November 5, 2004 | The most amazing thing about The Incredibles is the movie's miraculous ability to cloud your mind: For wondrously long stretches of this super-powerful spectacle, you actually forget you're watching an animated feature -- a cartoon, to be brutally blunt -- while you're swept away, giddily and gratefully, by the kind of wall-to-wall excitement and adrenaline-rush exuberance you normally associate with fantastical flicks featuring flesh-and-blood heroes. Forget about Van Helsing or I, Robot - or even the splendid Spider-Man 2, for that matter. This year, the very best big-screen action-adventure just happens to be a computer-animated extravaganza from the makers of Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo.

Like the latter two titles, The Incredibles is a product of Pixar Studios (and, not incidentally, a Walt Disney Pictures release). Unlike its predecessors, however, it's the work of a newcomer to the Pixar plant: Brad Bird, the prodigiously talented writer-director whose credits include The Simpsons, King of the Hill and, most important, The Iron Giant (1999), a fanciful fable about the friendship between a precocious youngster and an extraterrestrial robot. Beloved by critics but neglected by audiences during its initial theatrical run, Giant currently enjoys cult-fave status as a highly imaginative mix of Cold War satire, B-movie homage and inspirational parable. It's a terrific movie, no doubt about it. But The Incredibles is even better, with pleasingly apportioned measures of sophisticated wit, slapstick comedy and slam-bang derring-do.

With a respectful nod toward comic-book characters and conventions of the 1960s - think DC-style crusaders with Marvelous sensibilities - and a wink-wink, nudge-nudge awareness of 007 movies of the same era, Bird has concocted a phantasmagorical fantasyland in which super heroes are subject to the capricious attitudes of the merely moral, and super-heroics are insufficiently appreciated, if not actively discouraged, by wary egalitarians.

Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) is strong enough to single-handedly halt trains in their tracks, and Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), his spunky wife, is sufficiently supple and stretchy to do her own sort of crimefighting. But even they are no match for the lawyers hired by litigious folks who don't want to be rescued against their will. So the married marvels are forced to hang up their tights and assume low-profile lives as Bob and Helen Parr, perfectly normal suburbanites.

Fifteen years and three children later, Bob still longs for his glory days of do-gooding, and occasionally does some clandestine crimebusting with his best buddy, Lucius Best (Samuel L. Jackson), a reluctantly retired good guy once known as Frozone. (If it's liquid, he can freeze it, you dig?) Unlike her frustrated spouse, who chafes at the restraints of life as a cubicle drone, Helen is better-adjusted to anonymous normalcy, and she wants their extraordinary offspring - faster-than-fast Dash (Spencer Fox) and sporadically invisible Violet (Sarah Vowell) -- to remain inconspicuously ordinary. (Jack-Jack, their seemingly average infant son, has yet to manifest super powers.) But the entire family must get into the world-saving business when Syndrome (Jason Lee), a flame-haired evil genius, launches a nefarious plot to bend all humans to his will by enabling them to be - thanks to various miracles of modern science - superhuman. When everyone is super, he snarls at a captive Mr. Incredible, "no one will be."

Sporting a striking visual stylization that emphasizes sleekly minimalist modernism, The Incredibles passionately argues for the right of unique individuals to be all they can be, without fear of scorn or censure by their less gifted brethren. But don't let that scare you off: If you prefer not to parse movies for messages, you still can enjoy this particular picture as unusually satisfying and unpredictably compelling escapism. On the other hand, if you make even a modest effort to gaze beneath its dazzling surface, you'll be tickled to find how much thought can be provoked, and how much emotion can be stirred, by a story about all-too-human superheroes.