The Incredibles overall made me feel kind of sad. I love some pretty dark films, but we spend a whole lot of this movie seeing a family screaming at and hating each other, which is uncomfortably familiar to me and just not something I get any enjoyment out of in fiction.

Then there was that whole creepy bit where Syndrome boasts he’s going to give everybody access to his technology and eliminate the need for superheroes.

I realize he killed people to get there, but that moment is written and directed like the audience is supposed to be horrified by his proposal to make everybody equal. While his means are undoubtedly evil, we’re expected to find his ends evil as well, but those ends would basically be the elimination of both disability and an elite state of being previously unattainable to most of the population. It was just really unwholesome, to me, for that to be presented as so villainous in itself.

As for Up, It just kind of takes Pixar’s sub-par treatment of female characters to an extreme. The only woman in the movie exists to die as a plot device, which felt really really cheap, and then once we meet the little boy, the movie repeatedly wants us to be sad that his father is too busy to constantly see him.

There’s a sort of “every boy needs a father!” sub-narrative to Up that feels awkward and horribly dated, especially for a children’s movie in an age when over a quarter of children are being raised by single moms. How are they supposed to respond, emotionally, when a movie wants them to feel bad for a kid who has two parents present in his life anyway? What about his mom? She’s never treated as relevant to the issue, we never learn anything about her and just see her momentarily in the end.

These are mostly, I will admit, personal points of contention, things that dredge up issues from my own life or the lives of people close to me. However, I don’t think these aspects added much positive to these movies from an impersonal standpoint, either, and in themselves they could have been written so much better, so easily. Like, they could have kept the whole dead wife plot in Up if they just hadn’t rubbed salt into it with the whole “boo hoo hoo everybody needs a dad!” stuff.

Before I get hate mail:

I’m sorry if me not liking something somehow interferes with someone else’s ability to like it. I wouldn’t expect it to, but that’s certainly how some people have reacted every time I’ve said all this.