In the first trailer for “Angry Birds 3”, released this week, the island’s hot-tempered hero Red stands frozen amid a squall of feathers and squawks. His three chicks – Junio, Planeador and little Oli – are not battling green pigs but staging a domestic mutiny of tantrums and mischief. The scene, which Paramount Pictures unveiled ahead of a December 2026 release, swaps slingshot warfare for the quieter chaos of fatherhood, a pivot that, viewed from production circles in Los Angeles, signals a deliberate maturation of a franchise that began as a mobile-phone game in 2009.

That same impulse to deepen a cartoon universe without losing its madcap core animates “Minions & Monsters”, the eighth Despicable Me film, which opens in North American theatres on 1 July. Director Pierre Coffin drops the yellow, pill-shaped henchmen into 1920s Old Hollywood, where they briefly become movie stars before accidentally unleashing real monsters on the world. Early critical reaction aggregated on Rotten Tomatoes shows all fourteen initial reviews rating the film “fresh”. Guy Lodge of Variety describes it as “such a weird, willful popular entertainment … it’s fully, madly moviosa”, a verdict that, read from London or Mexico City, captures the franchise’s ability to hold goodwill through sheer absurdity.

That absurdity has always been linguistic as much as visual. The Minions speak Minionese, a constructed babble that Coffin, who also voices the characters, built by improvising sounds and then weaving in words from English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. “Bello” means hello, “gelato” is ice cream, “kanpai” a toast. The result, as linguists and fans note, is a language without a homeland that nonetheless feels familiar to audiences from Kuala Lumpur to Buenos Aires, its meaning carried by intonation, gesture and context. The new film’s 1920s setting adds silent-era slapstick to that formula, while the Angry Birds, for their part, are betting that the universal experience of raising small, chaotic creatures will translate across borders without a single subtitle.

Both pictures land in a month crowded with franchise extensions. July alone brings a live-action “Moana”, a sixth “Evil Dead” instalment, and a new Spider-Man chapter, alongside Tamil-language thrillers and Christopher Nolan’s Homeric epic. Yet the two animated returns stand apart for the way they are quietly recalibrating their own mythologies. The Minions’ pre-Gru Hollywood adventure and Red’s discovery that “criar a sus hijos puede ser incluso más complicado que salvar Isla Pájaro” – raising his children may be harder than saving Bird Island – are not reboots but gentle expansions, trading origin stories for the next stage of life. As the Minions might say, tulaliloo ti amo: we love you, in every language at once.