Jeremy’s Tophunder №38: The Incredibles

7 min readMay 19, 2020

It’s kind of hard to believe, but it took Pixar six movies and almost 10 years before they produced a movie with an all-human cast.

Actually, animated movies with all-human casts are more uncommon than you’d think. Most of the mainstream animation of the last 30 years has had non-human characters in key roles, and obviously a number of them feature outright anthropomorphic central characters. Pixar, especially, focuses their stories on non-human characters, and really has only had five movies where you’d call humans the main characters (Incredibles and Incredibles 2, obviously, plus Up, Brave, and Coco).

Director Brad Bird pitched the idea for The Incredibles to Pixar after his 1999 classic The Iron Giant (a very, very tough cut from my list), and Pixar actually had to re-engineer their animation methods in order to create more authentically detailed human movement. Bird’s pitch and vision were so thorough that Pixar gave him effectively total control over the project, and it remains (along with Incredibles 2, another Bird movie) the only Pixar movie to have just a single credited writer and director. The Incredibles was also one of the only early Pixar movies that was conceived outside the Pixar incubator. John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and Pete Docter were all at Pixar from the beginning (or very close to the beginning), and one or more of them prominently involved in every Pixar movie (either as a writer or director) from 1995–2011, except for The Incredibles and Ratatouille (again, another Brad Bird movie). Bird started at Disney in the 80s as an animator, but then bopped around in television, from The Simpsons to Rugrats to King of the Hill before directing The Iron Giant for Warner Bros.

I really like Brad Bird’s style of animation, but particularly the direction he went in with The Incredibles and its sequel. He specifically pushed both movies in a more “adult” direction, and openly pushed back at anyone who referred to them as “kid’s movies.” They’re obviously both movies about a family of superheroes, so there’s naturally going to be a lot more action and adventure and, yes, violence. The Incredibles is one of the few Disney or Pixar movies to include gunfire — I actually can’t think of any others off the top of my head right now. Obviously most animated movies are enjoyed by kids and adults alike, but there’s really no way to argue that the majority of them are geared towards kids, with a few subtle jokes for the grown-ups thrown in. I’m not sure you can say that about The Incredibles, though. It strikes a noticeably darker tone.

With everything that animation is capable of, and especially computer animation, it was only a matter of time before someone really leaned into the action-adventure genre. Most animated features have an adventure element, but it’s the adventure that drives the action. The Incredibles flipped that. They didn’t shoe-horn in a few action sequences to keep things exciting and fun, the action is integral to the plot and the characters. The action sequences take up a subtantial portion of the movie (another hint that The Incredibles isn’t “for kids” — the run time clocks in at almost two hours), and they represent not only some of the best work done in animation over the last 15+ years, but simply some of the best action set-pieces done in any medium over the same time span.

The super powers of the individual characters is also a really nice nod to kids and adults alike. Mr. Incredible, the patriarch, is the strongest dude alive, because when you’re a kid, you think your dad is invincible. Mrs. Incredible is flexible and can seemingly be in 10 places at once, because, well, she’s a mom, and moms can do it all. The early teenage girl can become invisible and create force fields to keep things away from her (kind of self-explanatory), the boy entering adolescence is fast and cocky because so many boys that age want to be the center of attention. Then there’s the baby, the unknown quantity. Everything just fits into how kids see their parents, how parents see their kids, and how everybody kind of wants to see themselves. Sure, they conform to gender stereotypes in a way that might be a bit too on-the-nose, but it might be okay, if for no other reason that I didn’t really notice or think about it until I had seen the movie 4 or 5 times.

The supporting characters are also brilliant — Edna Mode (voiced by Brad Bird himself) somehow became on of Pixar’s most well-known characters despite only appearing in a few scenes. She’s been rumored to have been based on legendary costume designer Edith Head (winner of a record eight Oscars for Costume Design), but with inspiration also possibly drawn from Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, among others. When I first saw the movie as a teenager, I obviously didn’t know who Head or Wintour were, but as I watched the character, I knew that the character had to be a half-spoof and half-homage to somebody. Frozone (and Samuel L. Jackson’s voice work) also landed beautifully, and provided a few scenes iconic enough that there were multiple petitions on We The People (the White House’s online petition system) during Obama’s presidency to have Barack and Michelle re-create the “where is my super-suit?” scene (although, disappointingly, none of them reached the 100,000 signatures required to receive and official White House response).

My favorite element of the movie, though, really, is how lived-in the world feels. It doesn’t feel like a cartoon, it feels like a real superhero movie, so much so that after I saw it for the first time, I spent the next few days racking my brain trying to figure out where I had seen those characters before. It felt so authentic that it tricked me into thinking it was a pre-existing comic book or something similar. Obviously, it’s not, it’s purely the brainchild of Brad Bird.

After leaving Pixar, Bird transitioned into live-action blockbusters, hitting big with Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, and then missing big with Tomorrowland (personally, I really liked it, but it was a flop at the box office and it got mixed reviews from critics), and then returned to Pixar for Incredibles 2. His next effort is expected to be an animation/live-action hybrid musical, a project so ambitious that I’ll probably love it even if it sucks. It seems right up Bird’s alley, as he has the animation down, his live-action work has been great visually, and I actually think he’ll be able to pull of the music as well, teaming up with frequent collaborator and Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino.

I have The Incredibles ranked as my favorite Pixar movie, an honor it’s held for about as long as the movie has been out. It’s probably not even in the top 3 or 4 most iconic Pixar movies, and I would argue against it being Pixar’s best movie, but it’s certainly my favorite for the way it blends the playfulness and whimsy of animation with the superhero action-adventure genre. It’s a combination that I loved on TV growing up — I was big into The Batman and Superman animated series that Warner Bros. put out in the 90s, and you might even be able to slide Pokemon and Digimon into this category as well, although the animation styles are obviously much different. It was seemingly inevitable that a major studio like Disney (either via Pixar or not) would dive in, and when they did, they produced an all-time classic.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11