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Wikipedia
The Incredibles is a 2004 computer-animated superhero comedy film about a family of superheroes who are forced to hide their powers. It was written and directed by Brad Bird, a former director and executive consultant of The Simpsons, and was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. The starring voices are Craig T. Nelson as Bob Parr, a superhero called "Mr. Incredible" who is forced to give up saving people's lives; Holly Hunter as his wife; Sarah Vowell as their teenage daughter; Spencer Fox as their young son; Jason Lee as Mr. Incredible's most avid fan; Samuel L. Jackson as Bob's friend; and Elizabeth Peña as the beautiful assistant of a vengeful supervillain. Bob's yearning to help people draws the entire Parr family into a battle with the villain and his killer robot.
The film won the 2004 Annie Award for Best Animated Feature, along with two 2004 Academy Awards, including Best Animated Feature. It also received nominations for two other Academy Awards, won a 2005 Hugo Award, and was nominated for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy at the 2004 Golden Globes.
Plot
The story is set in a world where some people have superhuman abilities. Two of these superpeople, or "supers", are Mr. Incredible, who is exceedingly strong, and Elastigirl, who can stretch her body into almost any shape. Mr. Incredible has a bright but foolhardy young fan named Buddy, who invents gadgets and wants to be Mr. Incredible's sidekick. Mr. Incredible rejects Buddy and other would-be helpers, telling them "I work alone." The film begins in the city of Municiberg, with a busy day of crimefighting and the wedding of Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, who call themselves Bob and Helen Parr. Shortly afterward, lawsuits from injured bystanders lead to a political backlash that forces all superheroes to stop saving the world and live normal lives.
Fifteen years later, Bob and Helen live unhappy suburban lives in the city of Metroville. Their young son Dash can run faster than the human eye can see, and their teen daughter Violet can turn invisible and create protective force fields, but the family is required to hide their powers as part of the government's Superhero Relocation Program. The baby, Jack-Jack, appears to be an ordinary child. Bob has gained a lot of weight, and he feels frustrated by his office job with an insurance company. He regularly sneaks out to secretly fight crime with his friend Frozone, who can freeze things by spraying them with ice.
One day, Bob is fired from his job for losing his temper and assaulting his boss, who refused to let him rescue an innocent crime victim. However, before he can reveal this to Helen, he finds a video message from a beautiful woman named Mirage, who offers him a large sum of money to stop Omnidroid 9000, an out-of-control robot on a remote island. Bob accepts the offer, is flown to the island, and disables the robot. Afterward, he happily spends time with his family and gets back into shape, still pretending to have his old job. He also takes his torn superhero suit to be repaired by the famous fashion designer Edna Mode. Edna makes a new suit for Bob, but she refuses to add a cape to it, citing numerous cape-related superhero accidents.
On his next trip to the island, Bob is attacked by Omnidroid. Omnidroid and the island are owned by Mr. Incredible's old fan, Buddy, who now calls himself Syndrome and intends to avenge himself against Mr. Incredible and the other superheroes for shunning him. He has already killed many supers by luring them to the island to fight Omnidroid, improving its design as they revealed its weaknesses. His plan is to make people believe he is a superhero by staging a fake battle with the robot.
While Bob escapes from Syndrome, Helen discovers the repair on his old supersuit and visits Edna, who gives her a set of supersuits for her and the children. After learning that Bob lost his job, Helen locates him with a homing beacon and flies to the island in a jet, with Dash and Violet secretly stowing away and Jack-Jack at home with a babysitter. Syndrome's security system detects the homing signal and captures Bob, then shoots the jet down with some missiles, but Helen, Dash, and Violet survive and make their way onto the island. After hiding the children in the jungle, Helen sneaks into Syndrome's facility to rescue Bob, only to find him embracing Mirage, who freed him after a confrontation in which Syndrome refused to save her life. Back in the jungle, Bob and Helen find the children, who triggered the Island's security system shortly after Syndrome launched a rocket to fly Omnidroid to Metroville. Syndrome eventually captures the family and follows the robot in a jet, but they escape and follow him in a second rocket with help from Mirage.
