You want to find the right balance, but you have to have the Minions because people responded so much to them. We wanted to find a story that would make the Minions more a part of the story than they were in the first movie. In this one, as you know, they're disappearing. What's happening to the Minions? We made them a much bigger part of the movie in those terms.

Ken has three kids. I have three kids. The first movie was basically the story of our lives. Every man is kind of a villain until he then has kids. And then, they soften us up.

When we wrote that scene about the Sleepy Kittens where he's reading the storybook to the kids, it's like we've had to read these stupid books to our kids, and we all want to just tell our kids, "This is really bad. Don't you know that? Can't you see that?"

I would say it was the directors. We have to give credit to the directors for this, because in the script, we just said, "Gru's Minions do this or do that" in the initial draft. And then, they came up with the characters' design and the philosophical concept of the Minions. And then, we started writing to that. We have to give a lot of credit to them.

You want to find the right balance, but you have to have the Minions because people responded so much to them. We wanted to find a story that would make the Minions more a part of the story than they were in the first movie. In this one, as you know, they're disappearing. What's happening to the Minions? We made them a much bigger part of the movie in those terms.

But the world of Despicable Me is such a cartoony world. It is much more Looney Tunes than I would say the Pixar world or those movies. We can get away with a little more, although I know some people responded negatively to the Iron Maiden beat in the first movie where it looks like Edith.

We have never pushed it far enough to know, but we decided 47 percent was the right percentage. You can quote us on that. It's very mathematical.