Visionary History

One of my favorite movies of 2004 was Pixar Films' The Incredibles, directed by Brad Bird. I loved everything about it: the idea of a superhero undergoing a midlife crisis and getting fat and balding just like regular people, the snappy dialogue, crisp animation and geek references.

One thing in particular I feel deserves celebrating about this movie is how it achieves a timelessness in its storytelling. Sure, it does this primarily by tapping universally understood themes and concerns, but one thing that really helps it along is the ultra-slick, retro-futuristic motif that permeates the film, from the production and costume design to Michael Giacchino's fantastically lively, predominantly jazz music score. It's evocative of a period that's caught somewhere between the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, and yet so much of the technology flaunted there doesn't even exist yet, even though much of it is theoretically possible.

I love movies that play with history this way; sometimes the filmmaker picks a certain point in human history and says "what if this was done differently somehow" and ends up giving us a world we can now only dream of seeing in real life. These are certainly not visions of our actual past, nor are they necessarily of our future, but often somewhere in between, somewhere we can never quite be because they are at the same time somewhere we've already been and somewhere we aren't quite at just yet. I believe one of the terms used to describe such non-histories is "steampunk."

Apart from Brad Bird's The Incredibles, one of my favorite examples of this is the little-seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a pet project of Jude Law's which presented an alternate version of the 1930s which was brought to life almost exclusively in Computer Generated Imagery, a full year before Robert Rodriguez did it in Sin City and three before Zack Snyder did it with 300. Unlike The Incredibles, Sky Captain does not envision a world that is neither here nor there but rather presents us with a definite past, albeit not the one we knew, one with Zeppelins as a usual mode of travel and robots that roam New York City in the 1930s. I suppose another good example would be The Golden Compass, though I did not see that film.

Speed Racer, for all its flaws, went the retro-futuristic route that The Incredibles did, and to my mind it is quite relevant that these two films share, in Michael Giacchino, a composer. While as a racing fan I simply didn't buy the film and its impossibilities, I loved the alternate history it presented with a world where cars ran on fantastical sounding components like transponders and convergenators, using fuel cells and yet sounding very much like throaty V8s were propelling them. The stylized anime-inspired visualization didn't float my boat when it came to many of the racing scenes, but it made everything else quite pleasing to the eye.

I'm sure there are dozens of examples of films that employ this storytelling technique just floating out there and I'd love to get my hands on them. I don't know how many people would agree with me on this but I'd love to see Superman re-fashioned this way.