Something really weird happened to me last night: I liked The Incredibles. Now truth be told, I "liked" it the first time, too; I didn't love it, and I had serious problems with it, but I enjoyed elements of the film (the production design, the score, the entire third act) enough to make me pick up a copy on DVD, provided I could find it used for under ten bucks. (I did.) I watched that DVD straight off, and had almost the same reaction as the first time. Then, for some reason, I slapped it in the player last night after making dinner, and ended up watching it cover-to-cover and enjoying it quite a bit more than I ever had before. Why? Because I was finally empathizing with the characters, that's why. The big problem with the Pixar shtick is always the uncanny plasticity of the image, preventing any real identification with the pixel-people. It seems that audiences worldwide are able to get around this fairly quickly; it now seems that I can get around it too, but on a longer time frame. It would appear that it takes me about five hours to begin to identify with a computer-animated character. (That's a serious generic drawback, but hey, who's counting.) Suddenly, the whole first act of this film - y'know, the part when they're not superheroes but are rather involved in the day-to-day grind of insurance sales - actually worked for me, and that makes a helllllllllllllll of a lot of difference. Am I now a card-carying Incredifan? No, not really; no film should take three whole tries to work. Do I really want to see Incredibles 2? Of course, but that was true the first time, as well. Is there any point to proclaiming this revelation at all? No, but I had nothing better to write today.

I'd be very interested to see some actual scientific data about the way the human mind interacts with animated characters, particularly comparison studies. What's the cognitive difference between our interactions with Elijah Wood versus Gollum? How about Belle from Beauty and the Beast versus Violet from The Incredibles? There's a very unreadable PhD dissertation waiting to be written here. Maybe I'll write it. I have little better to do than spend half a decade learning about cognitive theory as it applies to the human apprehension of motion pictures.