Beyond Belief

what about bob?: Mr. Incredible, aka Bob Parr, goes to work.

The Incredibles' cartoon heroes are more real than The Polar Express' creepy humanoids.

by Sam Adams

Even when you can bench-press a freight train, the weight of the world takes its toll. "Who wants the pressure of being super all the time?" sighs Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson). "No matter how many times you save the world, it still manages to get back in trouble again. Sometimes you just want it to stay saved."

Unfortunately for Mr. I, things are about to get a whole lot heavier. After he plucks a would-be suicide from midair—while simultaneously foiling a bomb-throwing bank robber and stopping a careening El train—the masked crime fighter is sued by the ungrateful jumper. ("You didn't save my life—you ruined my death!" he yells outside the courhouse.) The suit unleashes a flood of copycats, and before you know it, the era of the costumed superhero is over. Relocated and anonymized, the spandex-clad saviors who once watched over the grateful people of Municiberg and Metroville reinvent themselves as "average citizens, average heroes." Where Mr. Incredible, whose real name turns out to be Bob Parr, once retrieved tree-bound cats by uprooting the tree, now he toils as a claims adjuster, whispering helpful advice to his clients and hoping his supervisor doesn't catch on.

Bob's life in Squaresville isn't all bad. He's got a lovely copper-haired wife, Helen (Holly Hunter), who used to be better known as Elastigirl, and the requisite three children, two of whom have powers to match their personalities: Hyperactive Dash (Spencer Fox) can move faster than sight, and awkward Violet (Sarah Vowell) has the knack of disappearing and surrounding herself with a force field. But when Bob retires to his study, decorated with trophies and old Life magazines, it's obvious something's missing. He wants to be a hero again.

Unlike Spider-Man 2's Peter Parker, Bob has no qualms about exercising his powers, and if the occasional building gets blown up, well, saving the world is a messy business. (At least he's not as cavalier about property destruction as Team America.) But the world seems to be doing all right without "supers," or at least better than the supers are doing in their popularly imposed exile. Bob and his old buddy Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson) spend their bowling nights huddled around a police scanner, listening avidly for an opportunity to do good without getting caught.

The New York Times labeled The Incredibles a "red state movie," and it's possible to see Mr. Incredible as a symbol of American might—overweight, a tad oafish, but powerful and goodhearted, dragged down by niggling critics and ingratitude. (The first villain he faces is named Bomb Voyage, dresses like a mime and speaks with a suspiciously continental accent.) But his shoddy treatment at the public's hands feels less like the opprobrium of the international community and more like the special roasting Americans reserve for once-cherished public figures. More than anger, it's jealousy, a suspicion confirmed when it's revealed that the movie's archvillain, Syndrome (Jason Lee), is a powerless human who's been killing off supers so he can take their place.

A flame-haired ex-fanboy, Syndrome betrays writer-director Brad Bird's time on The Simpsons—at one point, he interrupts an explanation of his evil plan to exclaim, "You've got me monologuing!" But he's got a nasty streak that's rare in American animation. When Helen and the kids borrow a jet to rescue Bob, Syndrome doesn't hesitate to shoot them out of the sky, and the cold efficiency with which his computer flashes the pictures of terminated supers subtly underlines his bloody past. Death may have been the pretext of Pixar's Finding Nemo, but in The Incredibles it's a constant presence. After Helen and the kids survive the crash, she leaves them in a cave with a warning not to confuse Syndrome with the bad guys from Saturday morning cartoons. "These guys aren't like that," she tells them. "They don't exercise restraint."

A thin and inconsistently conceived character, Syndrome is the movie's weak spot. But his amoral ruthlessness in a world where even the bad guys once played by the rules is surprisingly chilling and socially resonant. By the time the plane carrying Syndrome's killer robot is bearing down on Metroville's watery shores, the echoes of 9/11 are impossible to miss. There's no better proof of Hollywood's reluctance to address life in the age of terror than that the most poignant responses have appeared in suspect or marginal genres; the fact that many people will reject out-of-hand the notion that a "kids' movie" like The Incredibles might have something to say about the state of the world is exactly what gives Bird the freedom to tackle the subject.

