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Description
Lets continue our Disney marathon with a family of superheroes taking on a sinister supervillain and his giant robot.

Public opinion turns against Superheroes due to the collateral damage caused by their crime-fighting. After several lawsuits, the government, including Rick Dicker, initiates the Superhero Relocation Program, which forces Supers to permanently adhere to their secret identities and abandon their exploits. Fifteen years later, Bob and Helen Parr—formerly known as Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl—and their children, Violet, Dash, and baby, Jack-Jack, are a suburban family living in Metroville. Although he loves his family, Bob resents the mundanity of his suburban lifestyle and white-collar job. Together with his best friend, Lucius Best, formerly known as Frozone, Bob occasionally relives "the glory days" by moonlighting as a vigilante. One day, after his supervisor, Gilbert Huph, prevents him from stopping a mugging, Bob loses his temper and injures him, resulting in his dismissal. Returning home, Bob receives a message from a woman called Mirage, who gives him a mission to destroy a savage tripod-like robot, the Omnidroid, on the remote island of Nomanisan. Bob battles and disables it by tricking it into ripping out its own power source. Bob finds the action and higher pay rejuvenating. He improves his relationship with his family and begins rigorous physical training while awaiting another assignment from Mirage over the next two months. Finding a tear in his super suit, he visits superhero costume designer Edna Mode to have it mended. Assuming that Helen knows what Bob is doing, Edna also makes suits for the rest of the family. Setting out for Nomanisan once again, Bob discovers Mirage is working for Buddy Pine, a disaffected former fan whom he had rejected as his sidekick and has now become a ruthless inventor and wealthy arms dealer. Having adopted the alias Syndrome, he has been perfecting the Omnidroid by hiring different superheroes to fight it, killing them in the process. Syndrome intends to send the perfected Omnidroid to Metroville, where he will secretly manipulate its controls to defeat it in public, becoming a "hero" himself. He will later sell his inventions so that everyone can become "super", rendering the difference meaningless. Helen visits Edna and learns what Bob has been up to. She activates a beacon Edna built into the suits to find Bob, inadvertently causing him to be captured while infiltrating Syndrome's base. Elastigirl borrows a private plane to travel to Nomanisan. She finds out that Violet and Dash have stowed away, leaving Jack-Jack with a babysitter, named Kari. Helen's radio transmissions are picked up by Syndrome, who sends anti-aircraft missiles to shoot her down. The plane is destroyed, but Helen and the kids survive and use their powers to reach the island. Helen infiltrates the base and discovers Syndrome's plan. Discontented with Syndrome's indifference when her life was threatened, Mirage releases Bob and informs him of his family's survival. Helen arrives and races off with Bob to find their children. Dash and Violet are chased by Syndrome's guards, but fend them off with their powers before reuniting with their parents. Now it's up to the whole family to stop Syndrome's evil plans.

Pros:
1. Bob/Mr. Incredible is a great and well developed protagonist.
2. Helen/Elastigirl, Violet, Dash, Jack-Jack, Lucius/Frozone, Mirage, Dicker, and Edna are all amazing supporting characters.
3. Buddy/Syndrome is an excellent villain. He's both very threatening and intimidating, but he can also be pretty funny.
4. Amazing and intense action scenes.
5. The film has a great sense of humor, and many of the jokes hit bullseyes.
6. The film has a great amount of heart.
7. Stellar vocal performances.
8. Michael Giacchino delivers an amazing and epic score.
9. Amazing animation for the time that contains very well designed characters, stellar backdrops and settings, and very neat effects.
10. The story is very well written, and gives a unique twist on the superhero genre; rather than a film that's simply about explosions, lasers, and a superhero trying to save the world from a villain, it's a film about a family of superheroes that also goes in-depth with what they do when they're not superheroes.
11. Great chemistry between the characters.
12. Like lots of the other Pixar films, there's plenty of memorable lines.

Cons:
1. Because of its age, the animation sometimes has pretty washed out colors, so it looks a little bit bland at times.

Overall:
This is not only one of Pixar's best films, it's also right up there with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as one of the best animated superhero films.

