The early 2000’s were an interesting transitional time for comic book movies.  After the crushing failure of 1997’s Batman and Robin, the genre as a whole went into a bit of a recession as it tried to re-establish what it needed to be.  The Batman franchise had evolved from moody and grim to campy and colorful, and it was not what audiences were looking for.  Heading into the new millennium, a different approach was looked at.  Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) got the ball rolling by grounding the super hero mythos in something that was more familiar to the world that we live in.  A couple years later, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) took the genre in a direction that made it’s adventure fun but not overly camp.  In many ways, the genre was heading in a direction that honestly was much closer to the comic books that these movies were based on.  Fidelity to the comic books was the guiding force now rather than the traditional standards of genre that had been present before.  And each comic book movie was able to have it’s own identity rather than follow formula, though there were still common tropes that still stuck around.  By the end of the 2000’s, the comic book genre had gone from being on life support to being the dominant force in Hollywood, and it would only continue to grow into the following decade and beyond.  But while the mighty forces of Marvel and DC were battling for supremacy in Hollywood, it could be argued that both have an entirely different source to thank for setting the tone right for the genre.  The movie that had the most profound influence on the super hero genre over the last 20 years (with impacts on everything from character development to the sense of humor present) didn’t come from Marvel nor DC, but rather from an animation studio called Pixar, which itself saw it’s own meteoric rise during this same period.

Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) came at a pivotal time for both animation and super heroes.  For Pixar, it was a big leap forward for them in terms of animation.  Up to that point, they had steered away from depicting human characters, often leaving them to the background as they were far more difficult to model in a believable way.  You look at the early character models of characters like Andy and Sid in Toy Story (1995) and you can see why Pixar chose to center their early movies on stylized toy characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear.  Animals or non-humanoid creatures also gave the studio more creative freedom with the primitive tools they had to work with, which was evidenced in the movies A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003).  However, they faced increased competition from Dreamworks Animation, which struck a huge hit with Shrek (2001), which featured more human characters in prominent roles.  For studios like Dreamworks and Pixar, the dilemma was to find the perfect medium in animating humans that would avoid the uncanny valley pitfall that can often occur.  The solution that Pixar ultimately landed on was to treat their human characters less like perfect recreations, and instead look for ways to make them stylized in a way that would make them easier to animate.  And what better example to look for exaggerated forms of human physique than in comic books.  There are plenty of examples of comic book artists doing away with traditional character models and bringing their own unique stylistic twists to the looks of popular characters; in many cases creating body shapes that could only make sense as part of comic book art.  This is likely what inspired the artists at Pixar and drew them into the idea of making a super hero movie that felt very heavily inspired by the freeing graphic inventiveness of comic books.  Instead of characters with perfectly rendered anatomy, Pixar’s Incredibles would have humans with extreme features that not only made them stand out, but would also be perfectly accentuated to their personalities as well.

The interesting thing about how The Incredibles came to be at Pixar is that it marked the first time that the studio went outside of their own inner circle to green-light a new project.  Now, writer and director Brad Bird was no stranger to the Pixar team before he came to work for them.  Bird was part of the same class at Cal Arts that also included Pixar Animation co-founder John Lassater, and both men started out as junior animators at Disney in the early 80’s, so they were already familiar to each other.  Bird, however, left Disney fairly early on to pursue independent work.  He would work on projects such as Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories anthology series, as well as directing a couple episodes of The Simpsons, including creating key supporting characters such as Krusty the Clown and Sideshow Bob that still remain a part of the show to this day.  It was, however, when he made his feature film debut in 1999 with The Iron Giant that Brad Bird began to make a big splash in the animation industry.  Though The Iron Giant is celebrated as a masterpiece today, it did not have a great opening in theaters and ended up prematurely closed the studio that made it, which ended up making Brad Bird a free agent again.  Regardless of box office, the love for Iron Giant was strong across the animation industry so there were a lot of studios that were willing to meet with Bird during this time, and that’s when John Lassater decided to call up his old colleague.  It would prove to be fortuitous because Brad Bird had been developing this idea for a film centered around a family of super heroes that fit perfectly with the desire of Pixar to experiment more with stylized human characters.  Up to this point, the Pixar legacy team had consisted of the people who worked on the original shorts as well as Toy Story.  Lassater had directed the firs three features, while Pete Doctor and Andrew Stanton helmed Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo respectively.  The Incredibles would be the first new film by someone who had not come up through the ranks of Pixar, but as evidenced by the results, Brad Bird fit in very much with the Pixar community.

There are a lot of layers to what makes The Incredibles a perfect super hero movie.  For one thing, the film is not about the characters doing super hero things, but rather it shows us how they try to build a life outside of their super powered identity.  In the world of The Incredibles, super heroic acts have been made illegal due to a string of incidents where people have become collateral damage in the fights between super heroes and super villains and in turn have led to law suits.  As a result, super heroes have live anonymously underground, forced to suppress their abilities.  The Parrs, a family of “supers,” try to blend in with this new normal and this is the focus of the story.  The movie has fun with how the Parrs use their powers in this domestic setting, but it’s ultimately about how they function as a family unit rather than what they must do to save the world, which does come into play in the final act.  The movie brilliantly allows each character to have their own power type too.  Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, has super strength; his wife Helen is super stretchy and goes by the alter ego Elastigirl.  And their children are unique as well; shy Violet can make herself invisible and creates a force field around her, while hyperactive Dash has super speed.  And the baby Jack-Jack, well, that would be spoiling too much.  The Parr family also has a close relationship with Lucius Best, whose freezing powers have earned him the name Frozone.  You can see the parallels with these characters with pre-existing characters from comic books, like Ice Man, Invisible Girl, or The Flash, but putting them together as a family was a unique way of framing their story and examining how being super would function in an average family narrative.  Super hero families aren’t a novel idea; Marvel has tried for years to make a Fantastic Four movie work, with attempt number three coming next summer.  But with The Incredibles, it’s a focal point for the story that works and helps to endear each of these super beings in a way that makes them relatable to the everyday average family.

But what was the thing that set The Incredibles apart as a super hero movie.  What Brad Bird did, in addition to directing an action packed film, was craft a script that in many ways deconstructed the very idea of being a super hero.  The brilliance of the story is that the super heroes are forced to suppress their powers in order to function as a citizen of society, and if a super hero can’t use their powers, what are they left with.  Bob Parr’s crisis in the film is that he has all this power, and yet he has to work a boring day job like everyone else.  What this motivates him to do is to break the rules just a little bit while still trying to balance his home life, with a wife who is more determined to keep him and the family in check.  We see that Bob is a hero to his core and wants to use his powers for good, but is foolhardy to the point where his desires don’t take into account the repercussions of what his actions may do.  By looking into this side of Bob’s character, we see how Brad Bird is examining the duality of being both a god among men and a flawed human being at the same time.  It’s a more introspective examination of the tropes of super herodom that in many ways has found itself worked into the whole genre at large.  When Marvel began their MCU, it was noticeable from the get go that they were taking a much more introspective look at the characters themselves.  The humor of the MCU is definitely more meta than super hero films of the past, and you can’t help but recall how a lot of their deconstruction of super hero tropes fell reminiscent of the ones from The Incredibles.  There’s a through line to be sure of the jokes in Incredibles about villains monologuing leading to 20 years later where Wolverine punches out a villain and says “Not everyone gets a speech,” as seen in Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).

But The Incredibles is far more than just examining the home life of super heroes.  The point wasn’t to just show what Superman does when he is only Clark Kent.  Brad Bird’s film is ultimately about embracing the special part of what makes us who we are; something that is a common theme in his films.  Some have criticized the movie for promoting an Ayn Randian objectivist point of view; where exceptional people should be held up as better than the rest of society.  The Randian elements seem most pronounced in the movie with Bob Parr’s frustrations over being held back by the anti-super laws, but I don’t see the movie as a validation of Randian beliefs either.  If anything, Brad Bird’s point in the film is not objectivism, but rather the way society scapegoats it’s problems on those who are different.  Ultimately, the Parr family realizes that just sitting on the sidelines doesn’t make society better either, and that the need to conform is not just restrictive to them, but it’s also preventing them from having a healthy family life as well.  When they get to be super powered in the open, they grow closer together as a family.  Exceptionalism, according to Brad Bird, is not in being better than everyone else, but in being the best version of oneself.  That’s something that he showed more definitively in his next film, Ratatouille (2007), where the motto “Anyone Can Cook,” reveals itself to be the idea that a great artist can be anyone, even the least expected.  And he also celebrates the idea that people who chose less power can often be the best representation of oneself; such as The Iron Giant choosing not to be a weapon and instead becoming “Superman.”  This is another idea that has helped shape the characterizations of super heroes over the last 20 years.  It’s the motivation that makes Wonder Woman walk into No Man’s Land and act as a human shield, or Spider-Man choosing to let everyone in the world forget who he is, or Thor letting his home world be destroyed in order to save it’s people.  Like the Incredibles family, modern day super heroes don’t just choose to be super to be better; in many ways they have no choice but to do what’s best for those they care about.

