Hacker Cinema
The Incredibles
2004 · Film · 115 min
Part of The Incredibles Collection
Directed by Brad Bird
ActionAdventureAnimationFamily
Bob Parr has given up his superhero days to log in time as an insurance adjuster and raise his three children with his formerly heroic wife in suburbia. But when he receives a mysterious assignment, it's time to get back into costume.
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75 comments on Hacker News
There are a lot of movies explain their themes outright. You don't have to try that hard to remember what they're fighting for in the Incredibles for example. But what is the theme of Tron Legacy? I had to get Google to explain that the movie is about perfectionism. That's an interesting theme but I didn't realize that in the theater.
Anti-corporate attitudes were completely normalized in the 2000s and arguably only really lulled during the mid-2010s. There were several films from that period that featured countercultural messaging:
Disney’s Incredibles had allusions to Kafka
Monster’s Inc. is a commentary on corporate vampirism.
Kingdom of Heaven was if not a commentary on the Global War on Terror at least a bold film to have released 4 years after 9/11.
The second Pirates of the Caribbean film was a (childish) commentary on global empire and rationalization eliminating places for the human person to live freely.
The Corporation, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Supersize Me were all released post-9/11. They screened Supersize Me in elementary and high schools when it was released.
Anti-globalization as a movement completely collapsed during the Occupy Wall Street protests. These movements had attitudes towards international mobility rights that completely undermined organized labor. Most of them recognized what impacts illegals were having on these industries but took the position that labor solidarity would somehow make everyone better off. This could have worked in theory except that they had no operational plan to enact this solidarity and the illegals were never interested in it to begin with.
Once the bankers realized that they could just pay off the OWS leadership with fake email jobs, you started to see the conventional partisan divide on globalism that we observe today, with liberals being in favor of it and conservatives opposed to it.
Even if Bluey was strange Australian propaganda to make fatherhood desirable and respectable, it still wins because it actually works at it.
Avoiding the "dumb sitcom dad" has been done before a few times, and well (Bob Parr of Incredibles; Stoick the Vast of How to Train Your Dragon; King Fergus of Brave could be some examples) - but Bandit just is a dad; he's not perfect, he's not brilliant - but he's there (except when he has to leave) and he loves - his children, his wife, himself.
And even though he says "I'm not taking advice from a cartoon dog" we all end up doing so.
There’s Toy Story 1-4 on there and Star Wars Force awakens, but for popular films it doesn’t have the incredibles, no Star Trek (perhaps include ii), few/no bond films (Casino Royale?), few Miyazakis (Nausicaa, Mononoke), not many Tarantinos (hateful 8), not too many Burtons (Batman 2, Big Fish, Sleepy Hollow). Is there any Indiana Jones? Could include Starship Troopers.
What about DivX/XviD?
VCDs had broad hardware support, and were more mainstream.
I used to travel around Southeast Asia a bit, and whenever I was in Hong Kong, I'd load up on VCD movies at mainstream stores like HMV.
I still have VCD copies of The Incredibles and On Her Majesty's Secret Service I bought at HMV.
Good point.
The localization of The Incredibles in Argentina was embarrassing, though someone must have thought it was a good idea. They used local voice actors popular at the time (though not so much today) with strong porteño (Buenos Aires') accents. They also referred to the streets with Argentinian names, e.g. "let's turn that corner of Corrientes Avenue!". The problem is that Corrientes Av is very typical of Buenos Aires, but nothing on screen looked anywhere close to it, so the whole thing was ridiculous and embarrassing, sort of like if the characters pretended they were in Tokyo and were Japanese.
What if they had gone the extra mile (maybe possible in the near future) and reskinned every character to look more Argentinian, and rethemed the city to look more like Buenos Aires, would I have been happier? Certainly not -- I want to see the original movie as intended, not some sanitized version designed to make me feel "at home" and not challenge me in the slightest.
(I watched the movie in English as well, mind you).
Just saying "Pixar movies" was probably not a great example. They can be deliberately location ambiguous (Monsters Inc., Toy Story - though it's clearly _somewhere_ in America, The Incredibles - a generic "metropolis"/50's futuristic city, lightyear, Elemental) or very specifically somewhere (cars - mashup of Route 66 towns, Finding Nemo - Sydney when on land, Ratatouille - Paris, etc...)
It makes sense to "translate" locale cultural indicators in say Wall·E which was very location agnostic but not so much for say Turning red which is very culturally specific.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Pixar does not have a monopoly on attention to detail. They're flush with cash and their leadership has decent taste.
There are so many creators putting in intense work, and doing it on low budgets. You can't claim these folks don't have attention to detail. Check out A24, low and mid and low budget films, or independent films and you'll see a wide assortment of highly meticulous storytellers.
Pixar, on the other hand, isn't low or mid budget:
Toy Story - $30 Million A Bug’s Life - $120 Million Toy Story 2 - $90 Million Monsters, Inc. - $115 Million Finding Nemo - $94 Million The Incredibles - $92 Million Cars - $120 Million Ratatouille - $150 Million WALL-E - $180 Million Up - $175 Million Toy Story 3 - $200 Million Cars 2 - $200 Million Brave - $185 Million Monsters University - $200 Million Inside Out - $175 Million The Good Dinosaur - $200 Million Finding Dory - $200 Million Cars 3 - $175 Million Coco - $175 Million Incredibles 2 - $200 Million Toy Story 4 - $200 Million Onward - $175 Million Soul - $150 Million Luca - Unknown but probably around $150 Million Turning Red - $175 Million Lightyear - $200 Million For that amount of money, they had better pay attention to detail.
Miyazaki is doing way more with much less.
Voices of a Distant Star was one person -- Shinkai. That's the kind of thing we'll see more and more of. Small creators reaching audiences and building studios. Gooseworx, psychicpebbles, Vivienne Medrano. That's the algorithm of tomorrow.