Rating:
10/10 (Perfect)

Production Notes and Trivia:
1. The Incredibles as a concept dates back to 1993 when Bird sketched the family during an uncertain point in his film career. Personal issues had percolated into the story as they weighed on him in life. During this time, Bird had signed a production deal with Warner Bros. Feature Animation and was in the process of directing his first feature, The Iron Giant. Approaching middle age and having high aspirations for his filmmaking, Bird pondered whether his career goals were attainable only at the price of his family life. 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." After the box office failure of The Iron Giant, Bird gravitated toward his superhero story.
2. He imagined it as a homage to the 1960s comic books and spy films from his boyhood and he initially tried to develop it as a 2D cel animation. When The Iron Giant became a box office bomb, he reconnected with old friend John Lasseter at Pixar in March 2000 and pitched his story idea to him. Bird and Lasseter knew each other from their college years at CalArts in the 1970s. Lasseter was sold on the idea and convinced Bird to come to Pixar, where the film would be done in computer animation. The studio announced a multi-film contract with Bird on May 4, 2000. The Incredibles was written and directed solely by Brad Bird, a departure from previous Pixar productions which typically had two or three directors and as many screenwriters with a history of working for the company. In addition, it would be the company's first film in which all characters are human.
3. Bird came to Pixar with the lineup of the story's family members worked out: a mom and dad, both suffering through the dad's midlife crisis; a shy teenage girl; a cocky ten-year-old boy; and a baby. Bird had based their powers on family archetypes. During production, Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli visited Pixar and saw the film's story reels. When Bird asked if the reels made any sense or if they were just "American nonsense," Miyazaki replied, through an interpreter, "I think it's a very adventurous thing you are trying to do in an American film."
4. Syndrome was originally written as a minor character who assaults Bob and Helen at the beginning of the movie, only to die in an explosion that destroys the Parrs' house (in this version, the Smiths), but he was made the main antagonist because the filmmakers liked him more than the character of Xerek, who was intended to fulfill that role. The Snug character that Helen talks to at the phone in the final film was intended to fly Helen to Nomanisan Island and to die, but he was removed from that position when Lasseter suggested to have Helen pilot the plane herself.
5. Upon Pixar's acceptance of 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 2-D artists had to make the shift to 3-D, including Bird himself. Bird found working with CG "wonderfully malleable" in a way that traditional animation is not, calling the camera's ability to easily switch angles in a given scene "marvelously adaptable." He found working in computer animation "difficult" in a different way than working traditionally, finding the software "sophisticated and not particularly friendly." 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 yet for Pixar. The film's characters were designed by Tony Fucile and Teddy Newton, whom Bird had brought with him from Warner Bros. Like most computer-animated films, The Incredibles had a year-long period of building the film from the inside out: modeling the exterior and understanding controls that would work the face and the body—the articulation of the character—before animation could even begin. Bird and Fucile tried to emphasize the graphic quality of good 2-D animation to the Pixar team, who had only worked primarily in CG. Bird attempted to incorporate teaching from Disney's Nine Old Men that the crew at Pixar had "never really emphasized."
6. For the technical crew members, the film's human characters posed a difficult set of challenges. Bird's story was filled with elements that were difficult to animate with CGI back then. Humans are widely considered to be the most difficult things to execute in animation. Pixar's animators filmed themselves walking to better grasp proper human motion. Creating an all-human cast required creating new technology to animate detailed human anatomy, clothing, and realistic skin and hair. Although the technical team had some experience with hair and cloth in Monsters, Inc., the amount of hair and cloth required for The Incredibles had never been done by Pixar up until this point. Moreover, Bird would tolerate no compromises for the sake of technical simplicity. Where the technical team on Monsters, Inc. had persuaded director Pete Docter to accept pigtails on Boo to make her hair easier to animate, the character Violet had to have long hair that obscured her face; in fact, this was integral to her character. Violet's long hair, which was extremely difficult to animate, was only successfully animated toward the end of production. In addition, animators had to adapt to having hair both underwater and blowing through the wind. Disney was initially reluctant to make the film because of these issues, thinking that a live-action film would be preferable, but Lasseter denied this.
7. Not only did The Incredibles cope with the difficulty of animating CG humans, but also many other complications. The story was bigger than any prior story at the studio, was longer in running time, and had four times the number of locations. Supervising technical director Rick Sayre noted that the hardest thing about the film was that there was "no hardest thing," alluding to the amount of new technical challenges: fire, water, air, smoke, steam, and explosions were all additional to the new difficulty of working with humans. The film's organizational structure could not be mapped out like previous Pixar features, and it became a running joke to the team. Sayre said the team adopted “Alpha Omega," where one team was concerned with building modeling, shading, and layout, while another dealt with final camera, lighting, and effects. Another team, dubbed the "character team," digitally sculpted, rigged, and shaded all of the characters, and a simulation team was responsible for developing simulation technology for hair and clothing. There were at least 781 visual effects shots in the film, and they were quite often visual gags, such as the window shattering when Bob angrily shuts the car door. Additionally, the effects team improved their modeling of clouds, using volumetric rendering for the first time.
8. The skin of the characters gained a new level of realism from a technology to produce known as "subsurface scattering." The challenges did not stop with modeling humans. Bird decided that in a shot near the film's end, baby Jack-Jack would have to undergo a series of transformations, and in one of the five planned he would turn himself into a kind of goo. Technical directors, who anticipated spending two months or even longer to work out the goo effect, stealing precious hours from production that had already entered its final and most critical stages, petitioned the film's producer, John Walker, for help. Bird, who had himself brought Walker over from Warner Bros. to work on the project, was at first immovable, but after arguing with Walker in several invective-laced meetings over the course of two months, Bird finally conceded. Bird also insisted that the storyboards define the blocking of characters' motions, lighting, and camera movements, which had previously been left to other departments rather than storyboarded.
9. Lily Tomlin was originally considered for the role of Edna Mode, but later turned it down. After several failed attempts to cast Edna Mode, Bird took on her voice role himself.
10. Brad Bird was looking for a specific sound as inspired by the film's retrofuturistic design – the future as seen from the 1960s. 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; the assignment was instead given to Michael Giacchino.
11. Its theatrical release was accompanied with a Pixar short film Boundin'.
12. The film was first released on both VHS and a two-disc collector's edition DVD in 2005. The DVD set included two newly commissioned Pixar short films, Jack-Jack Attack and Mr. Incredible and Pals. Disney released the film on Blu-ray in 2011, and later on 4K Blu Ray in 2018.
13. Several video games based on the film were made. Including a direct tie in for PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, Xbox, Game Boy Advance, and PC. The game would spawn a sequel titled Rise of the Underminer which was released in 2005 for PS2, GameCube, Xbox, GBA, Nintendo DS, and PC. The events of this game would become non-canon with the release of Incredibles 2 in 2018. Another game titles When Danger Calls was released exclusively for PC. The Incredibles characters also appear in Disney Infinity. A LEGO-themed video game, LEGO The Incredibles, was released for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. The game covers the events of both films.

