Fans of the adorable yellow little creatures that first appeared in the animated 2010 film "Despicable Me" may have noticed that there are never any female Minions anywhere to be found, not in the first two films starring Gru and his three daughters nor in this summer's stand-alone spinoff - and one of the "Minions" co-directors has just explained why that is.
In a recent interview, Pierre Coffin, the co-director of this summer's hit alongside Kyle Balda, was asked why there were no female Minions in any of the three movies, and his answer has risen a few eyebrows in the past few days: he says that Minions are too "dumb" to be female.
"Seeing how dumb and stupid they often are, I just couldn't imagine Minions being girls," the French director told The Wrap when asked about female Minions, and fans, as well as news outlets around the world, don't seem to be all that happy with that answer.
According to AV Club, this view about female Minions has led to the film being called sexist all over the web, with the search term "sexist Minion" showing a long back and forth discussion on Twitter about how it's unfair to think that there couldn't be any dumb girl Minions as well.
‘Minions’ most sexist kids’ movie of the year? https://t.co/Ov2fMMZ3Qv for you @margotmagowan :) #gender #media pic.twitter.com/0i2TkonyD9
— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) July 13, 2015
Of course, Minions themselves are mostly asexual-looking, but they all have male names (the three main characters in this year's film are called Stuart, Kevin and Bob) and are voiced by Coffin himself, which was a moment of realization for casual fans of the characters.
In the meantime, websites like Mashable have criticized Coffin's words, as it's been deemed fairly inappropriate that, first, there are no female little yellow monsters in the film and, secondly, his response has been considered a cop-out about a fairly serious subject of representation.
Perhaps following the controversy the film's sequel will include a few female Minions.
