The Incredibles Saga — The Very Best & Worst of Pixar

This video was featured today by my loyal patron pledge and you can participate by choosing which video will appear on the channel below. Link in description About a year ago I made this great retrospective video of all the Disney and Pixar Cars movies and in that In the video I said that it's not The Incredibles level or the Toy Story level, but I also said that my Cars movie My least favorite Pixar movie is Incredibles 2, which was just a copy of the first movie with the two lead roles swapped, so today I'm going to go on to say that we're going to do something

very

different for the channel with this video, this time without trains, nor ships nor automobiles, today we are going to talk about one of my other great childhood loves, Pixar, and what I think is its

best

film.

The Incredibles is Pixar's

best

movie and I know I'm not alone in that feeling. I'm someone who's pretty ambivalent about the superhero genre as a whole, but somehow The Incredibles blew me away in 2004 when it first came out. I loved it, my parents loved it, and the world clearly loved it because it ended up being one of the grossest movies of that year. What I would like to do today is explain why The Incredibles is so smart and innovative and how The Incredibles 2 sequel, in my opinion, completely failed. Let's start first by taking a trip back in time.

The Incredibles was a concept that dated back to 1993, as drawings that director Brad Bird had made of a family of superheroes during the period of his life that he had attempted to introduce into film. Bird, who was in his 30s at the time, felt the conflict between professional and family responsibilities and, in some ways, consciously projected these feelings onto these characters. This was just a fun movie about superheroes, but I think. What was going on in my life definitely seeped into the movie. Bird broke the film with his directorial debut. The Iron Giant in 1999. The film failed sadly, so Bird returned to his idea of ​​a family of superheroes.

He proposed the idea to his college friend, John Lasseter, who was then the CCO of Pixar Animation Studios and he loved the idea, before long they hired a bird to direct the studio's six films, a film about a family of superheroes called The Incredibles. The Incredibles subverts the collective expectations of a superhero movie at the time. and centers on a family of superheroes who are forced to not be super. The film focuses on Bob Parr, aka Mr Incredible, his wife Helen, aka Elastigirl, and their children in a world where superheroes are considered dangerous and were forced to retreat and hide Bob, who continually.

Longs for the Glory Days is now a depressed and broken man working a boring office job for a company he hates, but he does it to support his family, but one fateful day, Bob is presented with the opportunity to return to be super secret for a while. Undisclosed employer Andy believes the story focuses on his journey to recapture the Glory Days and the stress it places on his family. I'm guessing if you're watching this video, then you'll have seen the movie before I was almost 20 years old. so I think I can go into the details of why this movie works so well without really explaining the plot.

The first thing I would love to talk about is the structure. Mr Incredible is the main character and I love how the first half of the movie works. The film focuses solely on him, they establish all the characters at the beginning, Helen Lucius Dash Violet, but they are not that important to the plot at that point, the first half is about Bob's midlife crisis and he is trying to recover the spark in your life again. once he gets that and the twist is revealed and we get about halfway through, the story leaves Mr. Incredible incapacitated so we can shift focus, the movie is called The Incredibles, not Mr.

Incredible, so once They take him out of the picture for a while now they can show what the rest of the family is made of, we get a whole part of the movie where the family has to survive in the wild with their own vices, which concludes when they reunite with Bob and then e

very

one comes together as a team for the final. Battle is a brilliantly structured film that gives all of its characters an appropriate amount of time in the spotlight. No one here feels neglected or lacks characterization. Another thing I find notable about this film is the passage of time.

I feel very cheated. The way movies fall is how all the crazy events in the story happen in the span of a couple of days, like take the original Star Wars for example, great movie, great storytelling, but the total pace The time of this whole story is about two days. Luke met Obi. -Wan for about four hours before he was killed and the next day Luke is flying in the Rebellion, but it's a movie and audiences aren't supposed to think about stuff like that. The Incredibles, however, takes place during the duration of the story. Instead, in a much more realistic way days, maybe even weeks, passed between the main moments of the story, the day of the dinner scene and the fire and then what could be Weeks later, Bob is fired and meets Mirage , the great family life that the montage resolves.