Bird doesn't abandon the rubbery expressiveness of cartoon characters; some have heads like dinner plates, while others are thrown through walls with no apparent ill effects. But the world around them is, at times, stunningly realistic. The shot where Bob's escape pod crash-lands on Syndrome's island hideout could be slipped without notice into a live-action feature, while the fluid camerawork cunningly draws from Cold War spy thrillers (Michael Giacchino's score overtly references John Barry's Bond themes). Even shots that would be impossible in real life, like the high angle on a waterfall that splits to allow entrance into Syndrome's hideout, have a stunning tactile beauty.

It's not so much what Bird and the animators leave out as what they put in. Forsaking the obsessive detail of the Shrek movies, The Incredibles works with a realistic depth of field; hard as it is to make digital images look sharp, I'd bet it's even harder to make them look naturally out-of-focus. Animated realism is an oxymoron, but The Incredibles' characters and their world are more convincing, even recognizable, than those in almost any American movie this year. It's no secret that mainstream American movies are subtly moving closer to animation, with their CGI stunt doubles and digitally altered performances. But The Incredibles suggest that the smart money is on making cartoons more like people, rather than turning people into cartoons.

Unfortunately, Robert Zemeckis and the crew of The Polar Express don't seem to have gotten the memo. A digitally animated version of Chris Van Allsburg's children's book, the film was created using "performance capture" technology that uses real actors' movements and facial expressions as the basis for the animated characters, a process that would be more noteworthy if the end result weren't so unconvincing and downright creepy. Tom Hanks "plays" five characters, among them a little boy who boards a magical North Pole-bound train on Christmas Eve, the train's conductor and an evanescent hobo with a pronounced resemblance to Tom Waits. Only the conductor physically resembles Hanks, and not all of the characters even use his voice, so it's hard to get past the suspicion that the multiple casting is no more than a marketing gimmick.

Children's tales from Peter Pan to The Wizard of Oz have explored the idea that the characters in children's fantasies are analogues of the people around them, but The Polar Express doesn't expand on the idea that most of the people in the boy's fantasy are extensions of himself. Considering that the lucky few who've managed to avoid the flood of marketing-driven articles about the film's "revolutionary" technology are unlikely even to guess that Hanks plays so many roles, it's not surprising it all comes to naught.

That's not to say The Polar Express doesn't have its jaw-dropping moments. Zemeckis has always been an ingenious exploiter of new technologies, although here an exploiter is all he is. Zemeckis makes canny use of the locomotive, wellspring of the cinema's earliest thrills, matching primitive jolts with advanced technology, and plants one delicious in-joke for longtime fans: The bratty know-it-all kid who rides the train is played by Eddie Deezen, who was the insufferable Beatles fan in Zemeckis' 1978 I Wanna Hold Your Hand. But that can't make up for the movie's basic hollowness and hypocrisy. Like most Christmas movies, it's an elaborate, overstuffed ploy that pays lip service to faith and goodwill while serving up a decadent banquet of ocular trinkets. If, as the boy is told at the movie's climax, "sometimes the most real things in the world are the things you can't see," then why spend some $150 million on an elaborate photo-realist ruse? Lecturing children on imagination without asking them to use theirs is commonplace, but it still rankles.

There's one holy-shit sequence, in which one of the golden tickets that allow children to ride the train blows out the window, sails down a hill, under a bridge and then surfs under the train until it ends up back where it started, all in one shot. (It's Forrest Gump's feather in reverse.) But no matter how fancy its flight, it can't get The Polar Express off the ground.

The Incredibles Written and directed by Brad Bird A Disney release Now playing at area theaters recommended The Polar Express Written and directed by Robert Zemeckis A DreamWorks release Now playing at area theaters