Illumination

Illumination is an American film and animation studio founded by Chris Meledandri in 2007 and owned by Universal Pictures.

Good Qualities

 * 1) They are very good at animating in all of their films, as their films are inspired by the Popeye shorts, which is very noticeable in many of their films, especially Despicable Me.
 * 2) They have made many good films, such as the Despicable Me trilogy, The Secret Life of Pets, Sing along with its sequel, and Minions: The Rise of Gru.
 * 3) All three of the mainline Despicable Me films were great, however the third one wasn't quite as good as the first two, as they actually had a very original idea.
 * 4) As well as them being good at animating, they are also decent script writers and are really great at picking actors for their films, except maybe the 2023 Mario movie, where they "replaced" most of the cast with celebrities and reduced Charles Martinet to cameo roles (most likely as Wario and Waluigi) for no other reason than to increase profits.
 * 5) *However, the Mario movie (nor any footage, for that matter) isn't out yet as we still need to see how the voice acting is gonna go. Even then, some of the choices for some characters were praised (Jack Black, Charlie Day, and Seth Rogen in this case) while others are more mixed (Chris Pratt is notable in this one).
 * 6) Some of their films have some really good use of humor, even though some of them mostly consists of toilet humor (though thankfully they're starting to tone down the toilet humor nowadays).
 * 7) Their films generally have likable characters, especially Gru who was a sympathetic character that became a villain due to being neglected by his parents (who revealed to have divorced in the third film, and was separated from his twin brother) and friends during childhood (although every installment after Despicable Me 2 retconned it by confirming that Gru was always a villain or that he was interested in villainy since his childhood).
 * 8) They have a pretty good relationship with Nintendo, as they announced a Mario movie which is scheduled to be released on April 7, 2023. In fact, it even led to the point that Chris Meledandri, the producer of every single film from Illumination and CEO and became the Outside Director of Nintendo. If this goes well, they may consider having them make movies about Nintendo's other properties (like Pikmin, Splatoon, Kirby, Wario, Star Fox, Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Yoshi, etc), with rumors speculating a Mario movie spinoff in development centered around Donkey Kong. Heck, even Charlie Day expressed interest in wanting to do a Luigi's Mansion movie.
 * 9) Most like many other great iconic animation studios, including someone who went defunct in 2021, their animation is now starting to improve a lot, as the new Sing 2 has much better animation that is comparable to that of a live-action film.
 * 10) Their songs are really catchy and cool, such as Happy by Pharrell Williams, on the topic of that, they have a good relationship with them, to the point that a film from him is in development.
 * 11) Before Minions made the characters unfunny, the minions themselves were somewhat clever and had some pretty good albeit uncanny character designs that fits their weirdness very well.
 * 12) Their CEO, Chris Meledandri, is a very good person in real life, although he was responsible for many of the flaws in most of their films.
 * 13) They mocked NFTs on their official Minions account since NFTs are harmful to the environment.
 * 14) Their opening logos are pretty funny. The best variation was used in Sing 2, where the Minions sing the company's name as the camera slowly zooms out to reveal the text above them.
 * 15) They treat their employees really good unlike most animation studios, except for the Minions movie, where the film was treated badly due to the characters' success and hint in the post credits scene of Despicable Me 2.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Despite all of the good qualities, they are somewhat infamous for making predictable decisions, releasing five bad movies, and still have enough bad qualities to have a page on the sister wiki.

Movies With Their Own Pages

 * 1) Despicable Me (2010)
 * 2) Despicable Me 2 (2013)
 * 3) The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
 * 4) Sing (2016)
 * 5) Despicable Me 3 (2017)
 * 6) Sing 2 (2021)
 * 7) Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022)

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