'Mooned (2023)' is the latest 'Despicable Me'/'Minions' short from Illumination. It plays in front of 'Migration (2023)', one of the studio's few non-Minion-starring features, and its inclusion forces you to endure those increasingly inescapable, annoying little yellow grubs even though you quite literally did not sign up for any of their nonsense. I saw the piece in 4DX, a so-called 'special format' that 'enhances' the cinematic experience by shaking the seats and jabbing you in the back and spraying you with water and blasting you with wind and pumping strange smells into the auditorium, which definitely made it far more uncomfortable than it otherwise would have been. After all, the bulk of the narrative involves Vector getting violently injured by his own ineptitude; let's just say that the 4DX programing ensures we can empathise with him a little bit too much. There's very little to comment on if you divorce the film from the format in which I viewed it, as it's a generic and mostly humorless effort that doesn't have any real charm to it. It's not terrible, but it's just entirely uninspiring. It doesn't help that every character we see is annoying in one form or another. It's fine, I guess, but certainly nothing more.
