There can’t be many films of which you can truly say: what you’ve got on the label is what you’ve got in the can. The Incredibles, the new animation from the mighty Pixar stable (Finding Nemo; Toy Story) really is pretty incredible, even for a studio before whose films I have regularly had to scoop my lower jaw up from the cinema floor with both hands.
The Incredibles is brought to us by former Simpsons director Brad Bird, whose feature debut was the terrific animated version of Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man. It’s an all-conqueringly funny and blastingly energised family comedy that made me feel like one of its tiny pixillated civilians that get flung through walls, plunged into indigo-blue oceans or catapulted into the sky like a vanishing dot. And it has audacious things to say about the difference between meritocracy and mediocrity.
Plenty of ideas go into the mix. There’s something of X-Men, The Fantastic Four, Spy Kids and also the quirky retro-feel of TV shows such as Get Smart and the 1960s Batman. But, as ever with Pixar, influences are subsumed into something new, something supercharged with insolent originality and modernity.
It’s set initially in the superhero’s post-war heyday: the world of the late 1940s when a lantern-jawed titan with a red jersey called Mr Incredible (voiced by Craig T Nelson) steps in to assist embattled citizens and foil robberies. In this, he is helped by his fiancée, Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), whose superpower is to stretch infinitely in every direction.
Yet, at the very height of their success, disaster strikes. A would-be suicide takes Mr Incredible to court for saving his life, and the survivors of a train he saved from crashing file suit for various whiplash injuries. Soon an army of snippy little lawyers achieve what no supervillain could: they debar the caped heroes from plying their trade, and the government has to relocate Mr and Mrs Incredible to another city and forces them to stay in their mild-mannered identities like normal people.
So, a decade and a half later, we find poor Mr Incredible incognito in civvy street, his waistline advancing and hairline retreating. He has a job in an insurance company, a terrible perversion of his true vocation. The dazzling couple has to be Mr and Mrs Ordinary in a new age of dullness, despite now having kids with secret superpowers too.
No surprise, then, that when a mystery benefactor offers Mr Incredible a chance to work as a real superhero again, he jumps tall buildings at the chance. But who is the shadowy sponsor of Mr Incredible’s return to greatness — could he be the most dangerous enemy of all?
The animation is, as ever, gasp-inducing — with dazzling effects of light and detail that we have almost, but not quite, got blasé about. As with Toy Story, it is somehow the streetscapes that are the best things. The sheen and texture of cars, tarmac, glass, brickwork, are all intensified by the dizzying horizontal and vertical perspectives: tall buildings and straight roads along which we zoom at the speed of thought.
The Incredibles is pitched more directly at kids than, say, DreamWorks’s Shrek, which offered a bigger portion of smart, adult-orientated dialogue. That’s not to say there aren’t some very snappy things in the screenplay. I laughed inordinately at the idea that a second-rate supervillain can always be tempted into the classic mistake of ”monologuing”: talking continuously about the inner sense of hurt and resentment that propelled him into villainhood, and so giving the hero a chance to catch his breath and counter-attack. ”You sly dog,” sneers one supervillain with the neurotic name of Syndrome, ”you almost got me monologuing.”
And there is one fantastically funny character: Edna Mode (tellingly voiced by Bird himself), the visionary designer of superhero couture to whom Mr Incredible applies to have his super-clobber upgraded. She is a tiny, bespectacled lady who lives in an absurdly grand fastness, a veritable fortress of solitude with an Olympic-classic design. Edna is always looking for the next thing in superhero-costume: ”I never look back darling! It distracts from the now!”
For those of you looking for the classic holiday movie, call off the search. These Incredibles claim to be an authentic family of superheroes. I believe them. — Â