Minions

Appearance

A rambunctious bunch of simple-minded homunculi, Minions are a similar size and shape, but have unique features to tell them apart, such as height, number of eyes, roundness or secondary features such as hair, eye/pupil size or clothing.

Minions wear metal goggles accommodating their number of eyes, blue overalls with Gru's emblem on the front, and small black gloves.

Minions possess few additional physiological characteristics; with a crack and a shake, they can double as glow sticks for activities in the dark, such as going through ventilation ducts. They additionally can survive without air, as one is seen in outer space without oxygen in Despicable Me.

Though there are several hundred minions, there are only about forty-eight possible combinations of height and build (short and chubby, medium, tall and thin), hair (tall buzz-cut, short buzz-cut, sprout, combed, spread out, bald), and eyes (one, two). One-eyed minions are always almost all small, although a tall one-eyed minion appears in a promotional artwork. Tall Minions are all with Sprout-Cut Hair.

Personality

They are fiercely loyal to Gru and Dr. Nefario and extremely eager to please, willingly helping with any evil plans, but at the same time they are friendly and fun-loving. Despite being relatively simple-minded, they are capable of building weapons, operating those weapons, using computers, and even driving.

They express themselves through actions, not words: their "language" is fairly basic, they speak in a strange jabber combined with various human languages - evident in some (roughly) English words such as "Banana", "Bapples" (basically "Apple" with "B"), "Potato", as well as Spanish-sounding words like "para tú" (roughly "for you") and "la boda" (means "marriage"), French (poulet tikka masala, et pis c'est tout), Russian words such as "да" (Da"), and Korean words such as "Hana(하나), Dul(둘), Sae (From Set [셋]" means One, Two, Three), and many other languages. Hence, their language is incomprehensible to most humans, though they do understand English. It is also possible to isolate elements of Japanese from their speech patterns.

Minions love bananas and apples (or "bapples", as they call them), and the mere sight of one of these fruits can result in complete chaos. They also enjoy fine arts and find anything having to do with buttocks extremely funny. There are few things these little guys do not find funny. They also love spitting, frog legs, bunnies, and building things. They love trying new things and presumably they also love potatoes (they mention potatoes on occassion.) They dislike being unsure of themselves, and when Gru leaves questions unanswered. Their sense of humor is somewhat childish, if not silly, laughing from the sound of bubbles in a water filter, scanning their own butt in a copy machine and when mentioned words such as "botton".

Minions also enjoy playing, especially with Agnes, Edith, and Margo, as seen in the toilet paper fight scene.

Language

Minionese is the native language of the Minions.

Minionese appears to be a polyglot, which borrows words and - such as they are - grammatical rules from many different languages. Minionese contains some elements of English, with words like "Banana", "Bapple" (apple), and "Potato". (Minions are, as has been shown many times, particularly obsessed with food.) Minionese also contains words from other languages such as Spanish, French and Russian. Also, some words such as "Papoy" (toy) are unique to Minionese.

No non-Minion character has ever been heard to speak Minionese directly, although some characters (most notably Gru) can understand it anyway. The Minions can also understand English although none of them have ever been heard to actually speak it.

All of the Minionese heard in the films was created and voiced by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud.