Superhero Media: The Incredibles

Man, another great film it took me way too long to get to. Do I really need to go over how amazing The Incredibles is? Many consider it to be the best superhero film ever made, though I disagree and would rank it number two or three, but I can't really say it's an incorrect opinion, just one I don't share. Is it any great shock though that The Incredibles is so good? I'll even defend Tomorrowland, generally regarded as Brad Bird's worst film, though I'm not a fan of the Mission Impossible series personally, as it's a valiant effort reaching for something interesting. I actually soured a little on The Incredibles for a few years after it got picked up by the Alt-Right and touted as an Objectivist piece; for longtime readers, I'm pretty damn far Left and not a big fan of Ayn Rand and the morons who worship her contradictory nonsense. Thankfully, I came across a "Renegade Cut" video on YouTube about Objectivisim in The Incredibles and how Brad Bird is clearly against that kind of thinking. Yes, the Incredible family are special people who aren't permitted to use their gifts, but those gifts are used to help other people at the personal cost of the gifted, not to profit or raise the gifted above others. 

Whilst The Incredibles centres around Robert Parr, aka Mister Incredible, it manages to be a story about almost every stage of life, with both Robert and Ellen struggling to find an identity outside of family in their middle age, as well as dealing with the physical effects of ageing and the strain of a years-long relationship showing cracks. Violet is hitting puberty like a bus into a wall and has no help to cope with it, whilst Dash is struggling to form his own identity as he stares down the end of his own childhood. Without meaning, without something tangibly better to hope for, the family is drifting apart and may soon fracture, not solely to Robert's selfishness, but certainly driven by his willful distance from his responsibilities. The great thing about Robert's character isn't that he's some "man-child" trope that needs to grow up, but instead the solution to his malaise is finding balance between his familial responsibilities and self-determination; during the montage scene, we see that getting to be a superhero again is not only good for Robert's self-esteem, but he is a better husband and father as well. 

The secondary characters are also brilliant, with Syndrome being a shockingly accurate prediction of Internet Fanboy culture and entitlement and why it's almost always a terrible idea to let the fans run the franchise. Hell, he even has an edgy '90s Image Comics name and costume elements hiding his wrists so that Liefeld doesn't have to draw them. And then there's Edna Mode, one of the greatest accidents in film history, voiced by Brad Bird himself after they couldn't find anyone else who could do the character justice; but also because they were running out of money and couldn't afford new cast members. Seriously, The Incredibles almost didn't happen and it's only because of some dodgy workarounds of the Screen Actors Guild that the voice recording was completed at all. Many of the incidental characters are voiced by crew members, not professional actors, because they didn't have to pay them. To me, that makes the whole enterprise even more amazing, even if I'm personally not a fan of bypassing Trade Unions. The Incredibles is, naturally, incredible, and always worth a watch, even if you don't like superheroes and/or animated films, it's just that good.