AI, as a tool, makes this more possible. One of the first people to do it successfully was Joel Haver, and he's just the first of many to come.
> everyone will be able to generate "something incredible" and then it all becomes not incredible.
no, that's just your standard moving up.
There is an absolute scale for which you can measure, and ai is approaching a point where it is an acceptable level.
Imagine if you applied your argument to quality of life - it used to be that nobody had access to easy, cheap clean drinking water. Now everybody has access to it. Is it not an incredible achievement, rather than it not being incredible just because it is common?
That quote from the movie "the incredibles", where the villain claims that if everybody is super, then nobody is, was your gist of the argument. And it is a childish one imho.
I thought you altered the phrase spoken by the villain Syndrome in Pixar's "Incredibles" movie: https://youtu.be/GYmHYQPaHaw?feature=shared
Sideways
Back To The Future
Cinema Paradiso
Spaceballs
Up In Smoke (Cheech & Chong)
The Incredibles
Indiana Jones 1-3
Indiana Jones: Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (Rifftrax only)
Falling Down
Office Space
Man Bites Dog
Nothing To Lose
Idiocracy
Space Mutiny (MST3k)
Goodfellas
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Groundhog Day
Barbie
Full Metal Jacket
Mallrats
Flight Of The Navigator
The Founder
One Hour Photo
---
I'm pretty certain I've rewatched Sideways more than any other film.
There's a third option, which is: to not quit, but fight back against legal-but-immoral practices from within the corporation.
Have you seen The Incredibles (pixar film). This scene is exactly what I'm talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_VMXa9k5KU
there's a line in the movie the incredibles where robert (the hero) is meeting with the designer (edna) of super suits to design him a new suit even though such activities are technically illegal.
The dialogue goes something like this:
robert: you know I'm retired from hero work.
Edna:As am I, Robert, yet here we are.
so now it's 2023. you're telling me it's now safe to click on unsubscribe to the spam emails.
yet here we are.
no, the strait forward response is to ignore and mark as spam any unsolicited emails you did not explicitly sign up for. don't try to interact through the desired or expected channels of any entity that spams you.
Interesting, I’d never seen comparisons between Megamind and The Incredibles, but it definitely did suffer from being released so soon after Despicable Me.
My favorite overlooked animated film is Iron Giant. People didn’t yet generally appreciate that an animated film could be as much for adults as kids, and WB seemed to have no idea how to market it.
Right, I meant to suggest there might be some "culture" bleed. Another commenter suggested it had more to do with key Pixar figures leaving for Disney, at which point Disney's own offerings improved and Pixar's suffered.
I'm not very good at articulating "feelings" so bear with me: Early Pixar movies (to me) are timeless, positive, almost fairy-tale like. They're centrist, middle-of-the-road films that don't offend or validate anyone, just faithfully follow the Hero's Journey as they try to resolve some issue in the ideal world where we're all in this together. Toy Story is the best example-- literally every single toy could not be more different, but the entire point of the movie is about all of them finding ways to leverage their differences to advance the journey for all of them, not exploiting their shortcomings to hold everyone else back. Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, all are the same pattern. Pixar's money printer used to be endless asset-swaps of "Diversity: The Movie" (the secret to Sesame Street as well), and it was a beautiful thing before the concept was perverted by the same children who grew up watching these movies.
I don't have kids' show equivalents to name from AppleTV, but I do get the same feeling ("Diversity: The Show") from their regular shows. Ted Lasso is the obvious frontrunner. For All Mankind, Invasion, Foundation (caveat: I was really high when I watched this one). All of these beautifully weave together the themes of diversity and unity into a shared journey.
I guess if Pixar was never a masterpiece factory then no studio was? It's certainly not like Disney hasn't had a history of duds from pretty much the beginning. I haven't been a fan of Pixar for the last couple decades, but their first 6 films (the ones most people think of when they hear the name "Pixar") were pretty excellent. By the time The Incredibles came out, there was no reason to not believe a Pixar movie was guaranteed to be worth seeing.
Sure, they have not been a masterpiece factory for almost two decades now. However they were certainly a masterpiece factory at one point, that point being the first decade of the studio's life.
During that time they were certainly a masterpiece factory. From 1995 with their first film Toy Story, to 2004 with the release of The Incredibles, that resulted in consistently great films for 9 years. Their record held for 11 years until Cars was released in 2006.
I believe no other studio has had similar performance. I remember around early 2000's news of Hollywood studios in panic because investors started asking other studios why it was considered business as usual, a given, that for every successful film a studio released there would be flops too. So like VC investing, the pay off for the eventual success had to be enough to offset those films that flopped and lost money.
But then came Pixar and suddenly a studio proved you didn't have to have flops, every film they made in their first decade was a resounding success. They blew the conventional logic of Hollywood economics out of the window.
This article sort of paints a picture of how outstanding their success was at the time: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/nov/12/3
So I guess I disagree with the title, Pixar was most certainly a masterpiece factory in its first decade.
Reading deBoer's article I can't say I agree or disagree about the recent state of Pixar, I grew up with Pixar films and their first decade coincided with my childhood and early teenage years, so when I think to myself "yeah Pixar's recent work doesn't touch that early magic" I can't really tell is that my bias coming through?
Maybe I am overthinking this a bit.
Yeah, it kinda blew my mind how people I knew insisted the whole movie was great.
It's like, sure, it's OK if you like dogs flying in airplanes, but the first few minutes of the movie is the only thing that has any staying power. I'm pretty sure most people at this point who haven't watched the movie in a long time don't even remember what the rest of it was about. In contrast, I haven't seen Toy Story in 15+ years, and I can still describe to you roughly what happens act for act. Granted, I watched Toy Story as a young boy, so I'm biased.
