The Superhero Genre Peaked With a Kids Movie
20 years later, The Incredibles is still the greatest superhero movie ever made.
It didn’t take long for Pixar to become one of the pillars of modern filmmaking. The American animation studio has produced less than 30 films in nearly as many years, but its legacy seemed assured from the word “go.” Its first handful of films were towering explorations in empathy, each breathing life into anthropomorphized creatures like childhood toys, salt-water fish, or the proverbial monster under your bed. That affinity for non-human characters has become Pixar’s calling card ever since — but it also presented a major challenge to the studio when it was time to tell a truly human story.
The Incredibles was Pixar’s first film with an all-human cast, and it may also be its most underrated. Whether its subjects have anything to do with that oversight is a mystery that’s yet to be solved, but it’s hard to stand out in a subgenre that’s since become hypersaturated. The story of a superhero family trying to survive in a retrofuturist world is one that’s been done time and again; not even The Incredibles was the first to play in this particular sandbox. Competition aside, it might actually be the most efficient story ever told. Twenty years later, it represents a true peak for superhero stories across the board... and for Pixar itself.
It doesn’t get much better than The Incredibles. The 2004 film was the sixth in Pixar’s now-storied filmography, and it stood out from the crowd in more ways than one. With director Brad Bird at the helm, the studio was attempting something it’d never tried before. The Pixar films that had come before were each overseen by a team of directors and writers: it was pretty par the course for any animated feature. Bird wasn’t just the sole director; he was the only one credited for the screenplay, and for good reason. The story at the heart of The Incredibles was personal for the filmmaker, then at the cusp of a mid-life crisis and struggling to reconcile his professional ambitions with the toll of family life.
That dilemma would go on to inform the plight of Bob Parr, a family man yearning for the past. In his youth, Bob was just one of many superheroes protecting his native metropolis, a retrofuturistic city rendered with stunning, glossy precision. As Mr. Incredible, he was a consummate celebrity, but after a series of lawsuits tarnished his record, Bob was forced into retirement and obscurity.
Fifteen years later, superheroes are all but extinct. Bob’s wife Helen (fka Elastigirl) bides her time as a stay-at-home mom, while his best friend — the scene-stealer known as Frozone — tries to relive the glory days by moonlighting as a vigilante. Meanwhile, outside of Metroville, former supers are actually going missing. In reclaiming his responsibilities as Mr. Incredible, Bob connects their disappearances to a plot to render heroes entirely obsolete. This dastardly scheme is the work of Syndrome, a scorned Mr. Incredible fan turned maniacal supervillain. His resurgence forces Bob to right the wrongs of his past; naturally, though, he needs his family’s help to save the day.
The Incredibles is a competent superhero story, a mature pastiche, and a great family film all rolled into one.
The story at the center of The Incredibles is a rare feat: relatively simple, but executed with finesse and plenty of heart. Bird finds myriad ways to parallel the super experience to issues any human would know by heart. Bob and Helen’s son Dash, who possesses the power of super-speed, is expected to hide his latent abilities — the very thing that makes him special — to fit in. Like Bob, his self-worth is tethered to his powers, so getting the chance to unleash them later on, against a group of goons that will stop at nothing to destroy him, is endlessly cathartic. Bob’s relationship to superheroism also invites plenty of comparisons to real life, especially in how his derring-do creates a rift with Helen. Their domestic woes bring up issues of trust and even the toll of infidelity on real-world marriages: heady stuff to unpack in what’s ostensibly a movie for kids.
The Incredibles is shockingly mature across the board, but it offsets uncomfortable themes with smart pop storytelling. Like so many animated films of the era, The Incredibles is a melting pot of influences, taking the superhero stories of the Silver Age and all their latent cliches and churning out something shockingly original. For a world that was still warming up to the idea of superhero movies, The Incredibles set a high bar. Even now, in an era totally dominated by cinematic universes, the film feels like the best of the bunch. It may not get as much buzz as a classic like Toy Story or Finding Nemo, but The Incredibles is the best of Pixar all the same.