It’s the complexity of character that The Incredibles brought that certainly helped create ripples throughout the super hero genre, though there certainly were many cases before of complex characterizations.  One other thing that the movie had a strong influence on was the way it showcased the power sets of it’s characters.  The movie seems to have the most fun with Helen’s Elastigirl power set, as her stretching ability gave the animators a lot to work with.  One of the biggest highlights of the movie though is the sequence dubbed the “One Hundred Mile Dash.”  It’s a chase scene involving Dash as he tries to escape guardsmen trying to hunt him down.  Even to this day I don’t think super speed powers have been as showcased as well on screen as it is here, and we’ve had two Quicksilvers and one Flash in the movies by now.  There are many other great elements of the movie that the movie set a high bar for that I don’t think any other super hero film has been able to match.  One is the presence of the character Edna Mode (voiced by Brad Bird himself).  We see all these amazing super suits in Marvel and DC movies, but are never given an explanation about who makes them, with a few exceptions.  A character like Edna is a great addition here, and it makes sense that a person who designs suits for super heroes would be a type A personality herself.  She is easily one of the highlights of the movie and a character type you wish would be more present in the genre.  One other brilliant part of the movie is the villain, Syndrome; easily one of the greatest in all of Pixar’s canon.  Syndrome’s role is a great deconstruction of toxic fandom, where one’s fascination with super powers often leads to eventual loathing of not having control over it, and a desire to flip the power dynamic in their favor.  Syndrome wishes to create a society where everyone has access to super hero ability (which he will profit off of by selling it to them), so that in his eyes, “when everyone is super, than no one will be.”  He’s a character that has become frighteningly all too real in the last 20 years, as tech bro billionaires have used their wealth to bully their way into politics and culture.  Given Pixar’s close proximity to Silicon Valley, it’s almost like Brad Bird and his team knew what was coming and tried to warn us, but we didn’t listen and are now in a world increasingly run by Syndromes.

Unlike The Iron Giant, Incredibles was an immediate success upon it’s initial release.  The movie grossed a respectable $260 million domestic and Brad Bird won his first Academy Award for Animated Feature that year.  What’s more, it was a major milestone for Pixar Animation, as it helped them improve their style of animation and showed that they could tell a human story without having to be rigid in their animation of the human figures.  You know you’ve got great stylized human characters when each one’s silhouette alone conveys personality.  It also was a great leap forward in staging, pushing the medium of computer animation further into a cinematic mode, with the movie very much reaching epic heights in it’s sense of scale.  But at it’s heart, Brad Bird drove home the idea that this was a family film as well.  The heroes aren’t just defined by their deeds, but in how they act as a family unit as well.  And it contrasts so brilliantly with a villain who only sees the powers as the only thing that makes a hero who they are, completely missing the whole point of what heroism is.  While The Incredibles is working with tropes that were already there present in the genre, it did help us to look at them in a fresh new way, and that in many ways guided the shifting winds that would define the genre through the whole rise of the MCU and the DCEU.  One noteworthy contribution to the genre that definitely has a direct connection to The Incredibles is the contributions of it’s music composer Michael Giacchino.  After writing music for television and video games for years, Giacchino was able to make his studio feature film debut as composer for The Incredibles, with a mid-century jazz score reminiscent of the James Bond films. Cut to a decade later, and Giacchino is credited with writing the fanfare for Marvel Studios.  You now hear his music before every Marvel movie, which is quite a legacy to leave behind, and it all started with writing the score for The Incredibles.  Marvel even gave the longtime comic book fan a chance to make his debut behind the camera as director of the special Werewolf by Night (2022) for Disney+.  Even 20 years later and The Incredibles still remains a high water mark not just for animation, but for super hero films in general.  Even it’s sequel, Incredibles 2 (2018) performed like a MCU film at the box office, grossing over a billion worldwide.  Culturally, it is undeniably Brad Bird’s most influential film, and that’s saying a lot for a man with multiple masterpieces on his resume.  It’s an action packed ride, but also one where the heart is in the right place, showing how heroism in the end is not about personal glory, but instead about discovering the best way to use what you have for good.  It’s old school in that way, and there’s no school like the old school.