedroom.A snow globe in his hand tumbles to the ground.

The Minion croaks his last words: “Oh, poop.”That scene is in “Minions & Monsters,” a delightful dingbat homage to Tinseltown set during the transition from silents to sound.The Minion is a movie star flubbing that leap.

You, a person of cinematic erudition, may be chuckling at the truth of how hard it was for early actors to speak dialogue — the Minions babble in their own made-up language — or at the delirious inaccuracy of setting “Citizen Kane” a decade and a half too soon.The children in the crowd are howling at the creature’s potty mouth.

Regardless, director Pierre Coffin has the entire audience laughing.That’s classic Hollywood.Coffin, the co-creator and voice of the Minions, was born in France to Franco-Indonesian intellectuals who only turned on the TV for old movies.

As such, he’s a step out of sync with contemporary kids’ filmmakers who tend to chase trends or resurrect the retro toys of their own youth.Coffin doesn’t pander.

He trusts in telling fast, funny, anarchic stories that reward close attention — an ancient formula that feels new simply because not that many others are doing it.Like the first silent performers, the animated Minions are mutely expressive ids designed to play like gangbusters around the globe.Their frantic energy would fit in right alongside Mack Sennett’s pie-throwers and the primitive animated shorts of Felix the Cat.

An even earlier rewind that opens the film flashes back all the way to Eadweard Muybridge and the Lumière brothers, then progresses on to Georges Méliès 1902 dazzler, “A Trip to the Moon,” whose flailing slapstick aliens could be the Minions’ second cousins.Clearl...