It’s been more than 20 years since Brad Bird’s animated superhero movie The Incredibles hit theaters — plenty of time for wave after wave of fans to hit the internet and renew the claim that it’s an off-license Fantastic Four film with the roles swapped around. The comparisons (and fan-created competitions) between Bird’s super-team and the foursome created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1961 have been a hot topic online since the movie came out, with The Incredibles often hailed as the best screen version of the Fantastic Four.
Since The Incredibles debuted, there have been three separate attempts to reboot Earth’s First Family as blockbuster cinema stars: Tim Story’s profitable but widely disliked 2005 Fantastic Four (which spawned the 2007 Rise of the Silver Surfer sequel), Josh Trank’s critically derided (and personally disavowed) 2015 Fantastic Four, and now First Steps. But all three have lived in The Incredibles’ shadow, to the point where it’s so widely understood that Bird’s movie is the one to beat that Disney/Marvel actually put out a trailer prominently labeling The Fantastic Four: First Steps as “like a live-action Incredibles.”
Why is The Incredibles such an unimpeachable superhero classic that it reportedly made Tim Story revise the action in his first Fantastic Four movie? What does it do right that puts it above so many other superhero movies, the previous Fantastic Four movies and First Steps included? Arguably, quite a few things. Some of them are just practical: The Incredibles is animated, so Bird was able to stylize his heroes, and get away with effects that have never looked great in live-action, like super-stretchy bodies and symbolically huge bodies. And by creating original characters, Bird was able to create his own metaphors, putting real meaning behind each character’s powers, rather than having to try to update 40-year-old characters with a ton of awkward baggage built into their stories.
But there’s a lot more behind The Incredibles’ success than that. Let’s dig into some of the more important elements that make The Incredibles a contender for “best Fantastic Four movie,” as well as one of the all-time great superhero movies.
The Incredibles taps into one of the greatest heroic fantasies
Image: Pixar
Superhero stories sometimes struggle with the attempt to portray or even care about its heroes’ mundane lives. (Someone please tell me why the version of Superman in James Gunn’s 2025 movie even needs to work as a newspaper reporter, since the original reason — immediate access to the latest news — is now something he could get faster from a cell phone.) The live-action Fantastic Four movies tend to touch on the heavy responsibilities of being superheroes, and the gravitas of saving the world, but the Fantastic Four start out as cosmic astronauts and wind up as super-celebrities. There isn’t a lot of mundanity or relatability in their lives. Bird’s script, by contrast, dives into what ordinary life looks like for a superhero, and makes it a source of major conflict and crucial catharsis.
He explores how a boring, unfulfilling, oppressive office job makes Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) so eager for adventure that he’s willing to lie to his wife Helen/Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) to go out heroing on the sly. He gives equal time to Helen, who seems a lot more fulfilled as a parent, trying to keep her family happy and healthy, but who bridles at how Bob is shirking his part of their partnership. Their kids, Violet (Sarah Vowell) and Dash (Spencer Fox), each have their own small problems at school and home. And all of them are able to solve those issues, find new confidence and contentment, and learn to cooperate and care for each other better by embracing their superpowers and fighting a villain.
The steps Bob takes are a beloved fantasy all on their own: He gets to throw his awful boss Gilbert (Wallace Shawn) through a wall and walk away from his terrible day job forever, in order to live a much more exciting secret life that challenges him and lets him play the smooth, urbane, capable hero he is in his imagination. Everyone in the main cast gets their own version of that relatable fantasy — leaving school, housework, and all the day-to-day ordinary stuff behind to go fight bad guys. Speaking of which…
It strikes a perfect balance between the main characters
Image: Pixar
One of the reasons this movie flows so well is because Bird doesn’t back-burner any of his central foursome of heroes. There’s no “Superman and his supporting cast of far lesser heroes and ordinary humans” here, or “Brilliant scientific innovator and genius Reed Richards, plus his wife, brother-in-law, and friend.” The Incredibles gives a real sense that Bob, Helen, Violet, and Dash are all distinctive people, each with their own small, personal challenges and frustrations. When their desires inevitably come into conflict, there isn’t a clear and obvious Protagonist Who’s Right. Bob is justified in being miserable about spending his days using bureaucracy to deny insurees the settlements they deserve. Helen is justified in expecting him to commit and be present as a father and husband, instead of secretly gallivanting around the world while she raises their kids. Those kids are justified in their own frustrations, and less so in the ways they turn their unhappiness on their fellow family members.
The movie effectively starts with all the Parrs angry or sad, and lost in their own separate worlds. And it moves toward a satisfying reconciliation where they’re all suddenly, dynamically, joined together as a family. It’s emotionally gratifying that they all get what they want, but it’s even better that they come to better understandings of what they want, and learn that their needs are compatible with the rest of the family’s needs.
