Why ‘The Incredibles’ Still Feels So Super 16 Years Later
By Josh Spiegel/March 13, 2020 8:00 am EST
(Infinity and Beyond is a regular bi-weekly column documenting the 25-year filmography of Pixar Animation Studios, film by film. In today’s column, writer Josh Spiegel highlights The Incredibles.)For nearly a decade, Pixar Animation Studios was an island among animation studios. It worked with the Walt Disney Company on having its films distributed and its characters and worlds turned into theme-park and merchandising fodder. But its films were very homegrown in every possible respect. It took until their fourth film, Monsters, Inc., for the studio to have a film not directed or co-directed by John Lasseter. But their first five were all made by people who’d worked at the studio since before the release of Toy Story. Another common thread in those five films is that humans were part of the overall stories being told, but never the main attraction. And the last common thread was that Pixar’s films weren’t driven by a single author; even Lasseter had co-directors, and Toy Story, as excellent a film as it was, had a script credited to a handful of writers. That would all change with Pixar’s sixth feature. It was from the mind of someone who hadn’t started at Pixar, it was written and directed by the same person, and…oh, yes. The Incredibles was a film entirely about humans.
No Capes
Those details are important to consider because they no doubt fueled the creative direction of the story that really inflamed Bird’s creative mind. Bird’s deal with Warner Bros., as noted in David Price’s The Pixar Touch, was coming at the cost of the time he could spend with his family, and he had to weigh whether or not he could pursue his artistic ambitions while being a present, decent, and good father. Yet the struggle in balancing the personal and professional would become a jumping-off point for the final film and its characters.For a film about a nuclear family of superheroes, each of the characters would essentially embody archetypes within each of their roles. The perception of the paternal member of the family unit (at least, the 50s-era stereotype of a dad) would mean that Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) would be super-strong. The mother, who often feels as if she has to be in multiple places at once, would be Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), able to stretch her limbs to impossible lengths. Their eldest child would be a teenage girl, awkward and unsure of herself. So Violent (Sarah Vowell) would have the power to make herself invisible. Her younger brother, Dash (Spencer Fox), would be super-speedy to reflect his ultra-fast-paced personality. And their youngest sibling, Jack-Jack, would be the infant terror to end all terrors, with a slew of powers only revealed in the finale at the most hilariously inopportune moment.In many ways, The Incredibles would have to be a major leap forward for Pixar. Though the film was full of science-fiction derring-do, it was a deliberately human story. There were no talking toys, no talking monsters, or the like. The characters were human, and the animation would have to be up to snuff, especially since those humans had extreme abilities and gifts. And The Incredibles would be, like any superhero film worth its salt, fairly violent if not actually gory. But when Bird, in the spring of 2000, pitched Lasseter, the idea touched a nerve and Bird was contracted to join the studio for multiple projects.
These Guys Are Not Like Those Guys
The Incredibles makes it clear within its first minutes that this will not be the same kind of Pixar movie. Though the early marketing campaign leaned on physical humor – a teaser trailer attached 18 months in advance to the release of Finding Nemo showcased a different version of a gag in the finished film, in which Mr. Incredible/Bob Parr tries without success to fit into his super-suit, which he’s now too fat for thanks to the onslaught of middle age – The Incredibles begins by telling its audience that this is a film that will earn its PG rating. (Notably, this was the first Pixar film to receive that rating.)Mixed in with the opening credits, we see old talking-head footage of some of the core players: Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl and Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson, who became the first black actor with even a supporting role in a Pixar film), each talking about their lives as superheroes and whether the allure of an average life appeals to them. And then, immediately after the title is displayed on screen coupled with Michael Giacchino’s delightfully retro score, we hear gunshots. The ensuing action setpiece – in which we gradually realize that Mr. Incredible is performing intense acts of heroism mere minutes before his wedding to Elastigirl – is both thrilling and somehow more complex and adult than anything previous in the Pixar filmography.The Incredibles, like the previous Pixar films, is largely dominated by its male perspective, though the action takes a lengthy pause in the first half. (At the time, The Incredibles, clocking in at 115 minutes, was also the longest film from Pixar.) Among other things, one of Mr. Incredible’s rescues in the opening section comes back to bite him, as he frustratedly realizes that a suicidal man he saved from plummeting to his death did not actually want to be saved. The ensuing lawsuit and others like it leads the American government to ban superheroes and force them to live real lives. 15 years later, Bob Parr, as he’s known to everyone, suffers through a dead-end job at an insurance company, where he tries his best to help out clients in ways that infuriate his boss. It’s only when a mysterious woman (Elizabeth Pena) spots him and Frozone stopping a robbery in secret that Bob is given the chance to be Mr. Incredible again, though with unexpected results.
