Monsieur Incroyable!

I'm tempted to nominate The Incredibles as my second favorite movie ever (after my current rotating first-place choices of Gosford Park and Road to Perdition, all of which choices cause my wife to want to have me committed); so I'll write a paean to the film in hopes of purging myself of what threatens to become a fixation.

I watched it again, kind of by accident, at a friend's house the other night. This is probably the eighth or tenth time I've seen it. I loved it in the theater and, as a fan of animation generally, I looked forward to the DVD release so I could study it in closer detail. But I find that, far from satisfying my curiosity about a couple technical details of a kids' movie, these repeated viewings have only deepened my near-obsession with it.

First, as a general story it's brilliant. It's fantastically well paced, and while not breaking new ground for plotting, it's interesting and nuanced in lovely fashion. For the unfamiliar, it's (naturally) the basic good-vs-bad allegory in neon bright colors. The world has a class of people with special powers called "Supers," who use their skills to protect the public. As our story begins, the Supers have been forced into hiding by public outcry at the collateral damage done by them plying their trades. Their Supers all have cute, super-hero names, and the king of the pack is a fat, middle-aged dad named Bob Paar, a.k.a Mr. Incredible, who is basically Superman with a sense of humor (and no ability to fly per se). He is married to the former Elastigirl, a woman who can stretch herself obscenely. Their three kids, naturally, are all endowed with superhero talents (but it's fun that they haven't yet established their superhero identities or packaged their talents). The story follows the hapless super-hero dad and family as they try to right their personal (and the world's) wrongs.



From these potentially mundane origins, writer / director Brad Bird manages to put together a really engaging story, one that involves the audience in an edge-of-the-seat kind of way. You tend to know the outcome of things from the outset in a movie like this, but the little fits and starts, and the cliffhanger moments, are all done with such confidence and firm-handedness that the story pulls you along like a tractor. Everything is paced fabulously, lingering on the right things and rushing thru the right things, and the dialog and general family interaction is intelligent and feels so right as to be almost inevitable.

The husband / wife team of former superhero solo acts have taken to the exile of their skills quite differently, with the wife reveling in a normal family life and the husband pining for the stellar moments which formerly defined his existence. She is happy to be a mom, but he wants to be, well, Mr. Incredible. His yearnings threaten the stability of the family, and we easily buy into both points of view, an honest and understandable difference of coherent opinions between two really likable (OK, cartoon) people. This conflict between husband and wife serves as a backdrop for the raising of three children, each with their own burgeoning superpowers, who are themselves trying to fit in with their unendowed peers. Bird's writing / directing accomplishment is that we so readily buy into what might be easily passed off as a silly kids' movie.



And then there's the look of the movie, something so conspicuously spectacular that it threatens to upstage the action (and if a super-hero cartoon is not about action, then I can't imagine what would be). There is such care in even the tiniest detail of every shot that it's really an exercise in virtual reality. But Bird has kept the look of things whimsically tweaked firmly into traditional cartoon territory, which keeps the potentially scary and violent plot developments from being disturbing to the wee-uns. The details demonstrate over and over again that we have the ability at hand to duplicate reality outright, and one sees this in a movie like "Happy Feet," where it's not clear whether a given scene is computer animated or not. But Happy Feet serves, in my opinion, as a perfect example of how not to use realism in a cartoon. The Incredibles is much better for Bird's conscious tweaks on reality; there is art in the manner and degree of his deviation. Happy Feet, while being the culmination of an absurd amount of work, I imagine, seems more an exercise in proving that we can convincingly make realistic emperor penguins dance and sing (the singing is excruciating, sorry), than a justification that doing so is a compelling idea.


(Super-hero costume designer Edna Mode--clearly modeled after Edith Head--brilliantly voiced by director Bird.)



I loved the look of The Incredibles right away, but the extremity of the accomplishment did not hit me until I watched it a year ago on the aforementioned friend's 50" high-def plasma screen. In that setting, the attention to surfaces and lighting and to interior design details practically assaults one. You could pause the film--we did with a gasp a hundred times during the viewing--at nearly any point and print & frame what results. Absolutely spectacular.

Fantastic voice talent--Holly Hunter, Craig T. Nelson, Sarah Vowell, and a fabulous turn by the director himself, playing a woman!--a great soundtrack, and the very best that our current computer technology can muster: if you have not seen this movie, rent it on my recommendation and treat yourself. I DEFY you not to be brilliantly entertained!