Biography of legendary director Pierre Coffin

Pierre-Louis Padang Coffin was born on 1 November 1967 in France in the small town of Limoges. He is a recognised French voice actor, director and animator.

He is also the director of animated films in a series called "Ugly I", he was the one who voiced the invented to them minion charactersand invented their way of speaking. His career continues to this day, having started in 1993. Pierre is the winner of the Seiyu Awards 2016.

How Coffen started his career

Coffin was born into the family of Yves Coffin, who was a diplomat and Nh. Dini, a literary woman from Indonesia. The actor also has a sister named Marie-Claire Lintang, who was born in 1961 and now lives in Canada. During his childhood, the family had to make many moves, in particular they ended up in Japan and Cambodia, but eventually found refuge in the suburbs of the French capital in the 1970s. According to the father, only danger and negativity come from the TV set, and for this reason, the man forbade his children to go near it. Pierre read books, dabbled in drawing, and listened to music to keep himself busy. He never thought that in the future he would devote himself to acting and other artistic endeavours. However, he had gifted companions who were better with the pen than he was and thus forced him to improve.

For four years, starting in 1985, Pierre studied the intricacies of the film industry at Paris-Sorbonne. After that, he was obliged to serve, but at some point decided to drop out in order to take the entrance exams for the Gobelins animation school in the capital. He successfully did so and enrolled on a 2D animation course where he studied for three years, starting in 1990. He got his first job at 2D Amblin studio in London. His debut project was a film called "We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story", on which he worked as a junior animator. He then returned to his homeland, where he became a freelance animator at CGI studio Ex Machina. Pierre was later promoted to animation supervisor.

He started his career as a film director in 1997 with the short film Pings. He created the characters of Stanley and Pat for a TV series of the same name shown on TF1. And in 2010, he teamed up with Chris Renaud to complete an animated feature from the company's "Ugly Me" franchise "Universal. Later from this cartoon decided to make a sequel and added two more parts, as well as a spin-off "Ugly I". The cartoon epic ended with the release of "Minions" in 2015. A little below will be more detailed about the last project, which was voiced together by the author himself.

"Ugly Me and the Minions.

In all likelihood, you and your children have watched one of these animated cartoons. Surely there was a question - in what language they communicate. Some of their words are easy to understand and do not require any additional explanations, but there are moments, when you just hear a list of unidentified sounds. What is the name of this language and whether a person has the opportunity to start learning it, and who is its author. It will be described in more detail below.

Pierre Coffin, who created the Minion language, later told journalists that he created it literally on the fly, and took knowledge from those languages as a basis, Hindi, Chinese, and so on.. According to him, the prepositions and phrases used were those that can describe a phenomenon or an object by means of sound rather than its concepts. In fact, it can be said that all the languages the author used are present. Given that the minions were loyal to their masters all over the planet during their existence, it was logical that their language - a mixture of foreign words.

Before starting to voice the animated film, Coffin conducted a small test, which showed by example the sound of the minions' manner of speaking. The narration of Pierre's speech was recorded by producer Christopher Meledandri. After listening to the recording, Coffin asked Christopher to give his opinion on what had been recorded. To which he replied, that the creator of the animation would have to do the voiceover. That's what happened in the end. In "Minions" the authorship of the voice-over belongs to the whole, while in "Ugly Me" only a few characters. But the creators did not want to stop at the elementary mixing of languages: it was too elementary. The sound of words was deliberately distorted to resemble the conversation of a small child. The capital letters of words were changed very often.

In some places in the cartoon the words fit the situation, but in some moments it is not so at all. And if to speak in general, a couple of languages are mixed, some intentional mistakes are added and the phrase can be used.
The logic of language use cannot be traced in this case. Therefore, each of the inhabitants of our planet can recognise a few words from their native speech. For example, words such as "battle" and "congress" and "trouble" have been borrowed from our language.

Officially, the language spoken by the Minions has no name, unless it's the language of "banana" or, actually, mignon. It is known that Gru understands the language of the minions, but he cannot say anything himself. In addition, the minions are able to understand English speech, but they are unable to express themselves.

If one were to make a dictionary of the Mignon language, it would be easy enough, for they communicate rather little, and their conversations are mostly about food. But Pierre Coffin said that when they are not busy working, they chat about treats or Greek philosophy.
Because in that case, if you want to enjoy the events of an animated cartoon with your children againNow you have to listen, and then you may be able to understand a few more words. And if suddenly you are able to translate a phrase from the Minion language to your child, he or she will be delighted to the core.

And for all this we should say to the magnificent director and a real master of voice-over Pierre Coffin. And we should not forget about his other works worthy of attention.