As much as I think Wall-E was an excellent film, I consider The Incredibles to be Pixar's peak. It was a great story with a perfect balance of humor, child characters actually in peril, subtle mature themes (infidelity, "you didn't save my life; you ruined my death"), well stylized humanoid character models, a father character who isn't a deadbeat, a theme around having to hide who you are, etc. Lots of great stuff in there. Wall-E might have had a grander message and an artsier vision, but The Incredibles IMO has way more rewatch value.
Monsters Inc. was pretty great, too! For me, Pixar failed to make another film that came even close to Monsters or The Incredibles.
including two of the executives behind “Lightyear”: director Angus MacLane and producer Galyn Susman. MacLane had been at Pixar for more than two decades, serving as an animator on classics like “Toy Story 2,” “The Incredibles” and “Finding Nemo.” He co-directed the 2016 sequel “Finding Dory” before his first solo directorial feature film “Lightyear.” The spinoff of the “Toy Story” franchise, which featured Chris Evans as the voice of Buzz Lightyear, was a commercial dud; Deadline estimated the film lost the studio more than $100 million.
Susman, likewise, was a longtime Pixar employee. She is also the hero of one of the company’s most legendary stories. During the making of “Toy Story 2,” a Pixar employee accidentally wiped the servers of nearly the whole movie. Thankfully for the animators, Susman was working from home while taking care of her newborn child — her backup copy saved the film.
Having done great work in the past is not enough to incentivize others to keep you around.
> You can look at all the Disney movies for kids: all men are stupid, liars, stealer, and when you hit them it’s funny. On the opposite the feminine is often perfect, manage it all on the first try.
A few counterexamples: Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Zootopia, Raya and the Last Dragon, Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatoullie, Up, The Good Dinosaur, Onward, Soul, and Luca.
Yup. Even if you only look within a relatively small category of films one per year can miss a bunch. For example, consider the category of animated feature length films released after 2000 in the US, and pick one per year by picking the winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
In 2001 you'd miss Monsters, Inc. because of Shrek.
In 2002 you'd miss Lilo & Stitch because of Spirited Away.
In 2004 you'd miss Shrek 2 because of The Incredibles.
In 2005 you'd miss Howl's Moving Castle and Corpse Bride because of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
In 2008, no Kung Fu Panda because of WALL-E.
In 2009, no Coraline or Fantastic Mr. Fox because of Up.
In 2010 you'd miss How to Train Your Dragon because of Toy Story 3.
In 2011 no Kung Fu Panda 2 because of Rango.
In 2012 no Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, or Wreck-it Ralph because of Brave.
In 2014 no How to Train Your Dragon 2 because of Big Hero 6.
2015 no Shaun the Sheep Movie because of Inside Out.
2016 you miss Kubo and the Two Strings and Moana because of Zootopia.
2019 No How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World because of Toy Story 4.
2021 you'd miss Raya and the Last Dragon and Luca because of Encanto.
Most of the winners are good...but if you just put all the above mentioned films in a pool and asked most people to pick their top 14, most would have a lot of films on their list that were not among the winners of the aforementioned years.
> They're still making good ones: Frozen, Moana, Encanto. Just watch those and pretend the rest doesn't exist.
Probably the most objective way to view this is to actually look at the list of films from any given decade and see how many flops they had [1]. There's a bias at play here: the only movies we remember Disney making a decade+ ago are the hits. We don't often remember the misses.
Apparently Disney's "Renaissance" ended with Tarzan in 1999; but here are a list of movies that have come out since the end of this golden era:
- Monsters, Inc.
- Lilo and Stitch
- Treasure Planet (a personal favorite)
- Finding Nemo
- Pirates of the Caribbean
- The Incredibles
- Ratatouille
- WALL-E
- Up
- Tangled
- Brave
- Wreck-It Ralph
- Frozen
- Inside Out
- Encanto
I'm sure there's many great ones that you might love that I'm missing. But I'd say this lineup is potentially better than the list of movies spanning The Little Mermaid to Tarzan. To the author's credit, I will say there's part of me that's nostalgic for the traditional style of 2d character animation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Pictures_films
I sometimes hear this, but I disagree.
If you're 40 years old, you need to be able to consume any kind of media and then place yourself into the mindset of a younger person and judge it from that mindset - because you used to be that younger person.
Truly exceptional media is good enough to transcend the age barrier and is enjoyable for everyone, e.g., The Incredibles is enjoyable for young kids because it's a cartoon and it's flashy and exciting, it's enjoyable for young boys who want to be the "best" at a sport, it's enjoyable for girls transitioning to puberty because of Violet's storyline, it's enjoyable for men who have lost some of their steam and can relate to Mr. Incredible, and it's enjoyable for women because of the struggles Elastigirl has as a mother and a homemaker. Even Syndrome is shown as a sympathetic villain who is evil not because he is a bad person, but because he was dismissed and ignored by his idol. There are plenty of people who can relate to that.
Ghostbusters (1984) is another expertly crafted movie that is fun for kids, but well-written enough to be incredibly enjoyable for adults.
When my young cousins or my nephew corral me into playing a game with them, I'm not playing it from my 41-year old perspective, I'm playing it through their eyes.
If you can't do that, then don't review content. Content always has a specific audience. Really great content can weave together enough bits to at least satisfy every audience. Exceptional content manages to speak deeply to every audience. I still feel that's why The Incredibles is one of the best movies ever made. The struggles shown in that movie are relatable for every single person on the planet.
Offtopic, but The Incredibles has one of my favorite movie quotes:
You always say “Be true to yourself”, but you never say which part of yourself to be true to!
… which stuck in my head because so many Disney (and other?) movies seem to be all about being “true to yourself,” and in my experience they conspicuously fail to address the fact (in my belief system) that all humans have both good and evil, selfish and selfless within (we’re born screaming, demanding others’ attention; but even in the womb we listen to and begin to love familiar people, and in many situations we sacrifice much for our loved ones and even strangers).
Maybe he meant The Incredibles? But that's in Pixar's employee sexual harassment/overly sexy moms period.