Assembly could take weeks and months. Even from what we know, the passage of time adds a level of realism to story three, it makes everything we're watching feel more real and grounded despite it being an animated movie about superheroes with cartoonish proportions, something I really appreciate . how well written this story is, everything is setup and payoff, setup and payoff is a pretty common thing in screenwriting, but you'd be surprised how many movies don't use it. Syndrome, for example, has a great setup in the prologue and a great payoff later, when he is revealed to be the villain, they could have revealed the big villain and had him say he's an old enemy of Bob's or something, but No, they bothered to prepare it throughout the prologue so that the audience would not be confused. later even the little things are set up, Dash not only notices an Android bird watching him on the island, he was shown the bird much earlier watching Bob Lucius not only has a random wife in this scene, no, it was revealed long before he married, say hello honey for me, Lucius, good night, good night kids, a random kid not only witnesses the family surviving a plane crash that the kid was shown earlier watching Bob lift the car.

The syndrome is not simply absorbed by the plane's jet engine. because his cape got stuck, no, they set it up brilliantly earlier when Edna explained the reason she didn't want a cape on Bob's new suit and what at this point seems like a fun, light-hearted joke. Kickless montage, they don't just reveal Dash. he can run fast during the dinner scene, they hint at it before without showing it. I want to talk about that. I love how smart Dash's powers are. The scene in the principal's office is, of course, iconic. Everyone can quote this word for word because it is undeniable.

It's a hilarious coincidence, although I guess I don't notice that they never once claim that his superpower is running fast; it just hints that you know something is up and you know it by the satisfied smile on Dash's face as he walks out that he did in fact use his powers to trick the teacher and then in the car he drives home Dash says: I promise I'll slow down. I'll only be the best by a little bit, but we don't really know what he means by that, and then in the dinner scene, Bob congratulates. run to go fast you must have been booking fast you think you were going well so all the information is there but they haven't shown it yet and then they do it it's a nice little aha moment this movie is so clever it's just the Pixar classic in Overall, I find all of their classic movies to be so smart, the writing is quality, the pacing of this movie is fast and they make very efficient use of time to tell their story in every scene, no matter how fast or funny the movie is. information you provide to the audience. take a look at the dinner scene, this scene lasts a total of three minutes, but the amount of information laid out here is impressive.

Bob is a distant father at home, more concerned with what's going on in the world than what's happening in front of them. and he perks up noticeably when he hears that his children have used his superpowers. Helen respects the law and tries to keep the family together, but we will use her powers to do so if necessary. Violet hates having powers and just wants to be normal like everyone else. she kids at her school and she is also trying to hide her crush on Tony from the family and she also has force field abilities. We only saw her using visibility before her.

Bob and Lucius still hang out and Lucius is married now. Jack Jack is the only normal one in the family and we get the reward of seeing Dash running fast, something that was alluded to earlier but never shown. When this scene ends, the audience now knows everything they need to know about these characters. To start the story off, it's crazy how much information they have. feed us in this quick three-minute scene is so efficient that it wastes no time. Another example of the film cleverly not wasting any time is in the revelation of the syndrome. I think the first question we all ask as soon as we meet him is how he copes with everything.

Mr. Incredible puts this into a monologue to buy time to throw a log at him and in that monologue syndrome he answers that exact question and they will pay a damn to get it. How do you think I got rich? I Invented Weapons is basic exposition that we need to know to understand the character, but they incorporate it into the scene to make it a little more interesting. How much less interesting would this have been if the syndrome just started monologuing and there was just Mr. Incredible standing there listening to him? No, instead they cleverly inserted some action to keep the pace moving, you slide the dog, you have me monologuing.

I love the art design of this movie. The Art Deco design of everything is so elegant and unique to this film, very different from other Pixar films, everything is based on a simple form. like the omnidroid is a giant circle or those little monorails on the island are just little oval spheres, everything in Care Care's office and the elements of Bob's depressing part of his life are squares and rectangles with hard edges, including his boss, etc., even everyone. the characters are based on simple shapes to differentiate them from each other Bob is very square and robust Helen is made of Curves and circles Violet is like a stick Etc.

