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Directed by Brad Bird
I just don't want to think about this film any more.
 Universally praised by the critics as witty and as much fun for adults as the children who are its main audience, I went along in the hope that it would win me round to the Pixar world of animation which has so far eluded my pleasure receptors. You see, I like animation that looks like animation. I get a large proportion of my enjoyment of cartoons from the fact that they AREN'T real, the fact that they're having to be ingenious, and thereby, coming at reality from a different angle, they show something extra. Give me Steamboat Willy, give me Tom & Jerry, the Simpsons, Beavis & Butthead, give me Eastern European bleak, give me Nick Park.... But please don't give me Pixar.
OK the technique is incredible, every image honed and polished, but - to what end? It's as if the overwhelming technique had neutralised the wit. Such a disappointment when its director Brad Bird used to work on The Simpsons. I don't know when I was last so bored and unamused in the cinema. Too long by half, each incident was stretched further even than Mrs Incredible's body; the plot was not half as clever as it thought it was, especially when so ever-extended, and held few surprises; vocally and visually the characters were infected with such mugging and ‘aren't I just so lovable' archness ...above all a repulsive conforming blue-eyed American cosiness engulfed the whole thing. Listen here, folk - archness is NOT irony.
 I have to believe it when grown people tell me that they loved it and have happily watched it twice. I have to hope for their own sakes that parents taking their children will get something out of it themselves - I've sat through enough kids' films in the line of duty in my time. But to me it was just another instance of the supersize phenomenon. Big, bloated, over-promoted...what an expense of creative energy and technical expertise has gone into this mediocre result. The triumph of technique over content.
Like Oscar Wilde's cynic, who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, the Pixar stable presents the surface of everything and the essence of nothing. Bugs Bunny has a soul, even Butthead has a soul, but The Incredibles are no more than shiny simulacra, 3-dimensional without depth, heroic without effort, and cute without hearts.
I know I'm an old curmudgeon, and you're all out there shaking your heads sadly at me, but please think twice before you swallow this emperor's clothes effort whole. The merchandise is already gathering in ambush in the shops. Resist!!
CineWorld, Sunderland November 2004
www.theincredibles.com |
