The Incredibles Review

Bird treats the family as the genre. Bob's frustration is a midlife crisis with heat vision, Helen's competence is the exhausted competence of a parent running a household alone, and the argument they have about who they used to be is the same argument the film is having about superheroes. The design work is the other half of it. Bird and his team build a sixties world of curved concrete and tailored suits, light it like a spy picture, and stage action that is legible in a way computer animation rarely bothered with then, with Dash's run across the water still the clearest sequence in any Pixar film.

Michael Giacchino's brass score commits to the joke and then sells the emotion. Syndrome beats most of the live action competition because his grievance is small and completely believable. The film's harder edges, the line about everyone being special and the casualness about collateral damage, have kept an argument running for twenty years, which is the mark of a film with something in it rather than a flaw. Funny, fast, and unusually adult about ambition.