Covering the Basics: The Incredibibbles

I find that often people use the terms “children’s movie” and “family movie” interchangeably. “Family” seems to be a common innuendo for children in our language; when people talk about censoring television for the sake of “families” it’s not their parents they’re trying to protect from sex and violence. Even so, when talking about movies it’s important to draw the line between a movie for children and a movie for families. Children’s movies are created only for the sake of entertaining young viewers. A children’s movie is something you have on video that you play to keep your kid distracted while you and your spouse run upstairs to the bedroom and…play chess, which is what I assume all parents do in their sparse free time.

Family movies, on the other hand, are intended for all audiences, with “all audiences” meaning not that anyone can see it unaccompanied by an adult, but that people of any age should be able to enjoy it. The family film is a movie that, ideally, everyone in a family should be able to watch together and enjoy. This fact shouldn’t be surprising, considering that adults don’t need constant bloodshed, nudity, and existentialism in something to enjoy it (at least I hope they don’t) and children over the age of 5 aren’t the brain dead zombies incapable of understanding well developed stories that adults make them out to be (for kids 5 and under, you’re on your own).

My word processor is telling me I’ve spent 250 words just on this one topic, although it once told me that “lime juice” should be spelled “limejuice,” so I’ve gotten in the habit of not trusting it. Either way, there is a point to all of this: I recently hat the chance to see The Incredibles, and I have to say, treating it seriously, it is one of the best superhero movies I’ve seen in a while. It’s yards ahead of Green Lantern, if only for the fact that in The Incredibles the characters actually do something.

Quickly getting the plot out of the way, for anyone who hasn’t seen it: The Incredibles is a movie in which people with superheroes are forced to retire and keep their powers a secret, including Mr. Incredible and Elasti-Girl (or rather, Reed Richards), our protagonists, who marry and have two superpowered children, and all struggle to adapt to a normal life. Then they take turns getting kidnapped, as a guy named Syndrome tries to get his revenge on superheroes. Oh, and Samuel L. Jackson goes skiing. It makes more sense in context, but if you want that much context, you might as well watch the movie.

I’ve generally believed for a while that superhero movies are better suited to animation than live action. With the likes of Zack Snyder leading the way in the industry the two seem to be becoming synonymous. As for whether Pixar’s animation is suited for a superhero movie, let me put it like this: Catwoman had CGI fight scenes, Green Lantern had CGI costumes, and Watchmen had CGI rain. Midway through watching The Incredibles I thought to myself as I saw a shot of a rocket ship “that looks like CGI,” then had to wait a moment before I remembered I was watching a Pixar movie. It seems that by being fully CGI, all the movie is really doing is cutting out the middleman.

Also, the villain is some sort of evil troll doll. Or rather,
to avoid being redundant, some sort of troll doll.

I don’t know if I would call The Incredibles a comedy, but it certainly has a good amount of humor in it. From scenes of the Mr. Incredible working in a satirically unethical insurance office to an ambiguously German (or is it Japanese?) fashion designer, who I am just now discovering was voiced by a man, the whole thing is a barrel of monkeys (or is it laughs? I forget). For this reason, too, I consider The Incredibles to be better than many of the superhero movies I’ve seen in recent months. With the trend towards “dark” takes on the superhero genre still in vogue, a lot of movies are fairly humorless, but even worse, the concept of “comedy” is becoming synonymous with “farce,” or, worse yet, “parody.” This is what hurt movies like The Green Rogen, which could have been great, had the plot and protagonist not been reduced to absurdity for the sake of “comedy.” The Incredibles, on the other hand, shows that a movie can be funny while still having a serious plot with high stakes. This is a movie that has children getting shot at with machine guns. The fact that it knows when to play a scene for laughs and when to play it for serious, and can make both work, is a testament to the importance of balance in any movie, comic, or adventure story.

And then there’s the question of story structure. It seems to me that a great many of the superhero movies we see are based off comic books (brilliant observation, right?), and as a result, filmmakers are taking characters who have over half a century of backstory and character development, and try to recreate that on film, so we’re left with an “origin story” that takes up the first two thirds of the movie and clouds the plot. The Incredibles, instead, seems to realize it’s a movie, and gets the exposition out of the way as painlessly as possible, instead giving us an actual story to focus on. And it works, too!

I’m not saying The Incredibles is a perfect movie, or even the ideal superhero movie, but it’s certainly a refreshing break from the usual live-action fair. In terms of plot, tone, and visual style, it covers all the necessary bases, and more effectively than a lot of other movies I’ve seen lately. In terms of story, themes, and structure, which I may talk about some other time, it goes it its own unique direction, which is a direction I have mixed feelings about. Even so, while every movie should ideally go in its own direction, you need to cover the basics, and this is something The Incredibles handles very…competently.