Pierre Coffin

Pierre Coffin (birthname: Pierre-Louis Padang Coffin) is one of the key creators of Minions, both as co-director and as the memorable voice of the little yellow helpers to Gru. A rare example of an animation director and voice performer, Coffin brings an unusual international, multi-cultural perspective to an American-dominated art form. His latest feature as a voice artist is Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022), with fellow actors Steve Carell, Taraji P. Henson, Michelle Yeoh, RZA, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. 

After graduating from the famed Paris animation school, Les Gobelins, Pierre Coffin was a junior animator at Amblin’s London animation studio on We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993), executive produced by Steven Spielberg. Coffin returned to Paris and worked as an animator and animation supervisor at Paris-based CGI studio Ex Machina. Coffin worked on animated commercials in Paris for British-owned Passion Pictures, then established himself long-term at French visual effects firm Mac Guff.

As Mac Guff collaborated with Illumination Entertainment, Coffin co-directed the remarkably successful Despicable Me (2010), which launched the highest-earning animation franchise of all time, followed by Despicable Me 2 (2013), and Despicable Me 3 (2017), earning a cumulative box office of over $2.5 billion. This doesn’t include Minions (2015), with the voices of Cotton, Jon Hamm, Michael Keaton, Allison Janney, Steve Coogan, and Geoffrey Rush, which earned a worldwide gross of $1.16 billion. This, combined with the Despicable Me movies, means that Coffin has co-directed a group of movies that have cumulatively grossed worldwide nearly $3.7 billion—an astonishing average of close to $1 billion per film.