njoyed Bao. My theater was legit disturbed when you-know-what happened.
Main feature. This was good. I liked it a lot. It's probably my third favorite movie of the year after First Reformed and Annihilation (though a very distant third).
The animation is gorgeous. And the framing, the lighting, the details--there is just a higher level that Bird and Pixar are working on here when compared to most other current animated features. Some of the trailers before the movie couldn't have made that any more apparent. This isn't just talented technicians going hard on their computers. This is artistry.
The setpieces are fantastic--this is really where the film got me, the construction and editing of the sequences and the ideas fueling them delivered basically some of the best action I have seen since Fury Road. Action that puts most current live action films to shame, nevermind the animated ones. The humor is good but actually maybe not quite as effective as I thought it was going to be? Still, nothing felt too forced and there were some great laugh moments, most of them involving Jack-Jack. Jack-Jack vs. Raccoon will likely remain the best cinematic one-on-one fight all year.
Story and character--this is where the film gets a bit more questionable for me. I don't understand why this film is over two hours long, there's definitely a good half hour they could have cut out and I'm getting kind of tired of modern tentpole films giving us scenes or bits that felt like they would have been on the cutting room floor or never made it out of pre-production stages ten years ago. The characters still bring with them a lot of the charm they had in the first one, but it's almost like the film is trying to replay that instead of pushing it forward, and the whole story swings on a role reversal of the story structure of the first, which feels like a sort of oddly un-ambitious thing from Bird and also a weird approach given that it has been 14 years since the first one. There is so much to like about nearly every scene in this film but there is also a lot that is unnecessary or feels like wheel-spinning. In the first hour of the movie I really felt like things were being set up for some rich thematic and character pay-offs and... that doesn't really happen? It's not like the back-half of the movie is bad by any stretch, but Chaw's review on Film Freak Central is spot-on in how it appreciates a lot of the individual ideas that are at work in this film but admits that the end result is very muddled, like Tomorrowland. A much more entertaining and structurally straightforward Tomorrowland, but still conceptually confused.
Much has been made of how this film's villain was weaker than Syndrome in the first one but I will say that I was loving Screenslaver when Screenslaver was, uh, Screenslaver.
I appreciated some of the ideas behind Odenkirk's and Keener's characters but--and it pains me to say this, because I love Odenkirk and Keener and love the idea of them in an Incredibles movie--their characters don't really work. I thought they were working at first and interesting and I kind of loved this casual lux way that Evelyn was designed and animated even if it didn't fully fit with Keener's voice... but then the movie ends and you realize that they took up a lot of screen time and they just didn't add a lot to the movie other than the roles that they had to play in the plot, and that those roles didn't always make the most sense. Odenkirk's character turns out actually sort of has the biggest arc in the movie (which in retrospect is a pretty harsh condemnation of the other character arcs) but it's sudden and I'm not sure it's earned or that it really lands, it just kind of happens while a bunch of other stuff is also happening. Keener's character... uh yeah, still trying to work her out in my head, kind of think it's just a confused character.
Anyways, SOOOO much to love in this movie, and if nothing else its set-pieces are pure delight (I expected nothing less from Bird and co.), but yeah, it maybe doesn't quite cohere and resonate emotionally/thematically quite as well as the first one. And I think it could have been shortened and simplified a bit, but the down-side there being you lose some of that stuff to love. but this is becoming a common mantra for me these days when watching these 2-hr plus movies that don't need that length: KILL YOUR DARLINGS.