Or The Expendables? (a movie in the "Jason Statham drives a car and kills people" genre)
And the first Pixar film that focused on human characters was The Incredibles, which is very smart since the characters are highly stylized and angular, like something from an Ayn Rand book cover.
Related tidbit: Brad Bird (Iron Giant, Incredibles, MI:Ghost Protocol) was trying for years to make a related movie with this story as the context. The latest news is it was shelved 9 years ago after going through several screenplays and over a $200 million budget.
or paraphrased in this quote from ‘the incredibles’ movie, “when everyone is a superman, no one is…”
It was The Incredibles. That and my father was and still is an animator. But The Incredibles really got me interested because it was both pretty advanced for its time and had what I still consider to be a more mature storyline than even most animated films today. I definitely know what you mean about Roger Rabbit!
> "I feel that Pixar’s mastery of storytelling is overrated."
me too. the incredibles was pixar's high point of storytelling imho. of the first six films, i liked the toy stories the least. a bug's life, monsters, inc., finding nemo to the incredibles was like a crescendo of animation, reaching a satisfying zenith of art. cars, which came next, was ok (but unoriginal for storytelling, the characters were mostly great!), but then ratatouille through inside out were all groping for relevance while nakedly harvesting their reputation. of the last 8 movies, only coco has been worth watching so far (i haven't seen the good dinosaur or soul yet). so perhaps a quarter of their 23 films have been good enough to watch again for me; contrast that with the studio ghibli collection, nearly all of which are imminently re-watchable (spirited away is an absolute masterpiece).
Limiting my complain to recent Pixar movies: I think Coco, Soul and Inside Out are fairly obvious and not multi-layer. Definitely they talk of "difficult" subjects to kids: death, depression, regrets about ones life. They are not much fun either and the story is rather weak: often predictable, déjà-vu moments (Soul and Inside Out are strangely very similarly built with a meta-world in both), repetitive loop of slow and fast action scenes.
Japanese anime also talks about difficult subjects and IMO does it much better. Thinking of "Okko's Inn": much less predictable, some funny and tense scenes, and yet not shocking for children and quite emotional for parents (OK maybe our smallest daughter woke up and came in her parents bed the following night but she has not been traumatized for life :)
Since I am engaged in a reckless defense of Frozen in other posts: I think this movie is multi-layered. It talks of women and power, femicide, love vs friendship, sisterhood, although it is packaged in a story suitable for the smallest children as its success showed. The story is definitely not predictable from the start and has the power of myths. Of course Disney is well known for its ability to adapt old myths and tales.
As for older Pixar: The Incredibles was fun and multi-layered, Ratatouille was fun, Wall-E was great ...
Around the time of Wall-E and The Incredibles, I was very much a fan of their work and felt like they could do no wrong. Now I’m not so sure- I did love Coco but they have been absorbed by Disney at this point and are satisfying investors. Also, I find the low key arrogance about having mastered storytelling more than a little obnoxious. You can see a bit of this in Andrew Stanton’s Ted talk.
Before they sold to Disney, they were going to start making more mature films alongside their children’s entertainment. I was very curious about Ray Gunn. I think if Disney wanted it then Pixar could definitely make an incredibly compelling animated movie with mature themes. I mostly find myself disappointed with them these days.
(I find whenever I bring this up online quite a few people come at me with this idea that they are making mature films, and that the line between children’s entertainment and adult is imaginary, as though most kids could sit through something like The Rules of the Game or Tokyo Story.)
But to be clear, I’m still mostly a fan of their work but mostly for their technical mastery.
I think this is spot on.
It certainly seems like a lot of super hero franchises were started as outright far right propaganda, even if now, the profit motives of the licensee corporations have dulled the messaging somewhat.
I think 'The Incredibles' is an interesting movie in this regard. It's probably the most family friendly pro fascist romp ever made.
The protagonists are literally Ubermensch held back by an ignorant and fearful society. The evil goal of the bad guy is to give everyone super powers. It wouldn't be possible to spell this out any clearer.
I think this is a different line of reasoning from the one everyone else is on. Hume seems to be saying that there's no such thing as evidence at all, there's just a sequence of unrelated events. But faith (in the Christian sense, at least) is believing something apart from, or in spite of, evidence, whereas reason is believing something because of evidence. Point being, both of them require that the concept of evidence has some value. So saying that there is no evidence for _anything_ does not support faith (again, in the Christian sense); it undermines them both.
It's like that quote from the movie The Incredibles: "When everyone's super, no one will be."
That's great! I'll be sharing that site with my homestay family, who have kids aged 6 and 9. On Monday this week I asked the older one to read a Wikipedia list of Disney films and Dreamworks Animation movies and here's the list she made, which you can compare with the ones on your site:
Alice in Wonderland; Toy Story 3; Incredibles; Pinocchio; Lion King; The Tale of Despereaux; Winnie the Pooh; Maleficent; Cinderella; Frozen; Frozen II; Moana; The Santa Clause; Coco; Pirates of the Caribbean; The Princess and the Frog; Brave 2012; Beauty and the Beast; Born in China; The Boss Baby; Abominable; Trolls World Tour; Gift of the Night Fury; Shrek (all); The Grinch; Book of Dragons; Kung Fu Panda; Puss in Boots; Dawn of the Dragon Racers; Marooned ; Prince of Egypt; Peter Rabbit; Aladdin 1992; Aladdin 2019; Shark Tale; Wallace and Gromit; Chicken Run; Bee Movie; Turbo 2013; Home 2015; Captain Underpants; Tangled 2010; Harry Potter; Despicable Me; Despicable Me 2; Minions; The Secret Life of Pets; The Little Ghost; Waking Sleeping Beauty; Cleopatra in Space; My Neighbour Totoro
I remember when Netflix started automatically playing trailers (or their own version of one) whenever you rested on a title for longer than a few seconds. And I remember looking up how to disable this feature but you can't. I'm sure there will be "well actually"'s for this but when I checked, you couldn't and I don't bother every day checking to see if it's there.