Description
Lets continue our Disney marathon with a family of superheroes taking on a sinister supervillain and his giant robot.

Public opinion turns against Superheroes due to the collateral damage caused by their crime-fighting. After several lawsuits, the government, including Rick Dicker, initiates the Superhero Relocation Program, which forces Supers to permanently adhere to their secret identities and abandon their exploits. Fifteen years later, Bob and Helen Parr—formerly known as Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl—and their children, Violet, Dash, and baby, Jack-Jack, are a suburban family living in Metroville. Although he loves his family, Bob resents the mundanity of his suburban lifestyle and white-collar job. Together with his best friend, Lucius Best, formerly known as Frozone, Bob occasionally relives "the glory days" by moonlighting as a vigilante. One day, after his supervisor, Gilbert Huph, prevents him from stopping a mugging, Bob loses his temper and injures him, resulting in his dismissal. Returning home, Bob receives a message from a woman called Mirage, who gives him a mission to destroy a savage tripod-like robot, the Omnidroid, on the remote island of Nomanisan. Bob battles and disables it by tricking it into ripping out its own power source. Bob finds the action and higher pay rejuvenating. He improves his relationship with his family and begins rigorous physical training while awaiting another assignment from Mirage over the next two months. Finding a tear in his super suit, he visits superhero costume designer Edna Mode to have it mended. Assuming that Helen knows what Bob is doing, Edna also makes suits for the rest of the family. Setting out for Nomanisan once again, Bob discovers Mirage is working for Buddy Pine, a disaffected former fan whom he had rejected as his sidekick and has now become a ruthless inventor and wealthy arms dealer. Having adopted the alias Syndrome, he has been perfecting the Omnidroid by hiring different superheroes to fight it, killing them in the process. Syndrome intends to send the perfected Omnidroid to Metroville, where he will secretly manipulate its controls to defeat it in public, becoming a "hero" himself. He will later sell his inventions so that everyone can become "super", rendering the difference meaningless. Helen visits Edna and learns what Bob has been up to. She activates a beacon Edna built into the suits to find Bob, inadvertently causing him to be captured while infiltrating Syndrome's base. Elastigirl borrows a private plane to travel to Nomanisan. She finds out that Violet and Dash have stowed away, leaving Jack-Jack with a babysitter, named Kari. Helen's radio transmissions are picked up by Syndrome, who sends anti-aircraft missiles to shoot her down. The plane is destroyed, but Helen and the kids survive and use their powers to reach the island. Helen infiltrates the base and discovers Syndrome's plan. Discontented with Syndrome's indifference when her life was threatened, Mirage releases Bob and informs him of his family's survival. Helen arrives and races off with Bob to find their children. Dash and Violet are chased by Syndrome's guards, but fend them off with their powers before reuniting with their parents. Now it's up to the whole family to stop Syndrome's evil plans.

