There is something quite amazing and magical about watching a persons life being transformed by the power of being loved and accepted by others – When People Love Us, We Are Transformed.
After watching Despicable Me 2 for the 6th time with my sons I started to wonder why exactly we all seem to love it so much. I mean think about it, we have watched it 6 times and the movie is 98 minutes long which puts us as having spent 588 minutes of our lives on this movie. So I started thinking – is Despicable Me 2 really worth the 588 minutes of my life I have given it? Why yes it is!
For starters, who doesn’t love those Minions? Seriously, they are so cute and hilarious with all of their funny noises and behaviors. This movie has me and my sons laughing over and over again. But then I thought, “There has to be more to why we love this movie….what is it exactly?” Then it hit me.
A huge part of the story in both of the Despicable Me movies is watching Gru, the main character, learn his true identity and self-worth through being loved by others who see him for who he truly is.
We see his character go from a cold-hearted villain who is mean and is literally stealing the moon from the sky, to a man transformed by the love of three little girls he adopts in the first movie.
When we are experiencing the love of another, and I am talking about deep love that moves us – a natural response to this kind of love when never experienced before is to go on defense.
And defense, at times, looks exactly like what we see happen to Gru – the more the love of others (specifically his three daughters and the character Lucy in the second movie) challenges his current view of himself (his identity, self-worth, etc.) the more his relational fears surface. The closer Lucy gets to Gru, the more we see flashbacks to Gru’s childhood. We see Gru coming up against the “demons” in his past – being made fun of, seeming unloveable to all humans, unaccepted, and fearing rejection. It appears that the more he is loved and delighted in by his daughters and Lucy, who ultimately becomes Gru’s wife by the end of this movie, the more his “demons” seem to rear their heads. Ultimately Gru has to choose to trust their love of him, embrace the changed man he has become, and no longer allow the “demons” of his past to rule his current life.