I noticed the Netflix app on some older smart televisions don't have this feature which I can only speculate why but it's like an upgrade watching on those old versions.
I think it's clever, it gets the content they paid for playing on television sets sooner. Trailers can draw people in to watch something they might not have the same way the beginning of a book can suck you in sometimes. And for users that don't like this feature, it keeps them scrolling. Cause every time you scroll over to the next title, the trailer stops and you reliably get about 2 seconds before the next trailer starts playing.
So I started scrolling faster. I think what happened next was that I realized there was nothing interesting to watch much sooner than I would if I wasn't scrolling as fast to avoid the automatically playing trailers.
Their original content comes out so fast and different people in my social circles are so excited about completely different ones and recommending them to me all the time that they just all seem the "same". Something about not having months of hype and advertisements, big reveals, franchises, etc. makes the Netflix originals feel like the product of an assembly line than legitimate inspiration. Like they're doing sprints for creative work. There was a thread a while back on HN about "Bright" when it came out. I remember there was a comment suggesting that the plot/setting/actors/world seems like it was generated with neural nets or something. That's how they all feel to me.
Also the recommendation algorithm gets some things right about me. Most things probably. But it's noticeably more exciting to use when scrolling through someone else's profile. Because it's all new stuff. It's completely tailored for someone else. You're likely to find titles you wouldn't bother to search for specifically (typing in the title) but you're surprised it's on their and you want to watch it immediately. I like The Incredibles but I don't want to watch the Emoji Movie.
So I think they're getting eaten from a couple of angles. original programming is soylent green, other media companies are taking their balls home, the interface is designed in a way that reveals the lack of interesting stuff quicker, their price went up.
Children of Men, The Incredibles, Inception, Toy Story, Lala Land. Just a few off the top of my head.
I'm not sure what genres you like but I cannot imagine you haven't enjoyed a significant number of movies over the past two decades.
Check out FloobyNooby. The 'blogger dissects many films' cinematography in great detail.
Here is FN's article on the original Incredibles movie. http://floobynooby.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-cinematography-of-incredibles-part-1.html
I think that's one of the problems with Incredibles setting that 2 only makes worse: the films don't seem to be set in the 50s/60s, they seem to be set in a world that never grew out of the 50s/60s. There is too much anachronism for it to be the 50s/60s. It's maybe the case that Incredibles 1 started in the equivalent of our 50s or 60s, but the time jump of "no supers" and the births and ages of the kids would indicate that most of the Incredibles happened maybe in the 80s/90s.
The timeline is probably a mess, but the clear point is that it can't be set in the 50s/60s so much as a world trapped in the 50s/60s idea of a future. It's retrofuturist nostalgia, at best. (Which between Incredibles 2 and Tomorrowland is perhaps where poor Brad Bird is trapped mentally and needs help escaping?)
Pixar really wants to stay out of the uncanny valley with their characters, so they intentionally design them to look "cartoony"--closer to the classic hand-drawn animation of the past. They want their movies to look like animated movies.
"Live action" movies try to make it to the other side of the uncanny valley. Usually the most successful efforts cheat a bit by avoiding human characters. Think Avatar, Gollum, Snoke, Thanoes, etc. They look so real! (If aliens or ring-wracked wretches were real...)
Where movies looks weird is when there are elements on both sides of the uncanny valley--in the case of The Good Dinosaur, the backgrounds look real and the characters look like cartoons.
This was surprising because Pixar is usually careful to avoid this. The sea in Finding Nemo looked amazing, but it didn't really look 100% real--it looked like a beautiful stylized version of a sea. Same with the environments in The Incredibles, as the top blog here details.
Bear in mind both films are set in 1962...
I’m a father who shares duties equally with my wife. Between us, we cope. When one of us is away, all hell is prone to break loose. That’s what’s I interpreted Mr Incredible’s struggles as - not incompetence, but being overwhelmed by being the sole parent.
Very thorough piece, it's good seeing all the images that form the inspiration. I'd like to see something similar for the original Incredibles.
The original Incredibles is one of my favorites. There's a simplicity, pace and elegance to everything that makes it very tight and watchable.
I enjoyed Incredibles II but thought it suffered a little from "sequel ramp-up" where everything is required to be "bigger" and "better". Story is displaced by action, and then you end up rating the movie on the action scenes and sequences rather than a unified whole with story, dialog and action in balance. The visuals were excellent but even then, sometimes too much was crammed in, and not easy to take in due to pace of story advancing quickly.
> But if the consumer can't tell the difference, does it matter?
The consumer gets used to it. The CG effects in Toy Story 1 look dated, and if you were to watch the Incredibles and the Incredibles 2 back to back, you would also notice immediately. Or compare the movie "Gravity" to "Babylon 5".
Plus I've not even mentioned hair, fur and volumetrics. A staple in pretty much any feature film FX, they were completely absent in the real time ray tracing demos. Hair and fur are commonly not ray traced as triangles but use custom intersection routines. Those are an extra layer of complexity on top. I don't know yet how Nvidia's own API for the RTX card looks like, but Microsoft DXR and Apple's Metal ray tracing both are restricted to triangle geometry only.
There are various voluntary ratings associations in existence, focused on their own version of "acceptable."
Commonsensemedia is a good example, they have a US-centric Christian bent that doesn't agree with my own, but for the most part their information about movies and TV for kids is useful to me when deciding what to show my kids.
So there seems to be a treasure trove of voluntarily produced data on content by various groups on one side, and a desire to automate applying those ratings to my kids in a default whitelist then allow-by-exception model.
If it were technologically possible, I'd even be thrilled to have a default whitelist created by the parents who are my Facebook contacts. We do that manually today. "Hey, have you seen The Incredibles? Is it too scary for my three year old?"