Celebrating Mediocrity
The Incredibles is among very few Pixar films, in that it’s not trying to make you cry. (This is an important distinction: there are Pixar films that try and fail to make you cry, Pixar films that make you cry, and those that aren’t even trying. This is the latter.) Though Bob has to grapple with his mid-life crisis, and the desperate angst he feels at having to hide his own special gifts, even when he believes his family is in mortal peril at the hands of an evil supervillain, Brad Bird isn’t aiming for tearjerking pathos. The Incredibles, much more than its predecessors, is aiming more for social commentary than anything else. You can look at films like Toy Story and Finding Nemo as commenting on the emotional pitfalls of parenthood. But The Incredibles is about the commodification of distinct skillsets.Bob Parr is gifted with super-strength, even as he’s forced not to use it. Conversely, he lives in a society that has graduation ceremonies for fourth-graders. As he rants to his wife Helen/Elastigirl, “They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity!” In moments such as these, as well as those in which the bad guy Syndrome (Jason Lee) reveals his nefarious plot to fool the world into thinking he’s a superhero in part because he’s eliminated all the true supers and created a bad guy only he can defeat, it’s hard not to wonder if we’re hearing directly from the brain of Brad Bird, in ways that caused minor controversy because of how his characters seemed culled from the work of the right-wing writer Ayn Rand.Rand is best associated with Objectivism, a philosophical concept that sees man as a heroic being whose happiness is his sole moral purpose. Bird, for his own part, has never hesitated in shooting down any direct connections, dubbing it “ridiculous” in multiple interviews. Whether or not the comparison is intended or direct, there are clear signs of Bird’s own personality shooting through. When Syndrome describes his plan to not only show off his “powers”, but to turn those powers into products people can purchase, he says, “When everyone is super, no one will be.” (This theory is echoed by Dash early in the film, when he asks his mom why he can’t try out for track and field by using his actual super-speed. In response to Helen saying, “Everyone’s special”, he mutters, “Which is another way of saying no one is.”)
Run As Fast As You Can
It would not be hard to parse through the messages of The Incredibles and find some flaws. (For one: in the 15-year period when there are no superheroes publicly doing their duty, there are apparently also not any supervillains, because the world seems to be spinning perfectly naturally. If there aren’t any villains, what would heroes need to fight against?) And it’s also easy to perceive the push against supers using their powers as a strawman argument in a fantastical film where superpowers are intended to be incredibly cool. (It’s not entirely clear who exactly wants supers to not use their powers after that opening montage where we see politicians complaining about them.)Yet all this can be left aside, as can any wonder of Bird’s politics. (At best, we can file it under “Two things can be true” that Bird’s arguments in films such as this and others that we’ll get to in this series later line up with Objectivist principles, and that he doesn’t declare himself a Randian in any way.) Why? Because whatever else is true, Brad Bird knows how to craft eye-popping, remarkably exciting action sequences. Bird would end up as the first major director from Pixar to make the leap to live-action in the 2010s, and watching The Incredibles, it’s easy to understand why. It’s not just that each of the major characters has their own distinct power, thus enabling him and his animation team to build setpieces centered around those powers. It’s that the setpieces have stakes within them, raising tension. It’s that Bird knows how to choreograph animated action, allowing the camera to move fluidly, but not impossibly. The standout comes in the back half, once Elastigirl and the Parr kids, Violet and Dash, are stuck on Nomanisan, trying to reunite with Mr. Incredible. At this point in the film, Mr. Incredible has realized that Syndrome is a grown-up version of an old superfan of his, once named Buddy. As a kid, Buddy was desperate for approval from Mr. Incredible, and clearly a whiz kid when it came to building gadgets in place of having innate powers. But Mr. Incredible spurned him, Buddy chose to stew in his bitterness and resentment, and then he transformed himself into a villain with his own private island, straight out of a James Bond movie. (Giacchino’s delightful score, his first major feature work to boot, is a throwback to the work of Bond composer John Barry, who Bird had tried to get for The Incredibles.)Now, the Incredibles family is at risk, with each member split up in separate areas of the island. Dash has been instructed by his mother, however reluctantly, that he needs to run as fast as he can. That request could sound desperate or frightening, but not to Dash. When he’s beset upon by some of Syndrome’s lackeys, he follows her advice, and the ensuing chase is thrilling and joyous, because Dash is finally getting to feel what it’s like to use his powers at maximum effort. Syndrome is undoubtedly one of the better villains from a Pixar film – it should be noted here that Pixar films largely do not boast truly memorable villains, sometimes eschewing them altogether – but even his threats can’t dampen the excitement for Dash and even Violet in exploring their natural talents.
