Ladies and Gentlemen whether you like it or not, the Pixar Playlist
Sequels are a tricky business for Pixar, they’ve had some good ones, and
some mediocre ones, and a terrible one. But this era of Pixar is continuing to
pump them out and why not a sequel to a pretty popular film, the Incredibles.
The popularity of Superheroes in pop culture in the 2010s made a sequel
to this feel more and more inevitable. But that is a double-edged sword as it
enters into a pretty saturated market. They weren’t even safe in the animated
department as Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse was due to come out in the same
year, a film that would beat it to an Oscar in an uncommon loss for Disney.
But what they have to their advantage is resources. No-longer do they
need to dedicate time and money for developing the physics since the technology
already exists within the company, all the have to do is transfer all the
models to the new software and update them. And speaking of resources, $200m is
also helpful and far more than any other studio gives to their animated
projects.
And the film was successful, raking in $1.2bn at the box office, this in spite of Disney swapping the schedule and losing a full year of development time. Let’s see where it fits on my list
We pick up pretty much immediately where we left off, though with a
couple of minor recasts, Huckleberry Milner now voicing Dash as Spencer Fox had
aged out of the role, and Jonathan Banks now playing Rick Dicker, after the
passing of Bud Luckey. A villain known as the underminer was attacking the
city. Our family attempt to stop them but their attempts cause a bunch of
reckless destruction and basically the original status quo is reset. We never
see the underminer ever again, I wonder what he did with all that cash.
Making matters worse, Tony saw Violet with her mask on and Rick is tasked
with wiping her memory, his last act before his entire department is shut down
in the wake of anti-superhero sentiment. Still, that’s not true of everyone and
a business Tycoon called Winston Devour offers them a chance to try and prove
why supers should be legal.
Their best bet is with Helen, as she’s less noisy let’s say that Mr
Incredible or Fro-zone. To allow her family that choice, and because Mr
Incredible wants her to, she agrees to be the ambassador for Superheroes. Mr
Incredible is left looking after the kids, who are dealing with their own
issues. Dash is struggling with Math and Mr Incredible understands none of it,
Violet is upset since the memory wipe seems to have erased all of Tony’s memory
of her and Jack Jack’s powers are getting more and more out of hand.
Helen is dealing with her own problems, however, as a mysterious villain
known as the screen-slayer is putting people in jeopardy with a nefarious
agenda of causing members of the audience to have seizures. How did this get
past internal testing?
OK, so spoiler alert, the person whose name is a play on evil endeavour
is in fact the villain. I don’t have a problem with this twist in principle but
its execution has some issues. Evelyn’s plan is complex and somewhat
self-contradictory. She makes a lot of effort to make Helen look good is all
I’m saying. Still, her ethos is actually one of the more interesting villain
motivations. She believes that Superheroes can’t be relied upon and doing so is
making everyone else weaker. If her plan was more subtle it might’ve actually
worked.
It is a good idea to role-reverse the first movie, we see more of Helen
in action and the comedy derived from Mr Incredible babysitting, especially
with Jack Jack gaining more powers was great. Though a note from a maths guy,
as long as the method works, you should be good using it.
The film’s budget allowed them to do more involved action set-pieces,
including some bits with new supers barely interesting enough to mention, it’s
just a pity the final boss didn’t have powers. Either way, the fight animation
is pretty stunning but I have a critique when it comes to animation, I don’t
think the cityscape is all that impressive but that’s not really the issue. There
are occasions where they incorporate things just to show off, Helen rides
without a helmet to show off the hair physics, there’s a gratuitous water
feature to show off the water physics, they’re impressive but it kinda feels
like they’re showing off. Edna continues to be amazing and the short that came
after is comedy gold.
The Incredibles 2 is a solid, even good movie, with impressive animation
and some comedic role reversal. At the same time, it feels like they hit the
reset button and all this was just a means to get back to where they started,
nowhere is that more obvious than with Violet’s mini-arc in this.
#1 Inside Out
#2 The Incredibles
#3 Up
#4 Finding Nemo
#5 Finding Dory
#6 Coco
#7 Incredibles 2
#8 Toy Story 3
#9 WALL-E
#10 Toy Story 2
#11 The Good Dinosaur
#12 Brave
#13 Toy Story
#14 Cars 3
#15 Monsters Inc
#16 Ratatouille
#17 Cars
#18 Monsters University
#19 Cars 2
#20 A Bug’s Life
No comments:
Post a Comment