Kids Stuck at Home? Teach Them to Animate the Minions of Despicable Me with this Helpful Video

As millions of children are kept home from school during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, lord only knows how many parents forced into home-schooling are filling all of those kids’ empty hours. “Watching animated feature films” surely must rank highly on that list somewhere, and we wouldn’t be surprised if rentals of the Minions series in particular were through the roof right now. But you know what’s even better than watching the Minions in action? Learning to draw and animate them for yourself!

Illumination, the studio behind the Minions and Despicable Me series, has now provided the tools for kids to do exactly that. As reported by a reddit user by the name of “loucyuk,” this person reached out to Illumination founder Chris Meledandri and asked him if the studio could create a short video message for kids stuck at home because of COVID-19. The studio came through in fine fashion, providing a video from Meledandri and animator/art-director Brad Ableson, with the latter teaching kids how to draw some simple minion designs and introduce basic animation to the process. It’s not exactly a masterclass, but the intended audience is kids, after all.

So check out the below video, and direct your kids in its direction. Who knows? This could be the first step for them on the path to dreaming up original animated characters of their own.