Anything that allowed parents to do that, and that worked in a widespread way, would be adopted immediately and would probably be worth a subscription fee.
A couple of good quotes:
"This skepticism about Wakanda is both Black Panther’s greatest strength and, ultimately, the reason its climactic battle lets down the rest of the movie just a little bit. But it’s also part and parcel of Marvel’s recent slate of movies, which has been interested, more than ever, in the idea that American hegemony and military power maybe isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be — even as every movie seems to conclude with a big shrug. “Well?” the films seem to ask. “What else are you gonna do?”"
Well? What else are you gonna do?
"In the deconstructionist corner are works like the comic Watchmen or even the Pixar film The Incredibles. The former asks what kind of psychological trauma you’d have to experience to think putting on a costume and beating people up is the way to live your life; the latter flirts with objectivism in its insistence that everybody is special but some people are more special than others. (The Incredibles remains the best superhero movie, but it’s constantly about two adaptation choices away from becoming a straightforward rendition of Atlas Shrugged — for kids!)"
I'm going to have to think about that last one.
I really like the original Lee/Kirby comics (and Byrne's run in a similar style), and I'd love to see movies that were true to the best parts of those comics. The only good FF movie we've gotten so far was called The Incredibles, but there's no reason why the real FF movies couldn't be at least as good and successful.
Doom was the last video game I played regularly. Obviously, I am not a gamer. Strange, but I have spent more time with If (interactive fiction) these past few years, and any games that have more 'artsy' or abstract visuals. Hell, I even like the demo Breakout clone on the Pythonista app more than realistic games. I was into viewing Machinima at one time, and I think there the realism works better than in games, although there were some really cool Machinima works done in a zany forced-perspective, or cartoon style that were fantastic.
I think the point is that we have focused too much on high frame rates and realism, and drifted away from the creative, storytelling side. I think that's why the animated movies, like The Incredibles, or Despicable Me and Zootopia do well. They use the old animation tricks that don't actually mimic real physics, but our cultured sense of movement. I don't have much interest in the second wave of VR either; I am trying to continue to find awe in the real world around me, and would prefer to be in an immersive world of crazy Bugs Bunny and Jessica Rabbit!
I think the smart move for the time being for VR is to put realism to the side in favor of strongly art-directed stylized content that focuses on the strengths that the platform has right now and worry about realism later.
I think films are a great example of demonstrating that realism =/= immersion. Movies like Lego Movie, The Incredibles, etc can be just as immersive as live action. The secret sauce isn't realism, it's choosing the right style for the content, gameplay and theme you are going for.
Seriously? ANY pixar film puts those to shame in terms of depth. The entire back story of UP was about a widower; Finding Nemo, same story - talk about darkness and light. How about The Incredibles, Wall-E, Monsters Inc, all fantastic story telling and incredible depth. It even goes further back than 80s, to movies like The Sound of Music with the Nazis.
Again, your biases are only fuzzy nostalgia and it seemed bigger to you then cause your brain couldn't contextualize it as well.
Yeah, one of my favorite reasons why I like Pixar films is that their central conflicts are inspired by some deep-seated adult fear: fear of being replaced or forgotten (TS1-TS3), of children growing up and leaving (Nemo), midlife crisis (Incredibles), the fragility of newborn children (Monsters Inc), of change (Inside Out).
That said, I do think there are a lot of creative frontiers to be explored with material suitable for older audiences only. If they wanted, Pixar could make the most terrifying psychological horror known to Man, or a tragedy so heart-wrenching that everyone heads to the bars afterward.
I am happy with my faith. I've gone through a crisis of it. I've come out much stronger on the other side.
Specifically to the extreme, during that time I re-evaluated possible philosophic systems. I am an absolutist. I think there is Truth. Without a god, I needed to see if there was any system that provided a similar world view. Existential nihilism does. It says that the only fact we have is that nothing fundamentally matters (I'm treating existential nihilism apart from the extreme skeptics that deny the existence of things). The universe will die, or collapse and re-expand. Regardless to the exact details, every invention and power of man amounts to nothing. Therefore since every man is within the group man, individual acts amount to nothing. I've not seen a more honest system than this. I want an honest system
Most other systems are predicated on a quasi-Christian-like system. They believe that people are somehow different than everything else in the universe. That they have intrinsic meaning while nothing else does. Or they go to the other extreme that makes everything equally special, and as we're taught in the movie The Incredibles, nothing is special then. As we've seen in this thread, the view might boil down to "it makes me feel good to help people".
The problem that I have with such systems is that they ultimately anchor to a feeling or some other arbitrary truth. Upon that rock an edifice is made from which various dogmas are shouted. If I were to throw away one system of belief with that behavior, why would I adopt another?
As a result, I find that there are only two systems that could be true given what humanity knows: some form of theism or nihilism. I'm convinced of the former, specifically Jesus as the Christ, but I find no honest system possible other than nihilism if my feeling and beliefs were some how shown to be false.
What about Toy Story, Incredibles, Cars, Up... Oh wait they completely invalidate your point, I get why you left them out.
Or are you saying the sexism bias came in after the acquisition? So it's a Disney thing? Ignoring the fact that they are a company based around a massive Princess franchise, you are wondering why they like to manufacture princesses?
Did you forget the two male leads in Frozen? (Kristof and Olaf).
Do you point out the sexism in almost every facet of life to your kids? Or does this dilemma just hit you at disney movies? If your children are daughters, do you explain to them they should expect less from the world, because historic statistics show they are going to get less? Or if they are sons, do you explain how they will get more simply by being male?
I haven't seen the movie, but what the article says resonated with the vibes I got from the trailers, so...
> The wonder of childhood is the opposite of the cozy vision of “Inside Out”
That may be a key quote. Kids movies, and Pixar movies (which often are, or used to be, for adults as much as for kids) don't need to contain simplistic world views; they need simple and layered presentation, but the world may be rich, and the characters and situations be driven by nuanced and sophisticated themes under the colourful hood. Toy Story 2, The Incredibles and Frozen, in my opinion, are shining examples.
