Which The Incredibles Character Are You?

Learn More About The Incredibles

Brad Bird's The Incredibles arrived in 2004 and remains one of the sharpest superhero films ever made, which is notable given that it beat the modern superhero boom to the punch by several years. It won Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Sound Editing, and it was Pixar's first film built entirely around human characters, a technical gamble at a time when convincing animated humans were still a genuine problem.

The premise is a midlife crisis in a supersuit. Bob Parr was Mr. Incredible, the strongest man alive, until a wave of lawsuits forced every superhero into government-mandated retirement and civilian identity. Fifteen years later he is an insurance claims adjuster in a cubicle that is visibly too small for him, sneaking out at night with his old friend Frozone to listen to police scanners. His wife Helen, formerly Elastigirl, has thrown herself into raising three children. The marriage is strained in ways the film treats with real adult specificity.

What makes the film work is that the superheroics are almost entirely a vehicle for domestic anxiety. Bob's secret is not a crime-fighting career, it is that he has been laid off and has been lying about going to work. Helen's central fear is not a supervillain, it is that her husband is having an affair. The action sequences are genuinely thrilling, but the emotional engine is a man who cannot accept that his best years are behind him and a woman who has been holding the family together while he mourns.

Syndrome is one of the best-constructed villains in animation precisely because he starts as a fan. Buddy Pine wanted to be Mr. Incredible's sidekick, was brushed off with genuine cruelty during a bad moment, and spent his life engineering a revenge that includes an entire fake heroic persona. His stated endgame, to sell his inventions so that everyone can be super, carries the film's most argued-over line, because when everyone is super, no one will be.

That line has generated two decades of debate about whether the film endorses a philosophy of innate superiority. Bird has consistently rejected the reading, arguing the film is about not being ashamed of what you are genuinely good at, whatever that happens to be. The counterargument has its defenders. Either way, it is unusual for a family film to leave that much for people to fight about.

Edna Mode, voiced by Bird himself, became the breakout. A tiny, imperious costume designer with a violent aversion to capes, she delivers the film's most quoted material in roughly seven minutes of screen time. Her cape monologue, a rapid montage of heroes killed by their own outfits, is an all-time gag.

The children complete the family portrait. Violet is a teenager whose powers, invisibility and force fields, are such a direct metaphor for adolescent self-consciousness that the film barely has to comment on it. Dash is a ten-year-old told constantly to hide the one thing he is exceptional at. Jack-Jack's chaotic multiplying abilities function as a running joke about how unpredictable babies are.

Incredibles 2 followed in 2018 after a fourteen-year wait, picking up seconds after the original ended and inverting the setup, sending Helen out to work while Bob handles the house. It grossed over a billion dollars.

If you like your animation with an edge, try Which Toy Story 5 Character Are You? or Which Zootopia 2 Character Are You? next.