.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}
Miscellaneous thoughts and ramblings
Monday, March 21, 2005
 
Movie Review -- The Incredibles

ball-and-chain bought our kids the double DVD of Pixar’s The Incredibles. They’ve all watched it many times, but I only saw it for the first time last weekend.

ball-and-chain and I think it’s Pixar’s best film, though ball-and-chain thinks Finding Nemo is very close. The characters are engrossing and likeable. I especially liked Holly Hunter as the voice of Helen Parr, former superhero and now stay at home mom (just like ball-and-chain!). The story is full of exciting action, laughs, and a few very sweet touching moments. The animation, as you’ve come to expect from Pixar, is eyes-popping-out-of-your-skull incredible.

The frosting on this delicious movie is the moral. The message of the movie is the celebration of individual greatness, and a warning of what is lost when a society values equality over excellence. I’m not joking! How did this movie get made in Hollywood? This is easily the movie with the politically most conservative soul in many years. Not convinced? The second DVD has a lot of bonus features including commentary and scenes that never got past the storyboard stage. The initial opening scene was going to feature Helen Parr making an impassioned speech about the fact that she gave up fighting evil because raising children is more important. My eyes welled up; it was incredible.
Comments:
Pixar has never made a bad movie.
 
Psychotoddler: It's true. All of their movies were great. Their prior movies, though, had peculiar family structures. The movies were all written and directed by different people, so it's probably not fair to generalize about Pixar. Toy Story had a very negative and very subtle attitude about dads. ball-and-chain noticed it first. Andy has no dad, which might be benign enough, but the only dad in the movie was the mean neighbor's dad who is only shown briefly passed out on his recliner with empty beer cans strewn about. Check it out the next time you watch it. It definitely made us suspect that someone had an agenda. In Finding Nemo the mom dies at the beginning, which again isn't a big deal. Lots of kids' stories have a parent die at the beginning, but it again seemed weird after Toy Story. In retrospect I realize I'm reading too much into it, but still it was nice to see a movie with a completely boring family structure and completely exciting super powers!
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

Powered by Blogger