That really spends on the movie. I don't feel like Ratatouille is really a kids movie nor is The Incredibles. I'd even argue Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are pretty adult. I could certainly relate to Woody's feeling scared of the shiny new hire (TS1) or his being lured to probably the wrong job (TS2). Up seems like an adult movie with stuff added for kids vs the opposite. So did Wall.E IMO. Lots of parents found Saving Nemo very close to their hearts (not a parent so not one of my favs).
Cars, on the other hand ......
They used something similar in The Incredibles movie.
I agree with the pricing differential stuff, but I'm suspicious about the DRM claim. Is there any evidence that DRM allows companies to exploit the price difference? I always thought it was studios' better marketing and distribution. E.g., people buy real copies of The Incredibles not because DRM keeps it out of the hands of criminals, but because criminals can't sell movies on Amazon or at Walmart.
The hardware is great but the developers don't care about the platform for games. Many of the games you'll see for Mac are from films that Pixar did (Wall-E, the Incredibles).
And Homeworld 2, but only on OLD OLD systems. This makes me sad.
Not just referenced -- they appeared as themselves!
I can't help but wonder if this is a shout-out/jab to the perennial Stan Lee cameo in films based off Marvel characters, especially considering that The Incredibles was often seen as competing with, and compared favorably against, Fantastic Four (2005).
My favourite Disney book is "The Illusion of Life" which is written by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, 2 of Disney's "nine old men"
The first chapters deal with the creation of the Snow White film, and the startup culture within the Disney studios at that time.
Co-incidentally, both authors are referenced in the film The Incredibles (the original subject of the OP's post)
True, but I suspect that doesn't massively prolong most movies, only big ones that people are passionate about (Star Wars, The Godfather Trilogy, etc).
Just randomly picking... 2004. Top 10 movies from that year, and pulling future media sales predictions out of my ass:
Shrek 2 kids movie, profitable regardless. Spider-Man 2 probably poor The Passion of the Christ probably poor Meet the Fockers nobody cares. The Incredibles kids movie, profitable regardless. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban great. The Day After Tomorrow nobody cares. The Bourne Supremacy possibly good. National Treasure nobody cares. The Polar Express nobody cares.
I mean, I am sure all of these will have future releases on new media. There is no reason not to re-release movies, it is essentially printing money), but will many of them see dramatic sales that will really change how we view the profitability of those movies? Meet the Fockers was a good movie, but nobody is going to give a shit if you re-release it in 3D, 4K resolution, "hyperdisk". Only a few have that potential I think, and it gets more bleak if you stop looking at the top 10.
After the initial burst of home media sales, I just don't see most movies getting anything more than a trickle of revenue. For every movie like Office Space, there are dozens that aren't.
The worst of it was that most of the fitting wasn't necessary. There is no need for there to be a link between Up and Toy Story - both stories can exist in the same universe, as there is nothing contradictory.
In fact, the author of the page doesn't seem to want all the films to be in the same universe. S/he could more accurately be described as trying to reduce the number of "magical" artifacts necessary to explain all of the things in the films that don't exist in real life. So we have the discovery of magic in Brave, and the creation of unlimited energy / strong AI in The Incredibles, and everything else flows from that. Of course trying to tie everything to just these two root causes ironically makes them all less believable than the suspension of disbelief for each individual act of "magic".
"Sure, they're babies! But they're babies with POWER!"
I guess you live in the movie The Incredibles?
M:I Ghost Protocol was probably the most cartoonish thing that Brad Bird has done. I recently re-watched The Incredibles and... yeah, I can totally see him making a redemptive Episode VII.
I've long hypothesized that a normal human from the "superhero universes" dropped in our world would still seem bizarrely sturdy, if not actually superstrong.
Another similar one that really bothers me is Oliver Sansweet's fall in The Incredibles. He attempts suicide by leaping off of a building, gets about twelve stories down, then is "caught" by Mr. Incredible leaping at him and re-entering the building he jumped from. Mr. Incredible exerts enough force to instantly stop his downward descent and enough force to also give him at least a good 20mph horizonally, probably more, and from this Oliver gets... a neck brace. That catch should have killed him, too. Yes, the maximum acceleration might have been smaller than an impact with concrete since Mr. Incredible could give him a very small buffer with his arms... though I see no evidence he does. Mr. Incredible impacts Oliver and within two frames tops Oliver has matched Mr. Incredible's velocity. Mr. Incredible also appears to have incredible mass, as he does at several other points in the movie, as Oliver's impact appears to leave his trajectory entirely unaffected. He seems to mass at least 3 or 4 tons, probably more.
Oliver is an incredibly sturdy guy by our real-world standards.
Playings devil's advocate: There are many ways to incentivise even complex, large scale investment absent copyright. From project finance to Kickstarter, it is well beyond self-evident. On the flip-side, the cost of supressing academic and sciendific knowledge through academic publishers dwarfs whatever entertainment value might come from their library (~12 films)[1]. I think your comments on this are too simplistic.
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[1] Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Ratatouille; WALL-E; Brave; A Bug's Life; Cars, Cars 2
Here is my experience:
• I took my family to see the Incredibles - cost $7.50 x $5.00 = $37.50
• I like it so much we purchased the DVD - cost $19.50
• Somehow the DVD broke, so in a fit I purchased it through iTunes - $14.95
• Lost that hard drive and had no back up - torrents save the day.
My philosophy is pixar has already made their mint on me. This one movie cost my family $71.95, and I'm not about to pay for it again.
Cars and Cars 2 suffer from some of the same problems that Shrek 2 & 3 suffered from: creating a self-consistent universe based on adult puns based on characters of modern society.Unless it is done with restraint and real skill it soon behinds to feel insincere and contrived (see Sharks Tail, Chicken Run).
