Review 01 - The Incredibles

I’ve made a tactical decision to start with this movie, both for the purposes of using it as a pilot review and because I like it. Very often I can find myself in the position of defending movies everybody else hates and offering harsh critique to movies that the masses love. This happens because - speaking strictly outside of genre - there are only three types of movies – Good movies, Fun movies, and those that manage to capture both aspects. Good is an academic term – the cinematography was excellent, the acting believable, the lighting and effects done realistically, and so forth. Fun is the complete un-academic end of things – how it appeals to your need for explosions or martial-arts beat downs, or hot girls in tight leather, and so forth along this angle.
The Incredibles is a film that successfully falls into both categories. I’ll start with the fun aspect of it, because it is very easy to understand those qualities. It’s a movie about superheroes, which is guaranteed to draw in the geeks. It’s an original realm, so it doesn’t carry the responsibility of accurately representing a generation of comics that could have come before it. There are explosions, fights, and everything a superhero enthusiast can expect from the genre.

As a sum of its parts, the movie owes its fun factor to its goodness. A typical superhero franchise structures the first film around the origins, as we’ve seen time and time again. In this movie they don’t – they jump right in, using a newsreel style interview to introduce the characters, leading straight into action. In this film the origin story isn’t the interesting part, because Brad Bird took a unique approach to the script. Instead of it being the tale of a man becoming a hero, it’s the tale of a hero becoming a parent, where the question posed is “how does a man live as both a superhero and a dad?”
I think we can safely say this was the first superhero movie to ask that question, and it is the family aspect that makes the movie enjoyable for everyone. Parents can identify with the struggles of Bob and Helen; kids can identify with the children Violet and Dash. Realistic characterization makes you take the characters seriously, and thus you will come to sympathize.

The movie also succeeds in an artistic fashion. The design of the houses, the retro-modern feel of the setting, and even the facial structure of the people all give a sort of pop-art feel. It creates a very 1960’s suburbia experience, a time period which was incidentally a significant peak for the first fans of the superhero genre.
Essentially, I think what serves the film so well is the setting, that retro suburbia feel, a world that looks old fashioned and is driven by old-fashioned ideals but is smack in the center of a superhero generation. The story itself uses an old-fashioned convention – the singular villain, a megalomaniac with a secret fortress and a plan for world domination. Modern superhero movies tend to use modernized concepts of villainy, which at times can overcomplicate things. The atmosphere in The Incredibles has such a ‘James Bond’ feel to it, right down to the Bond-influenced musical score that underlies the film flawlessly.

Personally, I believe the key reason this film is both good and fun is the medium. Computer-generated animation is by no means a new venue of filmmaking. Story-telling through pure animation gives filmmakers the ability to do something unique - a seamless blend of character and fantasy. With live action superhero films, we enjoy them because of their fantastical nature, but the state of the genre these days is one subject to harsh critique. We look at movies like Spider-Man or X-Men and we can point out exactly which moments are computer-generated and where they flow back into actual stuntman. With animation and CG animation the boundaries are erased. The characters interact with their environment one hundred percent - the animated world is where fantasy can take a more successful leap. The actions of superheroes become acceptable and dare I say ‘believable’ because you’ve already suspended your disbelief with the detail in your mind that you’re watching animation.

Being a fan of this specific genre in particular, I had been hoping for a while following the movie’s release that there would be news of a sequel, or a prequel as I felt it would be more structurally interesting. To see the entire gallery of these heroes in their golden years a la Justice League would be right up my alley. Granted, there is so little room for originality in comic book heroes anymore, since it seems as though every interesting superpower available to the human imagination has been exploited, and those that haven’t border on the absurd or obnoxious. But I will cling to that hope, that some day in some form Brad Bird will bring his fantastic family of heroes back.