Pierre Coffin

Pierre Coffin is an animator who became a voice actor almost by accident. Trained at the Gobelins school in Paris, he worked at Amblimation in London on We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story, then spent years at the French computer animation house Ex Machina as animator, animation supervisor and eventually director, with later stints at Mac Guff and Passion Pictures Paris. In 2010 he co-directed Despicable Me with Chris Renaud, and somebody had to make noises for the small yellow characters in the background while the film was being built.

He is still making them. Coffin is the primary voice of effectively every Minion, which means most of the dialogue in a Minions film is one Frenchman layered on top of himself at different speeds and pitches, improvising a language assembled from French, Spanish, Italian and English scraps. It is a genuinely odd piece of craft, and it turned a design gag into one of the most profitable characters in animation.

He co-directed the first four films in the franchise and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for Despicable Me 2, with the Kids Family Award at the tenth Seiyu Awards recognising the voice work. Whatever you think of the merchandising, a director who has kept performing his own background babble for fifteen years is not treating the job cynically.