The Incredibles
dir. Brad Bird
Pixar

The Incredibles breaks the common-sense rule against using words like "perfect" or "flawless" in movie titles because it gives naysayers too much punny leverage. Pixar can be forgiven any hubris, though, because they have the most unimpugnable record for a movie studio ever — who else has been 1.000 after six at-bats? — and of course the title turns out to be truth in advertising. But what's really hard to believe about The Incredibles isn't that it maintains the Pixar legacy — it improves on it.

That's not to say this is Pixar's best film. It's not. Nor is it simply to acknowledge that we finally have CGI humans who don't look terrible. What's amazing about The Incredibles is that it has style. Sure, Pixar's other features have style, but they have the same style: Ants are anthropomorphized in A Bug's Life in much the same way fish are in Finding Nemo. Each movie has that show-offy tracking shot in its first minutes, usually scored to twinkly music, to awe you with the exhaustiveness of its production design — not that there's anything wrong with that, especially in a G-rated kids movie, but it is samey. In fact, if you can look at all of Pixar's movies and identify characteristics that distinguish the distinct artistry of their various directors — John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Peter Docter and Lee Unkrich — you've got a keener eye than I.

But distinctions jump out at you during The Incredibles, directed by Brad Bird. The movie's veneer certainly resembles the Pixar house style, but the way that it's composed and edited is something else entirely. It's hard to put your finger on, except to say that it looks like 2D animation — that is, like drawings brought to life. Computer animation didn't exactly lose the liveliness of Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, but its vector-based perfection worked against communicating that verve so explicitly. Even the characters in Monsters, Inc., which were Pixar's first to have their imaginative genesis in concept drawings rather than pop cultural artifacts or zoology, had that impeccably sculpted appearance. Whereas The Incredibles still looks, in its way, like lines on paper brought to life — the original alchemy of animation. Both in its resemblance to cel animation and in simple directorial choices, it seems much more like Bird's Family Dog or The Iron Giant than Pixar's Toy Story or A Bug's Life. This is no small thing. That the Pixar magic isn't just an end, but a means, bodes very well for the future of both the studio and its audience.

Let's not lose track of the present, however, which is itself quite good for both parties. The Incredibles garners Pixar's first PG rating with its genuinely exciting pastiche of Marvel comics and James Bond movies. The former is wonderful (if close enough for litigation), but the latter is really best of breed — The Bourne Identity was praised for hewing closely to Ian Fleming's darkest side, but The Incredibles is the first descendent of the Bond movies to completely capture their pop joy, with production designer Lou Romano showing fealty to Ken Adam and composer Michael Giacchino doing likewise for John Barry. Some have complained that The Incredibles, coming out in the middle of the biggest glut of comic-book adaptations ever, breaks Pixar's tradition of bringing us worlds we'd never otherwise see, but you don't have to have watched many of those underdone movies to know that we haven't otherwise been seeing anything like this.

Pixar is famous — and, frankly, unique — for simultaneously putting their best story foot and their best technical foot forward, and that's why The Incredibles seems a hop, skip and jump ahead of the curve. The heart of the movie is that its hero, Bob "Mr. Incredible" Parr, has ceased to have a fulfilling professional life (he's an insurance adjuster, superheroing having become too litigious) and so invests his heart and energies into increasingly self-gratifying activities rather than into his neglected family … to unsurprisingly self-destructive results. (Specifically, he does subrosa freelance hero stuff, like battling malfunctioning robots on a secluded island, for a private corporation that affords him a jet-set lifestyle, but it turns out that the point of these efforts is to teach those robots to be that much more unstoppable when they hit the mainland.) This too is a little more mature than Pixar's other themes — the increment from G to PG, say — but is very much in line with the studio's continued fixation on the inner life of the beta male. We've seen it in their meditations on the value of unrequited devotion (the Toy Story movies), the ultimate triumph of the socially inept engineer (A Bug's Life), the retiring übermensch who never anticipated how fatherhood would change him (Monsters, Inc.) and the neurotic dad who has to learn that he can't promise to never let anything happen to his kid "because then nothing would even happen to him" (Finding Nemo).

Cultural commentators have mistaken Pixar's success with the public's fixation on computer animation, but those who actually watch the movies know it's really about story. More than that, though, it's about grabbing that sensitive-guy demographic by the heartstrings, and that's why bringing Bird aboard was such genius — The Iron Giant is the movie that brings a tear to every geek's eye. That film was a marvel which was ultimately underserved by a studio that didn't know what to do with it; $140 million for The Incredibles by its second weekend suggests that Bird has alighted in the perfect place.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)