Why ‘The Incredibles’ Still Feels So Super 16 Years Later
By Josh Spiegel/March 13, 2020 8:00 am EST
(Infinity and Beyond is a regular bi-weekly column documenting the 25-year filmography of Pixar Animation Studios, film by film. In today’s column, writer Josh Spiegel highlights The Incredibles.)For nearly a decade, Pixar Animation Studios was an island among animation studios. It worked with the Walt Disney Company on having its films distributed and its characters and worlds turned into theme-park and merchandising fodder. But its films were very homegrown in every possible respect. It took until their fourth film, Monsters, Inc., for the studio to have a film not directed or co-directed by John Lasseter. But their first five were all made by people who’d worked at the studio since before the release of Toy Story. Another common thread in those five films is that humans were part of the overall stories being told, but never the main attraction. And the last common thread was that Pixar’s films weren’t driven by a single author; even Lasseter had co-directors, and Toy Story, as excellent a film as it was, had a script credited to a handful of writers. That would all change with Pixar’s sixth feature. It was from the mind of someone who hadn’t started at Pixar, it was written and directed by the same person, and…oh, yes. The Incredibles was a film entirely about humans.
Something Amazing, I Guess
No Capes
Those details are important to consider because they no doubt fueled the creative direction of the story that really inflamed Bird’s creative mind. Bird’s deal with Warner Bros., as noted in David Price’s The Pixar Touch, was coming at the cost of the time he could spend with his family, and he had to weigh whether or not he could pursue his artistic ambitions while being a present, decent, and good father. Yet the struggle in balancing the personal and professional would become a jumping-off point for the final film and its characters.For a film about a nuclear family of superheroes, each of the characters would essentially embody archetypes within each of their roles. The perception of the paternal member of the family unit (at least, the 50s-era stereotype of a dad) would mean that Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) would be super-strong. The mother, who often feels as if she has to be in multiple places at once, would be Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), able to stretch her limbs to impossible lengths. Their eldest child would be a teenage girl, awkward and unsure of herself. So Violent (Sarah Vowell) would have the power to make herself invisible. Her younger brother, Dash (Spencer Fox), would be super-speedy to reflect his ultra-fast-paced personality. And their youngest sibling, Jack-Jack, would be the infant terror to end all terrors, with a slew of powers only revealed in the finale at the most hilariously inopportune moment.In many ways, The Incredibles would have to be a major leap forward for Pixar. Though the film was full of science-fiction derring-do, it was a deliberately human story. There were no talking toys, no talking monsters, or the like. The characters were human, and the animation would have to be up to snuff, especially since those humans had extreme abilities and gifts. And The Incredibles would be, like any superhero film worth its salt, fairly violent if not actually gory. But when Bird, in the spring of 2000, pitched Lasseter, the idea touched a nerve and Bird was contracted to join the studio for multiple projects.
These Guys Are Not Like Those Guys
The Incredibles makes it clear within its first minutes that this will not be the same kind of Pixar movie. Though the early marketing campaign leaned on physical humor – a teaser trailer attached 18 months in advance to the release of Finding Nemo showcased a different version of a gag in the finished film, in which Mr. Incredible/Bob Parr tries without success to fit into his super-suit, which he’s now too fat for thanks to the onslaught of middle age – The Incredibles begins by telling its audience that this is a film that will earn its PG rating. (Notably, this was the first Pixar film to receive that rating.)Mixed in with the opening credits, we see old talking-head footage of some of the core players: Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl and Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson, who became the first black actor with even a supporting role in a Pixar film), each talking about their lives as superheroes and whether the allure of an average life appeals to them. And then, immediately after the title is displayed on screen coupled with Michael Giacchino’s delightfully retro score, we hear gunshots. The ensuing action setpiece – in which we gradually realize that Mr. Incredible is performing intense acts of heroism mere minutes before his wedding to Elastigirl – is both thrilling and somehow more complex and adult than anything previous in the Pixar filmography.The Incredibles, like the previous Pixar films, is largely dominated by its male perspective, though the action takes a lengthy pause in the first half. (At the time, The Incredibles, clocking in at 115 minutes, was also the longest film from Pixar.) Among other things, one of Mr. Incredible’s rescues in the opening section comes back to bite him, as he frustratedly realizes that a suicidal man he saved from plummeting to his death did not actually want to be saved. The ensuing lawsuit and others like it leads the American government to ban superheroes and force them to live real lives. 15 years later, Bob Parr, as he’s known to everyone, suffers through a dead-end job at an insurance company, where he tries his best to help out clients in ways that infuriate his boss. It’s only when a mysterious woman (Elizabeth Pena) spots him and Frozone stopping a robbery in secret that Bob is given the chance to be Mr. Incredible again, though with unexpected results.
