The Simpsons alumnus Brad Bird was welcomed to Pixar as a "disruptive influence": something to upset their perfect balance and smash the boundaries of any formulas they might have been settling into. It worked. Brilliantly. His first film for the cgi uber-producers is The Incredibles, a straight-down-the-middle comedy adventure about domesticated Superheroes.  Focusing on the Parr family, and primarily the frustrated Father Bob Parr (Mr. Incredible himself, voiced by Craig T. Nelson), the concept relocates the tropes of a comic book or Saturday morning cartoon to a sitcom set-up of clashing personalities and character driven plotting.

One of the very few best films of the year, The Incredibles does not so much please crowds as gratify them indecently. I was lucky enough to see it at both of the gill-bursting London Film Festival screenings, and on both occasions the reception was rapturous. Again, when I saw it at a local multiplex the audience were eating out of
Bird's hands from start to finish. To achieve this while by no means deferring to lowest common denominator get-outs is a mighty feat. This films knocks out the walls of expectations constraining cgi feature films even as it has the audience raising the roof.

It seems clear that Pixar want to entertain, first and foremost - but like their every other picture, this exceptional entertainment transcends that very mandate even as it excells at it. As ever, their characterisation evokes emotional, human themes that will be forever relevant; the sly setup satirises a society of litigation and unscrupulous insurance legislature; genre norms are blended into imaginative new forms. This movie is sharp, bright and smart.

Perhaps we should be able to expect near-perfect craftsmanship from ultra-malleable big-budget cgi feature films with five-year production schedules, but in The Incredibles, the tiniest of details are so very, very excitingly, precisely calculated it's impossible not to be staggered. For example, there's a reason some scenes take place on the night of a full moon - and it's a good one, but an incredibly subtle one. Or witness the apportioning of powers across the family - it's far from arbitrary.

This is perhaps the second or third greatest of Pixar's masterpieces. I will certainly see it on the big screen yet again, and would urge you to do the same.

Brendon Connelly, Dec 2004