Pros:
1. Bob/Mr. Incredible is a great and well developed protagonist.
2. Helen/Elastigirl, Violet, Dash, Jack-Jack, Lucius/Frozone, Mirage, Dicker, and Edna are all amazing supporting characters.
3. Buddy/Syndrome is an excellent villain. He's both very threatening and intimidating, but he can also be pretty funny.
4. Amazing and intense action scenes.
5. The film has a great sense of humor, and many of the jokes hit bullseyes.
6. The film has a great amount of heart.
7. Stellar vocal performances.
8. Michael Giacchino delivers an amazing and epic score.
9. Amazing animation for the time that contains very well designed characters, stellar backdrops and settings, and very neat effects.
10. The story is very well written, and gives a unique twist on the superhero genre; rather than a film that's simply about explosions, lasers, and a superhero trying to save the world from a villain, it's a film about a family of superheroes that also goes in-depth with what they do when they're not superheroes.
11. Great chemistry between the characters.
12. Like lots of the other Pixar films, there's plenty of memorable lines.

Cons:
1. Because of its age, the animation sometimes has pretty washed out colors, so it looks a little bit bland at times.

Overall:
This is not only one of Pixar's best films, it's also right up there with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as one of the best animated superhero films.

Rating:
10/10 (Perfect)

Production Notes and Trivia:
1. The Incredibles as a concept dates back to 1993 when Bird sketched the family during an uncertain point in his film career. Personal issues had percolated into the story as they weighed on him in life. During this time, Bird had signed a production deal with Warner Bros. Feature Animation and was in the process of directing his first feature, The Iron Giant. Approaching middle age and having high aspirations for his filmmaking, Bird pondered whether his career goals were attainable only at the price of his family life. 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." After the box office failure of The Iron Giant, Bird gravitated toward his superhero story.
2. He imagined it as a homage to the 1960s comic books and spy films from his boyhood and he initially tried to develop it as a 2D cel animation. When The Iron Giant became a box office bomb, he reconnected with old friend John Lasseter at Pixar in March 2000 and pitched his story idea to him. Bird and Lasseter knew each other from their college years at CalArts in the 1970s. Lasseter was sold on the idea and convinced Bird to come to Pixar, where the film would be done in computer animation. The studio announced a multi-film contract with Bird on May 4, 2000. The Incredibles was written and directed solely by Brad Bird, a departure from previous Pixar productions which typically had two or three directors and as many screenwriters with a history of working for the company. In addition, it would be the company's first film in which all characters are human.
3. Bird came to Pixar with the lineup of the story's family members worked out: a mom and dad, both suffering through the dad's midlife crisis; a shy teenage girl; a cocky ten-year-old boy; and a baby. Bird had based their powers on family archetypes. During production, Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli visited Pixar and saw the film's story reels. When Bird asked if the reels made any sense or if they were just "American nonsense," Miyazaki replied, through an interpreter, "I think it's a very adventurous thing you are trying to do in an American film."
4. Syndrome was originally written as a minor character who assaults Bob and Helen at the beginning of the movie, only to die in an explosion that destroys the Parrs' house (in this version, the Smiths), but he was made the main antagonist because the filmmakers liked him more than the character of Xerek, who was intended to fulfill that role. The Snug character that Helen talks to at the phone in the final film was intended to fly Helen to Nomanisan Island and to die, but he was removed from that position when Lasseter suggested to have Helen pilot the plane herself.
5. Upon Pixar's acceptance of 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 2-D artists had to make the shift to 3-D, including Bird himself. Bird found working with CG "wonderfully malleable" in a way that traditional animation is not, calling the camera's ability to easily switch angles in a given scene "marvelously adaptable." He found working in computer animation "difficult" in a different way than working traditionally, finding the software "sophisticated and not particularly friendly." 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 yet for Pixar. The film's characters were designed by Tony Fucile and Teddy Newton, whom Bird had brought with him from Warner Bros. Like most computer-animated films, The Incredibles had a year-long period of building the film from the inside out: modeling the exterior and understanding controls that would work the face and the body—the articulation of the character—before animation could even begin. Bird and Fucile tried to emphasize the graphic quality of good 2-D animation to the Pixar team, who had only worked primarily in CG. Bird attempted to incorporate teaching from Disney's Nine Old Men that the crew at Pixar had "never really emphasized."