Celebrating Mediocrity
The Incredibles is among very few Pixar films, in that it’s not trying to make you cry. (This is an important distinction: there are Pixar films that try and fail to make you cry, Pixar films that make you cry, and those that aren’t even trying. This is the latter.) Though Bob has to grapple with his mid-life crisis, and the desperate angst he feels at having to hide his own special gifts, even when he believes his family is in mortal peril at the hands of an evil supervillain, Brad Bird isn’t aiming for tearjerking pathos. The Incredibles, much more than its predecessors, is aiming more for social commentary than anything else. You can look at films like Toy Story and Finding Nemo as commenting on the emotional pitfalls of parenthood. But The Incredibles is about the commodification of distinct skillsets.Bob Parr is gifted with super-strength, even as he’s forced not to use it. Conversely, he lives in a society that has graduation ceremonies for fourth-graders. As he rants to his wife Helen/Elastigirl, “They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity!” In moments such as these, as well as those in which the bad guy Syndrome (Jason Lee) reveals his nefarious plot to fool the world into thinking he’s a superhero in part because he’s eliminated all the true supers and created a bad guy only he can defeat, it’s hard not to wonder if we’re hearing directly from the brain of Brad Bird, in ways that caused minor controversy because of how his characters seemed culled from the work of the right-wing writer Ayn Rand.Rand is best associated with Objectivism, a philosophical concept that sees man as a heroic being whose happiness is his sole moral purpose. Bird, for his own part, has never hesitated in shooting down any direct connections, dubbing it “ridiculous” in multiple interviews. Whether or not the comparison is intended or direct, there are clear signs of Bird’s own personality shooting through. When Syndrome describes his plan to not only show off his “powers”, but to turn those powers into products people can purchase, he says, “When everyone is super, no one will be.” (This theory is echoed by Dash early in the film, when he asks his mom why he can’t try out for track and field by using his actual super-speed. In response to Helen saying, “Everyone’s special”, he mutters, “Which is another way of saying no one is.”)
Run As Fast As You Can
It would not be hard to parse through the messages of The Incredibles and find some flaws. (For one: in the 15-year period when there are no superheroes publicly doing their duty, there are apparently also not any supervillains, because the world seems to be spinning perfectly naturally. If there aren’t any villains, what would heroes need to fight against?) And it’s also easy to perceive the push against supers using their powers as a strawman argument in a fantastical film where superpowers are intended to be incredibly cool. (It’s not entirely clear who exactly wants supers to not use their powers after that opening montage where we see politicians complaining about them.)Yet all this can be left aside, as can any wonder of Bird’s politics. (At best, we can file it under “Two things can be true” that Bird’s arguments in films such as this and others that we’ll get to in this series later line up with Objectivist principles, and that he doesn’t declare himself a Randian in any way.) Why? Because whatever else is true, Brad Bird knows how to craft eye-popping, remarkably exciting action sequences. Bird would end up as the first major director from Pixar to make the leap to live-action in the 2010s, and watching The Incredibles, it’s easy to understand why. It’s not just that each of the major characters has their own distinct power, thus enabling him and his animation team to build setpieces centered around those powers. It’s that the setpieces have stakes within them, raising tension. It’s that Bird knows how to choreograph animated action, allowing the camera to move fluidly, but not impossibly. The standout comes in the back half, once Elastigirl and the Parr kids, Violet and Dash, are stuck on Nomanisan, trying to reunite with Mr. Incredible. At this point in the film, Mr. Incredible has realized that Syndrome is a grown-up version of an old superfan of his, once named Buddy. As a kid, Buddy was desperate for approval from Mr. Incredible, and clearly a whiz kid when it came to building gadgets in place of having innate powers. But Mr. Incredible spurned him, Buddy chose to stew in his bitterness and resentment, and then he transformed himself into a villain with his own private island, straight out of a James Bond movie. (Giacchino’s delightful score, his first major feature work to boot, is a throwback to the work of Bond composer John Barry, who Bird had tried to get for The Incredibles.)Now, the Incredibles family is at risk, with each member split up in separate areas of the island. Dash has been instructed by his mother, however reluctantly, that he needs to run as fast as he can. That request could sound desperate or frightening, but not to Dash. When he’s beset upon by some of Syndrome’s lackeys, he follows her advice, and the ensuing chase is thrilling and joyous, because Dash is finally getting to feel what it’s like to use his powers at maximum effort. Syndrome is undoubtedly one of the better villains from a Pixar film – it should be noted here that Pixar films largely do not boast truly memorable villains, sometimes eschewing them altogether – but even his threats can’t dampen the excitement for Dash and even Violet in exploring their natural talents.
My Super-Suit
Next Time: You either love Cars or you don’t. But we’ve got to talk about it.
