The SmarK DVD Rant for The Incredibles
I think it’s pretty cool that we, speaking for the comic book geek milieu as a whole, have been waiting ages for a really good superhero movie, and we suddenly got two of them in the same year — Spider-Man 2, and The Incredibles.
Brad Bird is already a hero to the animation fanbase for The Iron Giant, so teaming him up with the 800-pound gorilla of the box-office, Pixar, was pretty much a can’t-miss proposition. And it didn’t miss.
The Film
Taking its cue from a story idea presented by DC Comics years ago with the “Last Days of the JSA” mini-series, the Incredibles decides to explore what can happen when public sentiment turns against the superhero population and the extraordinary are forced by circumstances to be ordinary. It’s the same kind of theme as used by the X-Men movies, but less dark. Brad Bird, several times in the supplements, describes the feeling as “the mundane meeting the fantastic”, and that’s as good a way to sum it up as anything.
The Incredibles begins back in the good old days, at some undetermined point in the Golden Age, with super-strong and nigh-invulnerable do-gooder Bob “Mr. Incredible” Parr trying to assist the police with a fleeing robber while rushing to his own wedding. Unerringly polite and caring even while forced to stop and rescue a cat from a tree (“Officer. Ma’am. Squeaker.”), his patience is shaken by an annoying wannabe-sidekick named Buddy who won’t take the hint about leaving superheroics to the heroes, and nearly ends up dead as a result.
However, it is not a supervillain that proves to end the Golden Age, but rather a more insidious force: The American legal system. With lawsuits numbering into the hundreds of millions, the government can no longer afford to support the destruction caused by “Supers” in pursuit of truth, justice and the American way, and as a result all superheroes are banished into private life. This leaves newly-married Bob stuck in a dead-end insurance job 15 years later, reduced to righting wrongs by circumventing red tape for old ladies, and his formerly spunky red-head wife Elastigirl at home with the kids.
Things start to look up for Bob when a mysterious benefactor leaves him a mysterious message, calling him to a mysterious island to fight a mysterious giant robot, and he happily wanders into those obviously-suspicious circumstances because anything beats the boredom of regular life for him. This is where the movie really starts to pick up after a slow start — a slowness probably necessitated by the drab existence that Bob has been living since the end of the hero age. Some of the movie’s best visual gags come when Bob is getting back into hero shape again at a trainyard, and of course his wife is none the wiser…until she discovers that his super-suit has been repaired, and thus he might be sneaking off and attempting heroism behind her back.
Of course, any superhero yarn is only as good as the villain, and they found the perfect one in Syndrome, a grown-up version of his boy sidekick gone REALLY bad, and voiced by walking comic book encyclopedia Jason Lee. If there was someone truly perfect for his role and sounding like he’s having a blast doing it, it’s Lee. From describing his dork-tastic inventions to catching himself “monologuing” at Mr. Incredible instead of finishing him off, Lee owns the character and is a constant highlight whenever Syndrome is on screen.
The actual particulars of his plot to overthrow the world are of course many and cliched, involving giant robots smashing up cities, and Syndrome’s attempt to recast himself as the great defender of the world by stopping his own creations. All this is minor consideration next to the brilliant sight gags (Mr. Incredible pegging a guard in the head with a rock from 200 feet, and the resulting melodrama) and lessons learned by Bob and his super-family about working together. Not to mention the jaw-dropping animation, like his son Dash, who naturally has super-speed, running through the jungle upon being given permission to run “as fast as he can” for the first time in his life, and not only discovering how fast he CAN go, but learning about the wonder of punching a henchman in the face at super-speed and how fun it can be. In fact, much of this movie is all about how fun being a superhero can be, like the awesome sequence when the whole family works together for the first time and you can practically feel the exhilaration coming from the kids as they see Mom and Dad kicking some SERIOUS ass. That exhilaration pretty much carries over until the end of the movie, with a non-stop pace and an action sequence to rival Bruckheimer as the Incredible Family has a showdown with Syndrome and destroys a city block in the process. And when Syndrome hatches one final plot to kidnap baby Jack-Jack, it pretty much blows up in his face in hilarious manner, even including a carefully-plotted callback to an earlier warning.
