![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Incredibles
Nov. 14th, 2004 09:53 pmAs 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.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
samantha2074 called it "the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow should have been".
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".