6. For the technical crew members, the film's human characters posed a difficult set of challenges. Bird's story was filled with elements that were difficult to animate with CGI back then. Humans are widely considered to be the most difficult things to execute in animation. Pixar's animators filmed themselves walking to better grasp proper human motion. Creating an all-human cast required creating new technology to animate detailed human anatomy, clothing, and realistic skin and hair. Although the technical team had some experience with hair and cloth in Monsters, Inc., the amount of hair and cloth required for The Incredibles had never been done by Pixar up until this point. Moreover, Bird would tolerate no compromises for the sake of technical simplicity. Where the technical team on Monsters, Inc. had persuaded director Pete Docter to accept pigtails on Boo to make her hair easier to animate, the character Violet had to have long hair that obscured her face; in fact, this was integral to her character. Violet's long hair, which was extremely difficult to animate, was only successfully animated toward the end of production. In addition, animators had to adapt to having hair both underwater and blowing through the wind. Disney was initially reluctant to make the film because of these issues, thinking that a live-action film would be preferable, but Lasseter denied this.
7. Not only did The Incredibles cope with the difficulty of animating CG humans, but also many other complications. The story was bigger than any prior story at the studio, was longer in running time, and had four times the number of locations. Supervising technical director Rick Sayre noted that the hardest thing about the film was that there was "no hardest thing," alluding to the amount of new technical challenges: fire, water, air, smoke, steam, and explosions were all additional to the new difficulty of working with humans. The film's organizational structure could not be mapped out like previous Pixar features, and it became a running joke to the team. Sayre said the team adopted “Alpha Omega," where one team was concerned with building modeling, shading, and layout, while another dealt with final camera, lighting, and effects. Another team, dubbed the "character team," digitally sculpted, rigged, and shaded all of the characters, and a simulation team was responsible for developing simulation technology for hair and clothing. There were at least 781 visual effects shots in the film, and they were quite often visual gags, such as the window shattering when Bob angrily shuts the car door. Additionally, the effects team improved their modeling of clouds, using volumetric rendering for the first time.
8. The skin of the characters gained a new level of realism from a technology to produce known as "subsurface scattering." The challenges did not stop with modeling humans. Bird decided that in a shot near the film's end, baby Jack-Jack would have to undergo a series of transformations, and in one of the five planned he would turn himself into a kind of goo. Technical directors, who anticipated spending two months or even longer to work out the goo effect, stealing precious hours from production that had already entered its final and most critical stages, petitioned the film's producer, John Walker, for help. Bird, who had himself brought Walker over from Warner Bros. to work on the project, was at first immovable, but after arguing with Walker in several invective-laced meetings over the course of two months, Bird finally conceded. Bird also insisted that the storyboards define the blocking of characters' motions, lighting, and camera movements, which had previously been left to other departments rather than storyboarded.
9. Lily Tomlin was originally considered for the role of Edna Mode, but later turned it down. After several failed attempts to cast Edna Mode, Bird took on her voice role himself.
10. Brad Bird was looking for a specific sound as inspired by the film's retrofuturistic design – the future as seen from the 1960s. 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; the assignment was instead given to Michael Giacchino.
11. Its theatrical release was accompanied with a Pixar short film Boundin'.
12. The film was first released on both VHS and a two-disc collector's edition DVD in 2005. The DVD set included two newly commissioned Pixar short films, Jack-Jack Attack and Mr. Incredible and Pals. Disney released the film on Blu-ray in 2011, and later on 4K Blu Ray in 2018.
13. Several video games based on the film were made. Including a direct tie in for PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, Xbox, Game Boy Advance, and PC. The game would spawn a sequel titled Rise of the Underminer which was released in 2005 for PS2, GameCube, Xbox, GBA, Nintendo DS, and PC. The events of this game would become non-canon with the release of Incredibles 2 in 2018. Another game titles When Danger Calls was released exclusively for PC. The Incredibles characters also appear in Disney Infinity. A LEGO-themed video game, LEGO The Incredibles, was released for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. The game covers the events of both films.