However, it’s all rooted in the basic story behind the goofy plot — Bob Parr learning to work with a team instead of doing everything himself, and discovering that he really is a family man after all. It’s another great Pixar movie in a series of them, as Brad Bird makes a great story look effortless compared to the labored, heavy-handed “message movies” that Disney has been pumping out of the animation assembly line for the past couple of decades. At 110 minutes it’s also the longest of all the Pixar movies, and suffers for it. Bird cut out nearly 40 minutes of the movie as it is and probably couldn’t have cut any more out without crippling the story, but it really does take too long to get warmed up and would have been better served at 90 minutes.
The Video
One of the best transfers I’ve ever seen, as it’s digital-to-digital like all of Pixar’s movies and flawless like all of them. The shift in color pallette from the “golden age” to Bob’s drab middle-aged life to downtown is all seamlessly done and looks gorgeous every step of the way.
The Audio
As befitting this type of movie, it’s a very nice, very aggressive 5.1 mix with lots of subwoofer boom (especially during the rocket launch and plane crash sequences) and cool positional audio when Dash is running around.
The Extras
As usual with Pixar, there’s lots for the geek crowd here.
Disc one has an introduction from uber-geek Brad Bird, and a commentary with him and producer John Walker. It’s a very fun commentary, as Bird flits from subject to subject and talks about all the different places where making the movie was a headache and what scenes had to be painfully cut for time, as well as giving tons of credit to his animators and tweaking the tech guys. His ribbing of the “hair simulation” dorks in particular is hilarious (“I think it’s too much barometric pressure”) and one scene where Mr. Incredible puts his hand through a piece of cloth is revealed to be a three-month project (“Couldn’t he just DESCRIBE the hole in the cloth?”). I had a lot of fun listening to this one. The other commentary is a revolving group of animators, and if you think Bird comes across like a real-life version of Comic Book Guy, the animators come across even GEEKIER if that’s possible. Fun stuff all around.
The second disc features two big documentaries — “The Making of the Incredibles” at 28 minutes and “More Making of the Incredibles” at 40 minutes, with the latter split into subjects like “Story”, “Tools”, “Music”, and the usual stuff. The consensus from watching appears to be that Bird is a maniacal slavedriver, but a fun guy to work with at the same time.
The big draw on the second disc is the 4-minute short “Jack-Jack Attack”, which shows what was happening to the poor babysitter while the family was off rescuing Dad. Very, very funny stuff.
You also get about 30 minutes of deleted scenes, done in a neat animation style of pencil drawings moving on a rendered background, all of which feature explanations from Brad Bird. Cutting the “Snug” sequence in particular was a really big deal to him, and he describes it as being like “passing a kidney stone”. I don’t think it was that great, if it makes him feel better.
What IS pretty cool is “Incredi-Blunders”, where you get a bunch of rendering errors or early test footage, showing how difficult animating hair can be, among other things. It’s not like the usual Pixar “outtakes”, which are sadly lacking on this one.
What ISN’T pretty cool is “Vowellet”, a waste of 10 minutes hosted by Sarah Vowel, the voice of Violet, who writes books about Lincoln in real life and has all the personality of a PBS special.
They also put “Boundin'”, with out without commentary, the short included before the movie in theaters. Still funny stuff.
There’s also the usual trailers and art galleries, plus “interviews” with the various characters for Access Hollywood.
I guess I’m allowed to also tell you about the “Top Secret” section, which features a “lost” 50s-style cartoon with Incredible and Frozone, and another version with commentary from Mr. Incredible and Frozone themselves, which is mainly Frozone yelling about racism. Some funny lines therein but too silly even for this crew. You also get full bios and sound clips from all the heroes mentioned in the movie, in a kind of “secret files” bit.
The Ratings
The Film: ****
The Video: *****
The Audio: ****
The Extras: *****
