Super-villain Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) plots to steal the moon with the help of his little minions in the computer-animated comedy Despicable Me. (Universal Pictures/Illumination Entertainment)

For my money, Steve Carell’s greatest cartoon voice work remains his performance as one half of The Ambiguously Gay Duo on Saturday Night Live. That said, he’s also fiendishly funny in the new animated 3-D treat Despicable Me. For this cunning little family comedy, Carell gives voice to Gru, a bald, needle-nosed super-villain with a daffy Eastern European accent and an even daffier plot to steal the moon.

Despicable Me is an inspired comedy, a mash-up of the Bond thrillers and the kids musical Annie.

Gru, an old-school baddie of James Bond proportions, sees a lunar heist as the crowning achievement of his crooked career. There are only a few things standing in his way. There’s a lack of funds for the project, meaning he has to wheedle yet another loan out of the Bank of Evil (formerly Lehman Brothers). Then there’s his rival, Vector (Jason Segel), a young upstart with cooler weapons, who threatens to beat him at his scheme. These obstacles are nothing, however, next to the three diabolically cute orphans who are determined that Gru is going to be their dad.

Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Emily (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher) are inmates of an orphanage run by Miss Hattie (Kristen Wiig), a steely Southern magnolia who forces her charges to sell cookies door-to-door to pay for their upkeep. When Gru discovers that Vector has a sweet tooth, he decides to adopt the girls and use them to infiltrate his rival’s lair. He’s after a shrink ray, a weapon integral to his moon theft, which he swiped from the North Koreans – only to have it stolen from him, in turn, by Vector.

The girls, however, have their own secret weapon – six, in fact. They’re those big, innocent-child eyes, the type that can reduce even a stone-hearted master criminal to a puddle of sentimental goo.

Actually, we suspect from the beginning that, belying his gorilla torso and those spidery legs, Gru is really a softie inside. Why else would he employ a crew of lovably bumbling little minions who look like yellow pellets with overalls and speak in squeaky gibberish? And surely it isn’t just for his expertise that Gru still keeps around the geriatric mad scientist Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand), a half-deaf old coot who is likely to come up with a fart gun when he was asked to create a dart gun.

Despicable Me is the first feature from Illumination Entertainment, the new animation division of NBC Universal. Illumination is headed by former 20th Century Fox exec Chris Meledandri, whose past credits include The Simpsons Movie, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. There’s a little bit of all of those pictures in Despicable Me, from Segel’s nerdy Vector, who echoes The Simpsons’ Bill Gates parody, Artie Ziff, to the chipmunk-like voices and antics of the scene-stealing minions.

The biggest influence, however, is Horton Hears a Who. The screenwriters for Despicable Me, Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, are the same team who adapted the Dr. Seuss book. Here, elaborating on a story idea by Spanish animator Sergio Pablos, they bring both the zany verve and gentle spirit they displayed in that 2008 film. Despicable Me may be a movie about villainy, but it’s so light and sweet that it makes the recently released Toy Story 3 seem like social realism by comparison.

Orphans, left to right, Edith (Dana Gaier), Agnes (Elsie Fisher) and Margo (Miranda Cosgrove) give Gru a taste of parenthood in Despicable Me. (Universal Pictures/Illumination Entertainment)

Paul and Daurio aren’t dealing with a source as original as Seuss this time out, but Despicable Me still rates as an inspired comedy – if only because it’s a mash-up of the Bond thrillers with the kids musical Annie. (The music here, though, is an urban beat from hip-hop producer Pharrell Williams.) The computer animation, meanwhile, takes its inspiration from the gleefully morbid cartoons of Charles Addams, with a passing nod to Mad magazine’s Antonio Prohias. Carter Goodrich, who designed the characters for Ratatouille, again does wonderful work, whether it’s creating the geeky Vector (with his Moe Howard haircut and fanny pack) or those nubbin-nosed, saucer-eyed orphans.

The backdrops are equally witty, especially the contrasts between Gru’s gloomy, Addams-like mansion and Vector’s sleek, ’60s-futuristic digs. Intentionally or not, directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud also put the whole 3-D trend in its place. Their cartoon has more goofy fun with the technology than any 3-D movie since the 1950s. In the process, they show it up for what it still is: not a cinematic game changer, pace James Cameron, but a gimmick.

The movie indulges in some shameless NBC product placement, but on the plus side, it also draws on the network’s stable of comic talent. As well as Saturday Night Live’s protean Wiig (doing a great Delta Burke impersonation), there’s 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer (as a nose-picking carny and an obese American tourist) and Carell’s Office co-star Mindy Kaling (as the tourist’s wife).

Then there’s Carell, whose innate likeability makes him both the most unlikely of bad guys and one we warm to instantly. Besides, in an age when the real super-villains are in high finance, there’s something quaint about a guy who just wants to control the Earth’s tides.

In what is shaping up to be Hollywood’s crappiest summer in recent memory, this movie couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Unlike Gru, we’re not asking for the moon at this point — just some fun, frothy entertainment. Despicable Me delivers the goods.

Despicable Me opens July 9.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.