The Incredibles (****)
In which it's leftover night and Tony Rydinger is on the menu
An important step forward for Pixar Animation, The Incredibles is a genre-bending ride that I’ve watched probably half a million times.
Back when DVD players in vans was about as cool as landing on Mars would be today, a copy of The Incredibles stayed for likely an entire year in my family’s vehicle. There were a few films in my family that earned the prestigious honour of being trapped in our van – the kinds of movies that we watched over and over and over until we could recite most lines from memory and tell you about every single bonus feature. We even watched a few scenes in other languages to see how our favourite jokes sounded. Pirates of the Caribbean 2, the original Spongebob movie, Spider-Man 2, Steve Martin’s Pink Panther and The Incredibles are all in this 2000s-era Hall of Fame. As a result, the fight between Bob and Helen has been one I’ve known by heart for years.
“I said I’d be back later.” “I assumed you’d be back later – if you came back at all, you’d be ‘back later’.”
As kids, we just recited it because it was fun to mimic the dramatic heights of the scene. We didn’t realize how realistic a scene this was. Having been married now for three years – not that that in any way makes me even remotely an expert in the field – I’ve had my share of fights, and this scene got it bang-on. This wasn’t one fight, but several. Helen’s mad that Bob lied, that he’s ‘reliving the glory days’, that he’s refusing to attend their son’s 4th grade ceremony, and that he’s putting his family’s needs second to his own. At the same time, Bob’s feeling unappreciated by society, mad about the way everyone seems to have moved on from something he’s hung up on, and mad at Helen because he feels she’s holding their kids back from greatness. The fight jumps from one argument to the next in the blink of an eye, and I’ve definitely been there. To clarify, I love my wife, and we’re doing great. Fights are normal and healthy from time to time. My point is that as a kid, I didn’t understand the complexity of this fight, or how on-the-nose they scripted it.
The other thing I didn’t quite get when I was younger was how much this film was about a father having an affair. I watched deleted scenes back then that emphasized this idea, but didn’t really take it in like I do now. Bob gets an offer from another woman to give him a chance to feel like he’s a ‘real man’ again. In accepting this offer, he gets into a habit of lying to his wife over and over to hide the truth. On the surface, it looks like things are great. But underneath, there’s a marriage that’s in shambles. On that note, it’s surprising just how unscathed Bob and Helen emerge. I mean, the trust in their marriage has suffered tremendously, right? They glaze over this part of the story I suppose because there’s a giant robot about to destroy the city, but I think the two of them deserved a more drawn-out reconciliation than what they got.
Even so, I loved how they tied this rather domestic story into the world of superheroes. It’s 100% a movie about family, but it’s also unquestionably a superhero movie. And by the way – it’s a GREAT superhero movie. The “Superhero Relocation Program” plotline reminds me so much of the MCU’s Sokovia Accords, except Pixar beat the MCU by twelve years. I love the idea of superheroes being asked to step down and having to come to terms with a world that feels it’s outgrown them. To enter the superhero genre and hit us with that right out of the gate was pretty awesome. And on top of all of that, this film really poked fun at superheroes in the midst of everything else. They referenced superhero clichés with the “you caught me monologuing” bit or “no capes”, and Mr. Incredible stopping a train seems far too coincidental to be anything but a nod to Spider-Man 2 which had come out just two years earlier. This was such a smart and witty flick.
The last thing I wanna say about this movie is that it’s the first one Pixar did that focused on human characters. Human movement, hair, and flesh textures were something they’d struggled with in the past, so this film marks a major milestone because it opened up a whole other world of storytelling possibilities. That’s not to say that they were restricted before, although I suppose they were. In fact, the constraints of the technology available at the time were part of the reason their stories ended up where they did directionally speaking. But now that they could pull off human characters convincingly, the kinds of stories they could tell increased dramatically.
It’s hard for me to settle on a rating just because it’s hard for me to view this film with fresh eyes. I’ve seen it so many times that re-watching it felt more like thinking an old familiar thought than revisiting an old friend. But maybe that speaks enough to the quality of this film. Pixar did it again!
Jack Jack Attack (****)
This was on The Incredibles’ DVD release, so my siblings and I watched it multiple times. Where Jack Jack’s powers were played for laughs right at the end of the film, this short leans into that and gives us a truly hilarious couple minutes. I still don’t know how to spell Kari’s name, but her misadventures with a superpowered infant are just terrific. The music, narrative set-up, and dialogue are all great. Maybe that’s why they used the bones of this short to set up the beginning of Incredibles 2 – although I’m not sure how they expected us not to notice the rip-off. By far, the best joke of the short is when Syndrome explains his uniform. Don’t miss this nugget of goodness!
Mr. Incredible and Pals (****)
Okay, I know I knocked “The Legend of Mordu” and “George & A.J” for cheap animation, but here it WORKS because they’re making fun of cheap animation. It’s an ode to the early days of superhero television, and the over-the-top cheesiness of the script makes it a lot of fun. But where this short REALLY becomes great is when you watch it with the accompanying commentary of the real Mr. Incredible and Frozone. Without the commentary, it’s tongue-in-cheek and pretty good. WITH the commentary, it’s hysterical. Their arguing over the way they were represented is a hilarious back-and-forth. It even builds to a crescendo over the course of the short. This was honestly gold. Definitely watch this.