None of these models have extraordinary details, there are no major prominent wrinkles or super defined lips or any thing, they're simple by design and not trying to be photorealistic or anything like that, humans are notoriously the hardest thing to create in CGI and Pixar will be the first to tell you if you've seen humans in their early films that way. baby ass in tin toy, even all of Andy and Sid look pretty strange in Toy Story, plus Bird's movie stars and the entire human cast. Pixar, which pioneered the new art of computer graphic animation, has stuck to non-human characters, toys, monsters and fish because animators have traditionally had trouble making humans look realistic, so knowing this, does Why would they have given the green light to a movie starring All Humans?

How did you work around something so simple? They are all cleverly stylized with very unhuman proportions. The simple appearance of the characters matches geometric art deco. world they are set in in its extremely clever production design by Pixar, it's as if the reason they went ahead with focusing their first film on toys was in part due to the limitations of CGI at the time, the models and CGI textures looked very tacky. So the toys didn't look strange, they just looked like toys. It's not about Pixar pushing the limits with what can be done in CGI. It's about them being smart about what they can do with the current restrictions.

CGI and present it in the best way possible and that's why they were so revolutionary for that time, so we've gone over everything. I love the structure of this movie. I love the intelligence of the writing. I love the efficiency of the story. I said it and I love the production design, but that's something that can be said for most of the classic Pixar films. What separates The Incredibles from the rest of the films and their library, in my opinion, is how adult this film is, it doesn't downplay the importance of children. There are a lot of elements here that come straight from a PG-13 movie, like how Helen suspects Bob is having an affair, they never say it outright, but it's so clear that that's what she suspects that there's actually a scene.Incredibles 2 came out in an era where it seemed like every Disney movie had a Twist villain and now it's a little old, it almost feels like it's a requirement from Disney themselves or something, so much of this movie is feel like that Sorry but she's going to prison, well sorry she's rich and we probably won't get more than a slap on the wrist, what the hell was this line there for social commentary?

Was it supposed to imply that Evelyn will return in the future? movie or something, I'm all for social commentary if that's what it was, but having it inserted here and what's supposed to be the big satisfying final moment where the heroes defeat the villain totally kills the mood. What am I supposed to feel here now? I'm not happy that the heroes won the day or anything. God, this sucks, okay, so the A plot sucks, let's talk about the B plot which focuses on Bob and his crazy adventures of being a stay-at-home dad. Bob is useless to the In the plot of this film, he stays on the sidelines while Helen gets the attention, he has a lot of screen time, but what he does contributes nothing overall until he reunites with Helen in the third act, There is a tension between him and Helen that comes from his jealousy. of her, but in the end he gets nowhere, he simply forgets when he leaves for the final battle.

All Bob does in this movie is just do things around the house with the kids until the plot needs him for the final battle. The subplot shows Violet having problems with boys at school, which already happened in the first film. Tony's mind is wiped in the opening scene, which to me seems like an excuse to do the same plot over and over again. A lot of time is devoted to Jack Jack, which is surprising since he was barely in the first film, he was really just a plot device of sorts, the final trick up the villain's sleeve to fool the family they spend so much time with.

Jack Jack, this time even dedicating an entire scene where he uses his new powers to fight a raccoon, naturally, you'd think this would go somewhere, but it doesn't. Jack Jack is involved in the final battle, but he's kind of a nuisance. VI and Dash are trying to save their parents, but Jack Jack keeps wandering. Outside of him, he's more of an obstacle that the other characters have to keep jumping around to reach the goal rather than him being actually useful in contributing to anything like he grows up and gets squashed. Some of the bad guys, that's all, that's it. the film's big payoff is that it spends so much time with him, so why involve him?

Oh wait, I know why there's also this scene where Bob finds out that Jack Jack has powers, you have powers. At first this revelation seems exciting and touching, since the family never found out on screen in the last film what he does, but doesn't this break continuity? Wouldn't Rick's family have heard about all the things that happened with Kari? while she was taking care of him, Jack Jack wears a mask at the end of the first film, implying that he will be involved in the fight, which would mean that the family knew he had powers at the time.

