Of all the top tier Pixar movies made before Disney took over and started ruining everything, I keep coming back to The Incredibles as perhaps the most finely-wrought of the bunch, functioning not only as a digital animation tour-de-force, but as a hugely clever comedy, an exhilarating action movie with incredible set pieces that strain the viewer’s capacity to process imagery, and a sincere homage to the great Bond movies of the Sixties and Seventies, in which 007’s arch-nemesis always seemed to be operating from some sort of clandestine fortress facility built into a volcano, perched on a platform out to sea, or orbiting in outer space (the excellent score, in particular, brings the Bond films to mind). The cast of characters is full of unique and engaging personalities, each given superbly character-driven dialogue that elevates the scenes they carry (think of the interludes with fashion designer Edna Mode, the conversations with a world-weary government handler, or the banter with superhero sidekick Frozone, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, who ends up scrambling around his apartment at the movie’s climax trying to find his hero costume – probably in the laundry – yelling at his wife: Woman! Where – is – my – super – suit!!??). Before long, they’re all old friends.
What really sets this one apart from, say, Wall-E, or Finding Nemo, is that The Incredibles is also, well, kind of dark. Not only are the movie’s superheroes portrayed as an oppressed class of designated deviants, forbidden from using their powers and forced into anonymous drudgery by their government – Mr. Incredible himself works in a soul-destroying cubicle job at an insurance company, where his main role is to deny valid claims from policy-holders under the unkind supervision of a nasty, stickling little prick of an executive – the stakes very quickly become life and death. People get killed in this cartoon. Indeed the film’s bad guy, the despicable Syndrome, has lured the superhero to his island redoubt so that the great Mr. Incredible can die fighting one of his terrifying mechanical creations, a fate which, a horrified Mr. Incredible discovers, has already befallen dozens of his superhero buddies. There’s a moving scene in which a computer file sets out the systematic elimination of his old friends by the Quintessential Evil Villain’s machines, killed one by one in what Syndrome has named Project Kronos: Gazerbeam, Universal Man, Hyper Shock, Tradewind, Vectress, one after another, all dead and gone:
It’s especially touching that Mr. Incredible, shocked and sweating bullets, immediately checks on the status of his wife and best friend.
In today’s selection, the murderous, vengeful Syndrome shows no compunction about trying to kill Incredible’s wife, Helen (AKA Elastigirl), along with both of their children, as our hero hangs there, trussed up, tortured, helpless, listening to it all go down over the radio. The cruel bastard exults at the pain and devastation he’s causing.
Helen, imagining (wrongly, of course) that her husband is off on some extra-marital lark with another woman, has set out to confront her husband at the island where his locator beacon puts him. She’s borrowed a fast jet and is on approach to Syndrome’s secret lair when she comes under fire from a volley of very persistent surface-to-air missiles. Maneuvering violently and evasively, Helen tosses the jet around the sky while pumping out chaff and flare decoy countermeasures, and actually shakes off the first couple of rounds, all the while communicating frantically with what she hopes is the air traffic control tower, pleading with them to abort, she’s a friendly, and there are children on board (the kids stowed away, much to her chagrin). It’s tightly-edited, typically exciting, and packed with terrific shots from vantage points both inside and outside of the jet as Helen tries every trick in the book to evade the incoming guided weapons, but what takes the scene to the next level is the effortless aviation argot she’s using as she begs whoever might be listening to call off the attack. Holly Hunter, voicing Helen, insisted on learning the correct jargon to add authenticity to the scene, determined to make it sound like second nature to Helen, and boy does she ever have it down pat; out here in the audience, we don’t doubt for a second that this woman is seasoned pilot from way back, apparently with combat experience. None of it’s explained, and only the true cognoscenti will realize she’s using military, not civilian terminology, but anyone listening gets the main idea straight away. She checks in with the Tower citing her civil registration number correctly (India Golf Niner Niner), asks for a “vector to the initial” (that is, a heading to the proper approach for the runway), cites herself as flying “VFR on top” (following Visual Flight Rules on top of cloud cover), and when the shit hits the fan, yells urgently for the attack to be aborted over the “blind Guard” (Guard Channel is a frequency set aside for emergency transmissions, and one is speaking “blind” when transmitting on the assumption that you can be heard even though no one is speaking back), citing her compass heading, reporting her altitude as “Angels 10” (10,000 feet), and informing the tower that they have her “buddy spiked” (engaged by friendly fire). The sheer believability that results is the final touch that renders the scene so remarkably compelling.
I’ve discovered that one discerning fan, every bit as impressed as I was when I first saw the movie, put together an explanatory video translating the specialized aviation lingo into plain English:
Others have written about it:
It’s all so real, you forget you’re watching a cartoon.
The Incredibles won Best Animated Feature at the 2005 Academy Awards. It should have been nominated for Best Picture. It’s wonderful soundtrack lost out for best score, too.
Frigging Academy.
the needlefish 