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Despicable Me's Minions Make Cameo in Kami-Usagi Rope Anime
posted on by Egan Loo
The title characters from this summer's American CG movie Minions are making a 2D cameo in the Japanese television anime series Kami-Usagi Rope: Warau Asa ni wa Fuku Kitarutte Majissu ka!? on Friday. Bob, Kevin, and Stuart — the banana-loving creatures who would eventually become underlings of the villain-turned-hero Gru in Despicable Me — meet the paper rabbit Rope at Rope's family gocery shop.
Yūji Uchiyama created the Kami-Usagi Rope anime as a series of comedy shorts at the Oscar-winning studio Robot. Kami-Usagi Rope: Warau Asa ni wa Fuku Kitarutte Majissu ka!? now runs as a segment in the Fuji TV morning program Mezamashi TV. The anime franchise also spawned a feature film in 2012.
In Kami-Usagi Rope, a high school rabbit named Rope and his quick-tempered squirrel friend Akira have random conversations as they walk through their working-class neighborhood to the movie theater.
Uchiyama, directs, writes, and designs Kami-Usagi Rope himself. Pierre Coffin, the co-director of the Despicable Me and Minions films, voices the Minion characters in those films and in Friday's Kami-Usagi Rope episode.
This is actually the second collaboration between the Minions and Kami-Usagi Rope; the characters also collaborated to promote the 2013 film Despicable Me 2. Another director, Tim Burton (Alice in Wonderland, Batman, Edward Scissorhands), made his own anime voice-acting debut as a dog in an earlier Kami-Usagi Rope episode in 2013. Burton voiced the role during a 2012 trip to promote his Frankenweenie film in Japan.
Similarly, Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean) voiced a pirate in the Doraemon anime in 2007, and the Terminator became the first Hollywood movie character to make an official Doraemon cameo when he faced the robot cat from the future in 2009.
Robot also animated Kunio Katō's La Maison en Petits Cubes (Tsumiki no Ie), the short that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2009. The studio then animated the 2009 Ring of Gundam short, the last Gundam anime that Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino created and directed.
Source: Eiga Natalie