Dash is in on this and he's not doing it. Damn, his big contribution to the story is that he has homework to do, he calls the car, he doesn't have an Ark at all and I don't remember a single time he used his powers in the final battle or any time there really was a removed. scene where he chases a thief in a car, which is great in this deleted scene, Bob is at a restaurant with the kids and while he is changing Jack Jack in the bathroom a robbery occurs. I said don't move, don't use his powers to stop them.

I wish this was more of the focus of the B-plot, which shows the kids wanting to use their powers and finding a way to do it secretly so that later, when the big final battle happens, they take over while their parents are around. incapacitated would have been much more satisfying and naturally groomed and better used both of them as characters Edna Mode is in the movie just to have a fun scene with Jack Jack she makes him a cool new suit, she already made him a suit in the last movie, did he? What does this add to the story?

As for the story, the kids use the new tracking device to find Jack Jack, and in the blink of an eye, you'll miss him. Moment of the final battle. That's all for an earlier draft of the film. Edna had a very different role. The house was hijacked by the villains and its security system failed Recognize the car What's wrong with my security system? Bob and Edna had to escape from the house as all their security devices tried to kill them again. This would have been much better. This involves Edna. with the main plot and shows a familiar setting from the first film in a completely new way.

What was once just a contemporary setting for characters to exchange dialogue is now shown as a setting for some cool action. Instead, they opted for the fun-loving Edna and Jack. Jack, holy shit, oh my god, all these little Bob-with-the-kids plots feel so meandering. Helen stayed home with the kids in the first movie, but she was very suspicious of Bob and her suspicions are what led her to contact Edna, which got her involved. the story and finally brought the family into action everything made sense here Bob's contributions do not advance the plot the phone rings at the end of Act 2 he says he will be there and then he is next to the final battle, that's it, there's no build up, no hint at any point where Bob's jealousy gets the better of him and he decides to get involved or anything, nothing, the B plot doesn't move the movie forward and basically just serves as something to cut back to after a The story beat in which a plot happens is filler.

They all seem like they're plots from separate episodes in an Incredibles TV show or something. Bradburn once said that Incredibles 2 was going to focus more on family dynamics in favor of superhero stuff, which is pretty solid in theory and would have worked if it contributed to the overall story, so the story is pretty bad, but I think the biggest myths of this movie are in its characters, the characters don't feel like the same ones we met from the first movie, now everyone is out of place, especially Bob, considering that this movie takes place right after from the first movie where Bob learned to have faith in his family and let them help him just so this movie would end.

He immediately forgets about it and becomes jealous of Helen for being the hero. Once again there is a deleted scene that interpreted Bob's characterization differently after a pretty bad day at his new job. Helen gets a call from a sympathetic Bob who is uplifting and tries to make her feel better oh hello honey hey great day how was it? I don't know, I was too fast or the criminals were too slow, they didn't entertain me enough. I don't know, I don't really want to talk about it. it was your day come on I'm sure you were great keep your head up this is more in line with Bob's character from the end of the previous movie in the finale it feels like he's done a huge 180 degrees and learned nothing.

I don't really like this line from Helen either. He lost the cycle of it. I didn't know you had a bicycle. Hey, I had a mohawk. There are many things about me that you don't know, yes, but aren't you two married and sharing a life together. Why would you keep your past a secret from your partner? It's little things like this that make the two feel strangely distant when at the end of the last movie they seemed closer than ever. Being distant wouldn't really be a problem if there was a time gap between the two movies, but since this takes place right after the first one, this feels wrong.

I understand that there has to be some kind of conflict between the two, but this seems like going backwards now. This is entirely a matter of personal preference, but I don't particularly like the new world production design, I find the character models a bit off-putting because it's 2018 and everyone expects CGI to be hyper-photorealistic. Now the Incredibles models have been updated to look more realistic, have more wrinkles and are more defined. skin textures and they are placed in a more real environment with ultra realistic lighting, the lighting is a little exaggerated at times even wow, you can see every strand of hair on Bob's shirt, cool I guess, but do we need the Art design The simplistic deco of the first film was made in part due to the limitations of CGI at the time. 2004 CGI couldn't produce ultra realistic looking textures so they used that restriction to stylize the world accordingly and that's why the characters had such cartoonish proportions now that the lighting and textures and the world look more real.

