The Incredibles
Special-Edition DVD

They're the family next door—and also the last best hope for a world threatened by villains

	The Incredibles Special-Edition DVD
	Starring the voices of Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell and Wallace Shawn
	Written and directed by Brad Bird
	Disney/Pixar
	Two-disc set
	MSRP: $29.99

By Adam-Troy Castro

n his way to his wedding to Elastigirl (Hunter), Mr. Incredible (Nelson) stops some fugitive bank robbers, rescues a cat from a tree, foils a would-be-suicide and prevents a horrific elevated train crash. Alas, the train passengers and would-be suicide take legal action, ending the age of Supers, and America's Supers find themselves obliged to enter the witness protection program.

Fifteen years later, restricted to a civilian life, insurance adjuster Bob Parr is a suffocating cubicle slave whose benevolent instincts conflict with his ability to defend his company's bottom line. He is so bored by the daily routine, so frustrated by a job that he considers meaningless, that he barely registers his wife Helen, his son Dash (Spencer Fox), his daughter Violet (Vowell) and his son Jack-Jack (Eli Fucile and Maeve Andrews). The entire family strains under the pressure of hiding super powers from a world that rewards mediocrity. As Bob notes, bitterly, saying that everybody's special is another way of saying that nobody is.

Then one day, following his termination for beating up his diminutive tyrant of a boss (Shawn), Bob receives a job offer from Mirage (Elizabeth Pena), the agent of mysterious parties who know of his prior existence as a superhero. They're willing to pay him big bucks to travel to a remote desert island and take out a dangerous, out-of-control robot. As Mr. Incredible—albeit, a fatter, more out-of-shape Mr. Incredible—Bob makes short work of the assignment and finds a new lease on life. He doesn't suspect that his employers have a sinister second agenda.

When Bob goes missing, Helen seeks out superheroic costume designer Edna Mode (Bird), who promptly outfits her for a rescue mission as Elastigirl. But the two older children, Dash and Violet, who harbor their own amazing powers, stow away on her jet ... and the Parr family takes one step closer to becoming the super-team known as The Incredibles.

Super movie, super extras

As a stand-alone movie, The Incredibles is one of the very best superhero movies of all time, succeeding brilliantly as a spoof and as a thrilling adventure taken on its very own level. The two-DVD set is a treasury of extras that deserve to stand with it.

Among them: "Mr. Incredible & Pals," a deliberately, wonderfully awful short adventure starring Mr. Incredible, Frozone and their bunny companion, Mr. Skipperdo. Supposedly a never-aired pilot for a cartoon series produced after the two heroes licensed their likenesses, it features that particularly unfortunate old animation technique in which nearly motionless figures speak with real, superimposed lips. The result is a gloriously nasty case of the world's most advanced animation studio, Pixar, shamelessly abusing one of the crappiest animation styles anybody ever tried to foist on the American public. The best way to appreciate this one is to watch the cartoon first, exult in its awfulness, and then watch it a second time, this time with the commentary track by Mr. Incredible and Frozone, who, we're told, are now seeing the results for the very first time. Both heroes are aghast at the garish superimposed lips, the lame bunny sidekick and the insipid story, but Incredible bends over backward trying to be positive while the less reserved Frozone works himself up into deeper and shriller paroxysms of affronted indignation. It is to die.

There's also "Vowellett," a short profile of Sarah Vowell, the essayist, NPR personality and fiction writer Pixar drafted to voice the role of Incredible daughter Violet. Vowell, a dry, witty presence very much aware of the absurdities of her brush with cinematic fame, rambles at length about personal enthusiasms ranging from great assassinated presidents to the great American abolitionist John Brown. Thrilled to receive her very own action figure, Vowell struggles comically with the packaging and continues to have trouble freeing her animated form even after she resorts to using scissors. Her eccentric humor immediately establishes herself as a writer whose non-Incredibles work is worth investigation.

CGI animation is so prohibitively expensive that the half hour of "deleted scenes" are essentially animated storyboards, but they're all interesting, especially as they're all accompanied by interviews in which creator Brad Bird explains why each sequence was eventually abandoned. The longest and most exciting is an alternate opening, featuring an early version of the villainous Syndrome. But the most intriguing is a sequence introducing (and killing off) Elastigirl's pilot sidekick, Snug. Bird, who believed somebody had to die in order to establish that the bad guys were playing for keeps, fought hard to keep Snug as the film's sacrificial lamb. The storyboards reveal his character to be amusing and quirky, his death a moment of shocking seriousness and his place in the story ultimately extraneous. He remains in the film only as the old friend Helen phones when she finds herself needing to borrow a jet.

Secret government files provide us with the data on the known Supers, including several whose only film appearance is on Syndrome's long list of previous victims. The listings are cross-referenced to provide us data on who teamed up with whom. It turns out that the super-teams on this world were the Beta Force, The Thrilling Three and the Phantasmics. Most of the computer files include short audio interviews with the various Supers, establishing that most were eccentric in the extreme. Universal Man liked Perry Como and suffered from poor self-esteem. Phylange mentions fighting Gamma Super Aquatic Ninja Pygmies. Stormicide has gas-emission powers and is sensitive to all the fart jokes people just happen to come up with around her. Mr. Incredible has his own opinions: He thinks Phylange never cleaned his costume enough ("It was all full of shmutz") and can barely contain himself thinking about how much work the guy put into his unique "battle yodel." As for Gazerbeam, visible in the film at the Incredibles wedding and as the skeleton Bob discovers on Syndrome's island, he shoots ocular laser beams, which he sadly notes could be quite a "pickle in a relationship scenario," as his habit of averting his eyes was all too often misinterpreted as disinterest. But he notes he has a great sense of humor, and is often "guffawing away on the steamship of hilarity."

A short, "Jack-Jack Attack," reveals for the first time what was going on between that harried babysitter and the youngest Incredible while the rest of the family were off fighting for their lives on that remote island. Other extras include the short, "Boundin'," which preceded the film in theaters, funny interviews with several of the characters, a "blooper" real of weird animation errors, two making-of documentaries and two commentary tracks: one by creator Brad Bird and producer John Walker and one by the animators. The Bird/Walker commentary points out some of the memorabilia in Mr. Incredible's home office, including the record album "Mr. Incredible Sings!," which they report came from the hero's William Shatner period. They also report that the family dinner scene caused particular problems, with weeks of meetings devoted to the particular placement of the broccoli and gravy.