The Incredibles 2 Movie Review: It Is An Incredibly Warm & Endearing Experience!
Animation Film With Voices by Craig TNelson, Holly Hunter
Directed by Brad Bird
Rating: *** ½(3 and a half stars)
If you are familiar with the Ramayan, you’d know 14 years is a lot of time. The Incredibles returns with a sequel 14 years after the first film created new benchmark for animation films and for the super-hero genre on the whole.
Who would have thought that the master creators of the original would return to continue the story of the ‘Incredible’ family with a plot so simmering with a dishy discontent , you wish the world would remain a wonky place, just so that director Brad Bird’s sparkling animation characters would come forward to claim a slice of instant immortality.
The plot , for those who came in late, has to do with a family with super powers in a country that has banned super heroes for political reasons. Bob Parr and Helen Parr(voiced fabulously by Craig T Nelson and Holly Hunter), the couple with super-hero powers are asked to lie low in their illegal status. But you really can’t keep a family of infinite do-gooders down.
Resigned to their motel-existence the couple finds itself back in business. Rather, the Mrs of the family is summoned to do her super-hero act .
The sequel simply soars with an inbuilt wisdom that sparkles in colours of contempory all-knowingness, There is a sly finesse in the way ideas of contemporary mores are inserted into the plot . Most importantly this film celebrates the blossoming of the wife-mother figure into a woman whose dreams can touch skyhigh.
Some of the situations in the plot regarding the man of the house playing care-giver to the children while the mother of the house saves the world, are so supremely gender-empowering that I forgot this was not a live film.The scenes were Bob Parr tries to cope with his elder son’s maths homework, his daughter’s love life and his infant son’s burgeoning super powers(the last is a blast) are enormously entertaining in their disposition to see domesticity as a desirable space for super-heroism .
My favourite character is the la-di-dah fey and snooty Edna Mode dress designer(voiced by the director Brad Bird) who babysits the Parr baby for one memorable evening of power play that neither she nor we will forget.
Animation never seemed less relevant and yet the format never appeared more eloquently employed in any recent film. Director Brad Bird brings into a play a variety of inventive characters who stride the world of animation with the aplomb of real-life people.Winston Deaver(voiced by Bob Odenkirk) is such a brazen entrepreneur, he markets super-heroism as a banned item that must be unbanned.His sister(voiced with dreamy splendor by Catherine Keener) is a worldweary sorceress of the digital world out to conquer the world with her wily whimsicality.
Filled with magical moments that accentuate human aberrations while stressing the need for family togetherness The Incredibles is indeed an incredible work of animation art, far wiser cleverer and savvy than what we’ve seen in live super-hero films recently.
Incredibles 2 opens in Hindi, English, Tamil and Telugu on Friday.