In Metroville, Syndrome uses a remote-control device to prevent Omnidroid from harming him, but he is knocked unconscious after the robot'sartificial intelligence becomes aware of the device and shoots it off of him. When the Parrs arrive, they and Frozone defeat the robot, and when Syndrome wakes up and tries to kidnap Jack-Jack, Jack-Jack uses his recently emerged superpowers to attack him. Bob and Helen save Jack-Jack after Syndrome drops him in midair, and Syndrome is killed when his cape gets caught in one of his jet's engines. Three months later, after Dash races with his school track team and Violet makes a date with a boy she likes, a new villain called the Underminer appears and the Incredibles prepare to fight him.
[edit]Cast
Main article: List of The Incredibles characters
- Craig T. Nelson as Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible
- Holly Hunter as Helen Parr/Elastigirl/Mrs. Incredible
- Sarah Vowell as Violet Parr
- Spencer Fox as Dashiell Robert "Dash" Parr
- Eli Fucile and Maeve Andrews as Jack-Jack Parr
- Jason Lee as Buddy Pine/Incrediboy/Syndrome
- Samuel L. Jackson as Lucius Best/Frozone
- Elizabeth Peña as Mirage
- Brad Bird as Edna Mode
- Bud Luckey as Rick Dicker
- Wallace Shawn as Gilbert Huph
- John Ratzenberger as The Underminer
- Dominique Louis as Bomb voyage
- Eli Fucile as Kari, the babysitter
[edit]Production
The film was originally developed as a traditionally animated film for Warner Bros., but after the studio shut down its division for fully animated theatrical features, Bird took the story with him to Pixar, where he reunited with John Lasseter. It is the first full-length Pixar film whose main protagonist is human.
[edit]Brad Bird's inspiration
Brad Bird was inspired by his own life while writing and directing the film. His situation during that time was similar to that of Bob Parr after the superhero ban: Bird wanted to follow his love of making films, but each film would fall by the wayside at some point during its development. While this was happening, Bird was also trying to focus on his new family, which demanded more of his time. He felt that he would completely fail at one if he focused too much on the other. He stated, "Consciously, this was just a funny movie about superheroes. But I think that what was going on in my life definitely filtered into the movie."[2]
[edit]Challenges during production
Upon Disney accepting the project, Brad Bird was asked to bring in his own team for the production. He brought up a core group of people he worked with on The Iron Giant. Because of this, many 2D artists had to make the shift to 3D, including Brad Bird himself. Brad Bird wrote the script without knowing the limitations or concerns that went hand in hand with the medium of computer animation. As a result, this was to be the most complex film for Pixar yet. It was planned to be 15 minutes longer than anything else Pixar had created.
Bird's story was filled with elements that were difficult to animate with CGI at the time. Creating an all-human cast required creating new technology to animate detailed human anatomy, clothing and realistic skin and hair. Long hair had never been done by Pixar until this point. Disney was initially reluctant to make the film because of these issues, feeling a live action film would be preferable, though Pixar executiveJohn Lasseter vetoed this. Brad Bird recalls, "Basically, I came into a wonderful studio, frightened a lot of people with how many presents I wanted for Christmas, and then got almost everything I asked for."[3]
In a 2009 interview, Up producer Jonas Rivera discussed how Bird's approach to filmmaking differed from the process previously used by Pixar:
We almost treat it like a live action movie, we build a set – say, Andy's room in Toy Story – and we get a camera, we actually 'location-scout' it, check out all the angles with the characters on the bed, or whatever, and we take that back and start building a layout based on that, and shots come and go. Whereas Bird is like, 'This is the exact shot I want, then I want this shot, and then this shot, and I don't want to see one pixel over to the right.' … There was a reason for it. The scope of The Incredibles was so big: for example, Monsters Inc had 31 sets, The Incredibles had 89, that's a lot of work. Brad was willing to sacrifice flexibility for scope.[4]
John Barry was the first choice to do the film's score, with a trailer of the film given a rerecording of Barry's theme to On Her Majesty's Secret Service. However Barry did not wish to duplicate the sound of some of his earlier soundtracks;[5] the assignment was instead given toMichael Giacchino.[6]
