36. The Incredibles – Mr. Incredible vs. the Omnidroid 9000
“I’ve got to warn you; it’s a learning robot. Every moment you spend fighting it only increases its knowledge of how to beat you.”
Brad Bird’s 2004 masterpiece stands not just as one of the great animated films, but one of the great action films as well. No surprise, then, that it contains one of the best fights, too.
For starters, the visuals are outstanding. That’s de rigeur for Pixar, and they’ve only gotten better. But seriously, look at the detail on that moss, or the age on that robot.
A lot of the charm of this sequence, though, comes from the central conceit of the film – what Bird refers to as the “mundane raising its head.” Mr. Incredible is too pudgy to get through the launch chute. He throws out his back in the middle of the sequence, only to have the robot inadvertently fix it for him. (That joke, btw, was in Brad Bird’s original pitch.)
Another key factor is the villain. The Omnidroid benefits from clever design (what other bad guy can just turn himself into a ball and flatten you?) and clever, um, cleverness. The idea of an attacker that learns as it fights you is much more interesting than straight up combat. It’s a little game of chess at 100mph. I love the moment where the robot calculates exactly where Mr. Incredible will be in his aerial strike in order to swat him like a fly.
Making your characters this intelligent gives them the chance to think faster than the audience, which improves the chances that the audience won’t know what will happen next. You don’t usually get that when both fighters have access to a human brain, much less man vs. machine.
See also: The rest of The Incredibles, escape from the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin, Peter MacNicol (yes, John Cage) vs. Vermithrax the big-ass dragon in Dragonslayer
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