When I first saw The Incredibles, I was blown away by it, and for years it made a big impression on me.
In some respects, The Incredibles is the sort of story I want to tell.
However, over ten years after I first saw it, I started to realize The Incredibles is mostly an example of pitfalls I want to avoid.
The Incredibles is the right direction for me, but fails in the details.
<aside> 💡
Ironically, my favorite Pixar movie has become Cars. Even though its subject matter is not something I normally find interesting, Cars has the most profound, well articulated message of any Pixar movie.
</aside>
The movie starts out as a deep exploration of family through a superhero lens.
However, by the third act, the story turns into a pure action movie.
There’s nothing wrong with action movies, but it creates a dissonance with its familial context.
In theory, with the right mechanics that dissonance could be resolved, but the movie doesn’t have any such mechanisms.
The movie starts off telling a story about a family that has superpowers.
By the end, the focus is flipped to a story about superheroes who also happen to be a family.
The initial question of the movie is, “How does a family with superheroes live a normal life?”
The final answer is, “They don’t need to!”
Instead, ship them off to a remote tropical island full of evil forces to fight. Go full power fantasy and forget about everyday life.
Then, at the end of the movie, provide a few domestic scenes to suggest the extraordinary and ordinary are reconciled, when really nothing changed other than now superheroes are accepted by society.
That leads to a minor secondary problem.
The ending suggests that the problem was society’s fault.
Society wrongfully shunned superheroes.