I feel like the look of the characters no longer matches the setting. The Good Dinosaur had a similar problem where the settings and landscapes were absolutely stunning and then the cartoonish proportions of the characters didn't match up at all. Clash with Incredibles. 2 looks like they took the old movie assets and put a snapchat filter on them or something, there's something weirdly weird about them, but hey, maybe that's just me. I'm very happy that studios are starting to realize that audiences don't want it. Photorealistic CGI and we are starting to branch out into new styles. Let's go back to that original statement from Brad Bird about how this is a movie that took him so long to make because he was waiting for the right story to tell and now I ask you.

This all feels like a story he waited 14 years to tell. Was this really the incredible sequel The Incredibles deserved? I don't believe it. I don't know what happened here. Brad Bird is a very profound director with integrity, but it seemed like call him here, was it a matter of Disney just showing up at his house with a truck full of cash and forcing him to make a sequel he didn't want to make because that's What I feel like to me, it's like they gave me a list of what had to be in the movie and wrote him a check for a billion dollars and, as I understand it, he just moved on.

This movie lost an entire year of production when Disney or whoever decided to move its original 2019 release date with the release of Toy Story 4 in Incredibles 2 to 2018, so the movie was a bit rushed and it definitely feels that way with one more year in the oven was enough to solve the story's problems. I'd like to think so, but who does he really know? Behind the scenes clips. It seems like they wanted to tell this story set in this time period from the beginning. I feel like this movie was limited by its strange insistence on taking place directly after the first movie.

I feel like they should. have aged the characters show a slightly more modern version of this world where supers are now legal show Dash and Violet in their 20s maybe Violet is about to get married or something and is going through marital conflict make Bob and Helen are in the middle of their lives - 50-year-olds are faced with being older and not being able to perform the same hero duties they could before and may be beginning to consider retirement, perhaps Bob has a moment when he realizes that he's not really invincible and his cracks start to show as he advances.

If Jack Jack was a teenager at school, he might be a great shooter there because he has so many powers that he likes to show off and in the Renault world now, where supers no longer have to hide their powers, what kind of What problems would he have? Going through all this sounds super interesting and I think most would have wanted that and it would also be a Pixar character. All of Pixar's other sequels seem to use the time gaps between films to their advantage. Lightning McQueen, for example, is at retirement age in the third Cars movie, all of the Toy Story sequels are about Andy getting older and the toys becoming obsolete as time goes on, but for some reason The Incredibles didn't get a similar treatment, but I think it's pretty obvious why they didn't do a Time Jump, well let's not try to kid ourselves, they didn't do a Time Jump so they could show more of what we liked about the first movie, more of the supes doing clandestine things from Secret Cover because they are illegal.

More funny haha ​​moments from Edna Mode and a lot more silliness from Jack Jack because he's a cute goofy baby and Disney can market that the amount of attention Jack Jack gets in this movie is really evident so oh look they can have a scene in which the two fan. favorite characters in Iraq that has no bearing on the overall plot if we aged the characters we couldn't have Edna and baby Jack Jack having a silly scene together we couldn't have baby Jack Jack get big and crush the bad guys and will fight. a raccoon, if they aged them up there wouldn't be any cute babies that Jack Jack Disney could use to promote the movie.

Look at the funny baby and guess what worked. Decisions seem to have been made morein favor of what was safe and could be milked. and commercialized more than what would have been a natural, thoughtful and bold progression of the story and that is why Incredibles 2 to me is a bad movie, it lacks integrity before I finish this part of the video, I feel I must mention some of the good ones. things in this because, like any movie, it's not all bad, first of all, the action scenes are all good, ignoring that Helen is totally blind to what could have caused this, the sequence where she chases the monorail and stops him is a great action scene and They use their powers as much as they can.

I really like the sequence. Avoid using portals to make Helen land on the plane. She was smart. If you go into this movie just wanting to see good action and nothing else, well, you won't be. Disappointed, I like that this movie still feels very adult, they don't shy away from showing things that might be inappropriate for children, like being filmed, the action scenes feel tense and all the bureaucracy and social commentary, the movie doesn't feel as if it were reproducing. even the kids most of the time and I appreciate that they wrote in this line of Helen calling herself a hypocrite.

