The Incredibles

[mmcirvin]

As far as I'm concerned, The Incredibles is the best Pixar movie ever (though bear in mind that I haven't seen Finding Nemo, which seems to be a critical favorite).

I was a bit lukewarm about it before seeing it, just because superhero parody is so overdone and most of the interesting jokes about the genre have already been made. What makes this work is mostly that the characters and their relationships are as well-realized as in the best of the straight superhero flicks (I'd compare this favorably to, say, the recent X-Men and Spider-Man movies, which were all enormously entertaining). At its heart the movie takes its characters seriously, the action is huge and exciting, and the humor is unusually grown-up for a Pixar/Disney collaboration, largely revolving around a believably portrayed marriage between two adult characters, something there really needs to be more of in movies.

The other thing that tremendously impressed me about it is the attention to visual detail in its fictional world, which is a clever amalgamation of mid-Sixties design aesthetics and an incongruous mixture of high and low tech. It's the little things. The insurance office in which the former Mr. Incredible works is a clever mixture of a 1960s gray-flannel-suit world and a circa-2000 cube farm, with posters seemingly designed by the ghost of Paul Rand and a strange retro-tech video terminal on his desk that somehow manages to be completely different from the strange retro-tech video terminals in Brazil. Edna Mode's mansion is entirely done up like a Mondrian painting; the villain hides out in the Bond-villain lair to end all Bond-villain lairs, which makes heavy use of jumpsuited henchmen, glowing magma, ellipses and Microgramma. This stuff just keeps coming. samantha2074 called it "the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow should have been".

Comments

[zmook.livejournal.com]

It was advertised like a parody, but it wasn't. It was a legit superhero story -- nobody in the film, except maybe Edna Mode, spends her time doing anything irrational, or even particularly implausible. (Well, "implausible" for a superhero story.) Sometimes it was funny, but I can't think of anything (except maybe Edna Mode) done just for laughs. And Edna was hilarious. Brad Bird is my new hero.

I need to go see Iron Giant now, which I somehow never got around to.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The fact that it's really not a parody does open it to another line of criticism I've heard: that it's just a Fantastic Four knockoff rushed into production ahead of the F4 movie. That's an exaggeration, though; the Fantastic Four references (particularly Violet's powers) are blatant enough that they're clearly supposed to be noticed, but the backstory is more X-Men-derived, the Incredibles are more literally a family with kids, and the texture of the world is more Iron Giant-ish. And while the Fantastic Four's character relationships were, I gather, considered somewhat novel at first, their powers certainly weren't.

[zmook.livejournal.com]

I've never read the FF4 books, so all I know about them is the capsule summary. But obviously the powers are all re-arranged, and the world owes more to X-Men and James Bond, Mr Incredible is clearly not Ben Grimm, and the Flash isn't even a Marvel character. I never got the feeling there was anything going on there that could only be understood with reference to some other story; thus, not a knockoff. Am I wrong?

Also, if a movie that gorgeous was "rushed into production", then I want Pixar to rush more movies.

"Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal." --Stravinsky, I believe.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Actually, that sounds completely right to me.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...This movie's world is so well-constructed that Sam and I were actually motivated to start thinking about the details of its alternate-history timeline, in an attempt to figure out the year in which it takes place. History seems to have gone somewhat differently in this world, even apart from the Supers and the "Men In Black"-ish secret technology: answering machines are commonplace items, but everything looks like it's about 1966, and the fact that the baby is named "Jack-Jack" (not to mention "Jack Parr") speaks of Camelotian influence.

The aesthetics of the Munciberg sequences gave me the idea that Helen and Bob got married in the early fifties, but the fall of the Supers came immediately after that, and the dates in Edna Mode's rant about capes suggest that that was no earlier than about 1959; so if fifteen years went by in the interim, that would place the main action no earlier than 1974 or '75.

Which is actually not too far off from the visual style of things, given that the general vibe kept giving me flashbacks to my own early childhood, when much of the Sixties Bond/tiki/Saarinen/International Style aesthetic was still hanging around. So maybe it's 1975 in a world in which the Vietnam War and the cultural upheavals of the late Sixties never happened. Maybe "Rick Dicker" actually is the alternate world's Nixon; he looks the part.

I suppose the thing that could establish this for sure is if there are any dates on the spinning newspapers, but I didn't look for them.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, and the elementary-school teacher has easy access to a concealable video camera and videotape recorder, but he's got it hooked up to what looks like an old black-and-white Philco. ...Which might seem like a deliberate anachronism, but on the other hand, for a little while around 1982 I was using an old TV that was about that primitive as a monitor for an Atari 400. Eras actually do slop together like that even in the real world.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Whereas Syndrome and his henchmen seem to be the only people in the movie whose speech is peppered with direct references to 1990s/2000s Internet-based nerd culture. Maybe Syndrome's incubated all that inside his own head.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Old school/new school clash? Like in "American Gods".

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

I agree that it's better than Finding Nemo (although often these sorts of comparisons aren't that useful); the fish-protagonists were frighteningly disney-fied, I thought, which the Incredibles seem to have mostly if not entirely escaped. The character designs in Finding Nemo generally freaked me out somewhat (exception: the sharks and seagulls), in a similar way to the short before Incredibles. Gah, fearsome characters! I know Pixar loves to do the on-the-edge-of-grotesquerie thing, but I'm not a huge fan. So I was thankful when the Incredibles escaped this (although I can't vouch for the Cars movie, yeeowtch); I enjoyed the departure into another form of iconification/simplification.
Brad Bird is especially good at naming characters, I think. 'Rick Dicker'? Brilliant. It's got that Snappy Politician feel, but also (I think you're right) is a direct reference. It's like translating from another language.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

"Cars" looks difficult to watch. Sam remarked that it looked even more like a toy commercial than most of these films do.

The short was, I thought, unremarkable, a throwback to Pixar's earliest work; I'd have thought it pretty amazing in the early Nineties. The sheep was kind of scary.

Actually, that brings up something else about The Incredibles: it's the first Pixar movie during which I didn't really spend much time looking out for computer graphics community in-jokes and moments of in-your-face technical virtuosity. They were there-- I'd heard that the food in the dinner-table scenes was the focus of a lot of work, and they obviously love water, fire and magma effects-- but the tools have become accepted enough that that's not a large part of the point any more; the thing that makes this movie is the wonderful writing and direction.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah: I think it's also what a lot of action movies wish they were. So well-composed and written.