Incredibles 2 (***)
In which the villain makes fun of the audience for watching the film
It's not bad. I just don't think we needed to wait 14 years for it.
Check out these time gaps between movies' release dates and their sequels.
· Revenge of the Sith to The Force Awakens: 10 years
· Toy Story 2 to Toy Story 3: 11 years
· Jurassic Park 3 to Jurassic World: 14 years
· Return of the Jedi to The Phantom Menace: 16 years
· Mary Poppins to Mary Poppins Returns: 54 years (a bit extreme to say the least)
Notice that in each of these cases (and I admit that my examples are limited to films I've reviewed), the story always leaps to a dramatically different time. With the exception of the Star Wars prequels, every other example moves FORWARD by at least a decade. For Incredibles 2 to pick up exactly where it left off in 2004 wasn't just unexpected - it was also fairly unprecedented. When the announcement first came that a sequel was on its way, I couldn't have been the only person who wondered how far the film was going to take us into the future of the Incredifamily. Would Violet have grown up and moved out? Will Jack-Jack be an actual kid now? And how will the parents recuperate from the strain the original film likely put on their marriage?
It's hard for me to say that choosing to return to the family precisely at the moment we left them was a bad call. What I CAN say is that I kinda wish they had gone with the traditional time jump and shown us this family ten years further down the road. Without it, the film feels just a little bit...I don't know. Stagnant? Out of place? I don't want to be too critical on a competent film like this one.
On that note, let's talk about what Pixar did right. First of all, everyone sounds great. The adults are voiced by the same actors, and the kids sound similar enough to be almost indistinguishable from the originals. Dash steals the show again with his hilarious youthful energy, and the bad guy is interesting enough as an antagonist. Elastigirl also takes the lead in this film, which I'm all for. However, I feel like the story she leads isn't as compelling as the original film. The original film centers around restoring a relatively broken marriage - and through it, the family. Here, the family unit itself isn't ever really in jeopardy. Sure, Mr. Incredible is trying to prove that he can do everything Mom can do, but worst case scenario, she comes home, right? The urgency or gravity of the family struggle isn't as potent this time around.
I want to highlight a speech from the Screenslaver, the film's main bad guy. Skim through this excerpt from a monologue that plays while Elastigirl is searching for the antagonist:
"Superheroes are part of a brainless desire to replace true desire with simulation. You don't talk, you watch talk shows. You don't play games, you watch game shows. Travel, relationships, risk; every meaningful experience must be packaged and delivered to you to watch at a distance so that you can remain ever-sheltered, ever-passive, ever-ravenous consumers who can't free themselves to rise from their couches to break a sweat, never anticipate new life."
First of all, this is kind of meta for Pixar. The antagonist is talking to the people in the world of the film, but it also REALLY feels like they're talking directly to us. And if that's the case, what are we supposed to make of that? Is the superhero genre - or the medium of film and television as a whole - a way to diminish ourselves and our own zest for life? Are stories the problem, or is the "package and delivery" the problem? What's interesting to me is that the movie doesn't ever really answer this - nor does it even really need to. By the end of the film, this speech turns out to be relatively meaningless. The villain cared more about preventing the return of superheroes than they did about getting couch potatoes to go outside. But why put in such a thought-provoking idea if you weren't going to explore it further - ESPECIALLY if that very idea is one that threatens the very system you're using to deliver it?
Okay, here's another thing. Jack-Jack Attack was a short film that followed up on Kari (the babysitter) and her discovery of Jack-Jack's superpowers. It was never released in theatres, but was included on every DVD or Blu-Ray copy of the original film. IN THAT SHORT, Rick Dicker is interrogating Kari in a dark room with one lightbulb and a desk, just like he questions Tony at the beginning of this film. Some of the dialogue is literally cut-and-paste here - it's like they assumed no one watching the 2018 film would have seen the original short. It's not an homage. It's just lazy. What were they thinking?
I'm giving a lot of flack to a film that I originally gave 3.5 stars. This movie doesn't suck. It's an enjoyable ride and it's worth its runtime. It's just not really what I was hoping for or expecting, so because of that I have to dock it half a star and leave it at that.
Auntie Edna (***1/2)
Considering I wasn’t the biggest fan of Incredibles 2, I went into this short with low expectations. Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised. Edna’s interactions with Jack Jack are very different from that of Kari’s from the last Jack Jack short, which made the whole thing feel fresh and not like a re-tread. I loved seeing Edna study and react to Jack Jack’s antics – the whole time, it seemed like Edna was inches from losing control, but she never let Jack Jack best her. We get more fun gags with Jack Jack’s abilities, and while this doesn’t add anything to our understanding of either character, it’s fun on its own merit and it fills in a gap left by the feature film. This wasn’t bad at all.