Pretty incredible...

Computer animation - particularly from Pixar - becomes more and more impressive with each release. Toy Story was an amazing picture - full of amazingly realistic characters and jokes that played on adult and kid levels. And things got better with Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, but I'm going to say that I think The Incredibles is the most phenomenal production yet.

The artwork is outstanding - near photo-realistic in a number of scenes, particularly with cloth and water imaging making giant leaps and bounds over previous films. For one early scene in an elevator, I watched the scene three times, zooming in each time to try to see any flaws with the clothing. The picture looked like it had been filmed and then had animated heads added in. Later, the characters nearly crash into the ocean, and the sights of the water and waves breaking around them is stunningly realistic.

If the animation were all that there was to recommend the movie, though, it'd not be nearly the equal of the other Pixar productions. Instead, the story is phenomenal. It plays on so many different levels for both kids and adults. It's a tribute and pastiche of James Bond movie cliches - with the evil hideout in the middle of a volcano, the monorails moving people around a secret island base, rockets launched from the volcano, villians who give monologues instead of taking care of the hero, even the soundtrack has a bit of Bond-theme at times. But the heart of the film is a superhero family gone underground after the American public turns on them. In the end, though, the story is really about whether we should hide our special abilities from the world around us so that we don't frighten and offend others who either might not be as special as we were or at least special in different ways. The characters discuss whether to show their abilities or not, and the major villian - a voice perfect Jason Lee - plans to eventually turn everyone into a Super so that nobody will be super anymore.

It's a great film, truly one of the best made in the past years, and there isn't a person out there that it isn't appropriate for. Truly an incredible effort by all involved...