Toy Story & Shrek did something far cleverer. Shrek especially is smart, sophisticated humour for smart, sophisticated kids. The references are all from children's literature and culture. Kids know the references and are able to understand the clever puns.
Shreks 2&3 are dumb adult humour forced into the Shrek world. Many of the puns are above children's heads and are not sophisticated enough for the adult audience. Adding plot-lines about lawyers, unions etc just confuse small kids and leave adults slightly cringing.
Pixar and Dreamworks are at their best when they choose their target audience and focus on it. Toy Story & Nemo are for smart young kids; Ratatouille & The Incredibles are for smart older kids. Then enough is added for the rest of the family: everyone gets a clever joke every few minutes; the stories are understandable by all. Wall-E and Up are very adult in the big story (but full of great fun in the small story) I thought they were wonderful but I do understand your point (although they are I no way 'awful'—even if you are 5).
I'm not convinced that Pixar have mad a bad film yet. Cars grows on me the more I see it (and believe me if you have kids you end up seeing these films any times). Nemo (by far the funniest film Pixar have made) still makes me laugh despite having seen it 20+ times.
{I'm told that Cars 2 is relentless: too fast and too complicated for young kids, but as I haven't seen it I can't judge. The fact that I haven't seen it says something: I normally see every Pixar film the week it comes out.}
The problem that Pixar has had is that we have had to judge Pixar by Pixar standards as until recently no-one was making anything as good. This has now changed. Wonderfully for us Pixar now has serious competition. Dreamworks has made a number of films that are as good as Pixar's. Some of them are as good as Pixar's best: How to Train Your Dragon, Megamind, Kung Fu Panda. Walt Disney Animation Studios is back on form with Tangled (Monsters v Aliens wasn't bad either).
How to Train Your Dragon & Tangled are thankfully free of transfer-modern-society-into-cartoon-world puns. Instead you are given a detailed, self-consistent world that complements the story (rather than being the story). This is a very good thing—something I hope that Pixar will move back towards (although I don't hold out much hope for Monsters Inc 2).
one of the reasons i loved Avatar is because the foundation of its universe is relentlessly scientific and natural, on top of which there is spiritual and social goodness
another movie like this that comes to mind is The Incredibles, which despite featuring superheroes has clear respect for physics
i sure wouldn't mind more movies like that. i think there is greater creativity from starting with a rigorous foundation
Ratatouille just doesn't cut it for me, I don't care if it's a rat cooking food or not, the entire story just leaves me thinking "whateva".
Incredibles on other hand is perfect in every way. BTW, given the premise of this movie it's possible to make good sequel for it without resorting to "international spies in the world of racing cars".
UP was strange. It was like two different movies that never quite came together. I like slapstick, but man, slapstick and cancer doesn't work. It's like there was a great and weird (good) movie in there but it got cheapened by the clowny Disney mascot kid thing.
I couldn't stand the kid and the bizarre dog voice, but I haven't thought enough about it to see a solution.
Wall-E had some nice moments -- mostly when it was trying to be Star Wars. The Eco-story and human characters were ludicrous.
I want to see what Brad Bird makes next. Incredibles and Ratatouille are by far my favourite Pixar movies.
>Even some very successful animated movies like Lion King end up with the bad guy being killed. Either intentionally or not, kids end up satisfied that the bad guy had what he deserved and that all become happily ever after.
This is something that I'm disturbed by. Did they really have to kill off Charles Muntz in Up and Syndrome in The Incredibles? Those guys weren't that bad.
I would keep my kid away from as much violent anything as possible, and gradually introduce critically renowned and age-appropriate entertainment as they grow up. Kind of like how I was raised I guess.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an adult who enjoys good entertainment like Sin City and Blood Meridian. I had read a lot of Mark Twain and Dickens as a kid, and those were thoroughly entertaining too. I didn't feel deprived at all. Parents just kind of suck.
Except even Pixar characters make the 'tude face. But I usually see that crapola only on box art.
One thing the investors didn't seem to notice is that the acquisition of Pixar seems to have spillover effects into the rest of Disney. With Lasseter in the driver's seat as Chief Creative Officer, their quality seems to have improved a tick. <i>Bolt</i> was an outstanding film, not <i>The Incredibles</i> great, but funny and fun to watch.
Ratatouille: Peter O'Toole, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo, Ian Holm, Brian Dennehey
Cars: Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Cheech, George Carlin
Incredibles: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson
Finding Nemo: Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney,
Monsters, Inc.: John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi
I don't know why you think animation means you don't need actors.
And your 'argument' on WALL-E is HUGELY flawed: Ben Burtt (who 'voiced' WALL-E) is literally the go-to guy when you need incredible sound effects. Not only would that movie have failed without him, he got the job because he's THE best sound fx guy in the business. For something like WALL-E, you need even more exacting quality, not less. And the few voices they did have went to John Ratzenberger (of "Cheers" fame: he has 95 acing credits on IMDB), Kathy Najimy, and Sigourney Weaver.
Making good content requires good content producers. I'm not trying to discourage you: there are good people out there. But you seem to be saying that since its animation, you can have lower standards. No: you need higher ones.
I've found that video game music can make fantastic background music while working - there's hardly ever any distracting vocals and it feels like you're attacking something mythic.
Movie soundtracks have a similar effect on me: The Incredibles, Dark Knight, Primer.
More than that, in my opinion. Ratatouille is a great movie in itself. Just like "The Incredibles", it is a film where you see fully developed characters and an interesting story without getting pseudo-intelectual over it.
Also, I went to see it with my girlfriend at the time. It was a few weeks past the opening weekend, and I remember that we've noticed how few people were "taking the kids" to the movie. They were going on their own, which I took as a excellent sign that animated movies are no longer just about the cute factor. Computers are just supporting the movie, instead of being the selling point of it.