The action is colorful, creative, and exciting
Image: Pixar
Live-action superhero movies have to battle for budget on every set piece and action sequence. Too many of them head toward climaxes where one CG wireframe character smashes against another, in a digital morass that loses any sense of human stakes, and the previous Fantastic Four movies in particular have struggled to make the four leads — each with their own visual challenges and complications — work in action on screen. The Incredibles doesn’t have that problem. Again, working in animation frees Bird up to make stretching powers, invisibility, and force fields look like a natural part of the world, instead of digital distortions. But it helps that the action is so supremely well-choreographed.
That goes equally for breathless sequences like Bob fleeing Syndrome’s bubble trap, the family’s plane crash, or Dash’s frantic speed-evasion of Syndrome’s flying guards, and for tense, slow-burn sequences, like Helen quietly infiltrating Syndrome’s base, running into some frustrating barriers and threats along the way. And in each of these cases, how the characters handle the action teaches viewers more about who they are. (Including Helen pausing, mid-sneak, for a disappointed, self-critical examination of her own post-baby butt.) Over and over, The Incredibles uses action sequences not just to inject excitement and pay off the superhero fantasy, but to push the story and the characterization forward at the same time.
That element pays off most obviously in the family’s big team-ups, first on Syndrome’s island, then when facing his ultimate Omnidroid back in Metroville. The previous Fantastic Four movies only fitfully find ways for the central team to cleverly, creatively use their powers in concert with each other. In The Incredibles, once the family is fighting baddies together instead of fighting with each other, they keep upping their game, finding new ways to collaborate.
The Incredibles is really, really funny
Image: Pixar
Possibly the most important element that’s made the Marvel Cinematic Universe a billion-dollar phenomenon is the ability to balance humor with drama, to let heroes (and their audiences!) experience emotions beyond anger, frustration, and fear. That’s a lesson that hadn’t often been effectively applied in blockbuster superhero movies as of the 2005 and 2015 Fantastic Four movies. When superhero movies in the 2000s and 2010s tried to apply humor, it was usually snitty, sour, or clumsy.
By contrast, The Incredibles mixes up the modes of humor, from tiny, barely remarked-on details (like an explosives-wielding French mime villain named “Bomb Voyage”) to meta gags about superheroes (“And what does Baron von Ruthless do? He starts monologuing!”) to absolutely everything that comes out of the mouth of comedic character Edna Mode. (“No capes!”) The movie’s comic timing is terrific, sometimes operating on just a wide-eyed glance, sometimes operating in full scream mode. (Like Bob and Helen yelling at each other about which downtown traffic route to take to get to the Omnidroid. Or… “Where! Is! My! Supersuit!”) And it all just highlights the drama when the story gets serious. Speaking of which…
The Incredibles has incredibly personal high stakes and low moments
Image: Pixar
Superhero blockbusters, the early Fantastic Four movies included, regularly try to make the stakes personal for the characters and to put them through the emotional wringer, whether that means the 1978 Superman killing Lois Lane, Batman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight having to choose one of the people he cares about to save from a death trap, or the Fantastic Four trying to decide whether to give up their cosmically talented super-baby to save the world in First Steps.
And yet the heroes in these movies usually react stoically, grimly, without betraying much of the pain they’re going through. (’78 Superman aside; Lois’ death absolutely wrecks him.) Like the best Pixar movies, though, The Incredibles pushes its characters toward big moments with deep emotions. Bird lets the audience really feel what it’s like for Bob when he thinks his family has died because of him. He similarly makes it clear how far Bob has to fallen away from his heroic self-mythologizing when he nearly murders Syndrome’s sidekick Mirage (Elizabeth Peña) as revenge. Even the irony of him almost killing her before she can tell him his wife and kids are alive takes The Incredibles to a more meaningfully felt dark place than all the “Batman broods in his Batcave over his lost parents” scenes in the superhero canon.
The Incredibles is the whole package
Image: Pixar
Superhero movies often pull off individual sequences or characters or concepts really well — standout sequences like the two-boats dilemma Heath Ledger’s Joker sets up in The Dark Knight, or Quicksilver’s bullet-time rescue sequence in X-Men: Days of Future Past, stick with superhero fans long-term, and come up again and again in conversation.
But what makes The Incredibles stand out so strongly 20 years after its release is the way Bird and the Pixar team created a movie that works on all levels — as a comedy and a drama, as an action-oriented adventure and an emotionally resonant family story, as a story about superheroes saving the day and a story about a bunch of people with mundane personal problems coming to appreciate their lives and their loved ones better.
Internet commenters and writers have been accusing Bird of ripping off the Fantastic Four for two decades now, but he didn’t need to steal a thing from other iterations of heroes — he just needed to tap into our understanding of what makes superheroes satisfying to watch, whether on an aspirational level or a relatable one. It’s a timeless movie, about all the aspects of superhero stories that have drawn in fans since the genre was created. If we get a new Fantastic Four reboot 10 or 20 years from now, movie fans will probably still be comparing it unfavorably to The Incredibles.