[edit]Reception
[edit]Critics
The Incredibles received near-universal critical acclaim, receiving a 97% "Certified Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes[7] which made the movie the fifteenth greatest action film of all time and the only one of Top 20 with more than 100 reviews.[8] Metacritic indicates The Incredibles "universal acclaim" with a 90 out of 100 rating.[9]Critic Roger Ebert awarded the film 3 1⁄2 stars out of four, writing that the film "alternates breakneck action with satire of suburban sitcom life" and is "another example of Pixar's mastery of popular animation."[10] Rolling Stone gave the movie 3 1⁄2 stars and called the movie "one of the year's best" and said that it "doesn't ring cartoonish, it rings true."[11] Also giving the film 3 1⁄2 stars, People magazine found that The Incredibles"boasts a strong, entertaining story and a truckload of savvy comic touches."[12]
Eleanor Ringel Gillespie of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was bored by the film's recurring pastiches of earlier action films, concluding, "the Pixar whizzes do what they do excellently; you just wish they were doing something else."[13] Similarly, Jessica Winter of the Village Voice criticized the film for playing as a standard summer action film, despite being released in early November. Her review, titled as "Full Metal Racket," noted that "The Incredibles announces the studio's arrival in the vast yet overcrowded Hollywood lot of eardrum-bashing, metal-crunching action sludge."
Makers of the 2005 film Fantastic Four were forced to make significant script changes and add more special effects because of similarities to the storyline of The Incredibles.[14]
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone named The Incredibles #6 on his list of the best films of the decade, writing "Of all the Pixar miracles studded through the decade, The Incredibles still delights me the most. It's not every toon that deals with midlife crisis, marital dysfunction, child neglect, impotence fears, fashion faux pas and existential angst."[15]
[edit]Box office performance
Despite concerns that the film would receive underwhelming results,[16] the film grossed $70,467,623 in its opening weekend from 7,600 screens at 3,933 theaters, averaging $17,917 per theater or $9,272 per screen, the highest opening weekend gross for a Pixar film (the record was later broken in 2010 by Toy Story 3 with $110,307,189), the highest opening weekend for a non sequel animated feature (the record was broken in 2007 by The Simpsons Movie with $74 million), and the highest opening weekend for a non-franchise-based film for just over five years when Avatar opened. The film was also #1 in its second weekend, grossing another $50,251,359, dropping just 29 percent, and easily outgrossing new animated opener The Polar Express. The film ultimately grossed $261,441,092, the fourth-highest gross for a Pixar film behind Toy Story 3 ($406,040,342), Finding Nemo ($339,714,978) and Up ($293,004,164) and the fifth-highest grossing film of 2004.[17]Worldwide, the film grossed $631,442,092, also the fourth-highest gross for a Pixar film behind Toy Story 3 ($1,012,440,342), Finding Nemo($867,893,978) and Up ($731,342,744), and ranked fourth for the year.[18] The film was also the second-highest grossing animated film that year behind Shrek 2.
It had its network television premiere on Thanksgiving Day 2007 on NBC sponsored by Target and its basic cable premiere on ABC Family as part of The 25 Days of Christmas in December 2007, and its second cable showing on Disney Channel as part of the No Ordinary Friday on February 1, 2008.
This was also the first Pixar film to be given a PG rating.
[edit]Awards
The film won the Academy Award in 2004 for Best Animated Feature as well as Best Achievement in Sound Editing. It also received nominations for Best Original Screenplay (for writer/director Brad Bird) and Best Achievement in Sound. It was Pixar's first feature film to win multiple Oscars, followed in 2010 by Up.
The film also received the 2004 Annie Award for Best Animated Feature and the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, and it was nominated for the 2004 Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. These and other awards place it among the most-honored animation films in recent history.[19]
[edit]Top ten lists
The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2004.[20]
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