My husband used to listen to a police scanner waiting for something to happen and I got mad at him for it. I'm very hypocritical because I was literally thinking this while watching it. She earlier chastised Bob for wanting to break the law and do heroic work. Superheroes are illegal, fair or not, that's the law, the law should be fair and then she does it herself. I don't know if you mean this is out of character for her, but at least they acknowledged it I guess, and while I personally don't like the new character models with too much texture, I really enjoy the animation on them, the face.

The expressions in this are taken to the max, especially on Bob, you can tell they had a lot of fun animating him, especially in his crisis scene, because I'm Mr. Incredible, not Mr. Average or Mr. Mediocre. Mr. Incredible, all of these things are nice though. Unimportant in the grand scheme of things, a good action scene or good animation ultimately means nothing if it's not tied to a good story. Now back to my initial statement at the beginning of the video that Incredibles 2 is the

worst

Pixar movie. It's a bad movie, but is it really the

worst

entry in Pixar's library?

Is it really worse than something like Cars 2? Well, in my opinion, yes, let me explain. I know most people will argue that Cars 2 is objectively the worst Pixar movie. Kickstart your Duds streak yes, that's true and Cars 2 is pretty bad. I agree, I've gone into detail about that before, but the point is that Cars 2 is not a lazy movie, it's still a completely original story and very clearly inspired by old spy thrillers. Whether or not it was a good decision for a talking race car movie is a completely different argument, but at least it's still something new and different, a totally new story that doesn't tread the same ground as the first.

There's still integrity there. I believe it when John Lasseter says they did it because it's a story he wanted to tell. I can't say the same about Incredibles 2. Incredibles 2 feels very lazy, it feels like a cash grab, it feels like Disney forced Pixar to produce a sequel to a popular movie to milk Nostalgia and they did the bare minimum while They were making sure that fan-favorite things from the first got a higher percentage of screen time, this time giving up the continuity and elements that made the original so groundbreaking. Disney's current approach to continuing franchises like this, in my opinion, is what's killing them and what's killing Pixar.

Pixar is a company that is capable of continuing to tell good stories, even most of the unnecessary sequels they have produced still add something to their respective franchises. Monsters University was an unwanted prequel, but it showed Mike learning to accept himself for who he is and shows us why. First of all, he and Sully are very good friends. Toy Story 4 was totally unnecessary, but it gave a new take on Woody and Beau's relationship that recontextualizes them in the previous films in a good way. Cars 3 was definitely an unnecessary sequel that no one asked for, but it tastefully used the concept of sentient cars becoming obsolete as a solid metaphor for growing older and learning to accept retirement and somehow ended up being my favorite car movie. .

What does Incredibles 2 add to its franchise that didn't exist before? As far as I can see, I don't know if we'll ever get Incredibles 3, and I honestly don't think I'll want one unless they do something totally bold and new for the franchise, but who knows, then it'll be Disney. everything and they will make sequels to anything that no one on God's green earth has ever asked for Toy Story 5. but still here we are fine. I hope you all enjoyed my breakdown of the two Incredibles movies. This was something totally new and different for the channel. but I felt it was time to try to start standing out a little.

The Cars video I did last year did really well on the old channel and it's still doing really well on this one and people have been asking me to do more Pixar ever since. Things that even people I know in real life have told me that if this video does well I would love to do more, maybe the Toy Story series or in every movie ranking, who knows. I know the Star Wars video I've been talking about has been on the back burner forever, maybe it's time to finally understand that Thomas content is coming back as usual.

I'd like to go back to Thomas' flashback. I think another Best Sodor Episodes video will be posted soon or maybe another Top 10 CGI Episodes video for everyone. I seemed to like that one at the time of recording. I haven't posted a poll on Patreon, so the next video will be decided from there. If you want to get in on the Patreon action, the link is in the description below, you can vote. About New Content Participate in monthly trivia and you'll get access to all new videos two days early, including the one you're watching right now. Thanks again everyone for the support and I'll see you all in the next one.