Yes, it's Incredible!

There used to be a dozen films a month aimed at what they called "the family audience". No longer. You couldn't ask a family to go and see Bad Santa, for instance, though many innocently brave the movie, which has 236 four-letter words in it.

The Incredibles, however, fits the family bill immaculately. It's a brilliant piece of Pixar animation, a character-driven movie that adults can easily appreciate and which also has something special for the kids.

At 120 minutes, it is over long, perhaps, for the younger ones, but is still an experience to put beside Spider-Man II as the best of the year's more literate blockbusters.

You'll know, by now, the bare bones of the plot, thanks to the Hollywood hype machine. A podgy and balding Mr Incredible, and his home-bound wife, Elastigirl, look after their three kids tenderly in their ordinary suburban home. One of the nicest scenes in the film is the family having dinner around the table and bickering slightly over this and that.

That they were once superheroes, saving the world from itself, is all in the dim and distant past. America's legal processes have seen to that, ever since Mr Incredible saved a suicide-who then sued him for stoppinghis death. They may be a bit bored, but The Incredibles have come to terms with their new, more ordinary life.

Then along comes the villain they once laughed at to bring them whirling back into orbit. The world will always need saving, Mr I says, and so it proves.

There follows nearly an hour of the fight for Good against Evil, accomplished as well as you could wish, before the film reverts to its original premise - that even superhumans are human and need to love one another.

I see from the American press that some consider The Incredibles a Bush movie, extolling the family and moral values above all else. But I can't think that Brad Bird, who brought the whole conception to Pixar's visual experts, and wrote and directed the movie after working for The Simpsons, had any such thoughts in mind. He says he was merely inspired by becoming a parent - a far more innocent reason.

The voices given to the characters are nothing like as intrusive as those of the recent Shark Tale. Craig T Nelson as Mr I, Holly Hunter as Elastigirl, and Brad Bird himself as Edna, the superheroes' Eurofashionista costume designer, don't get in the way of the characters they are supposed to be voicing.

But what really makes The Incredibles is the genius of the animators who, slowly but surely, are expanding the barriers of what is possible by experimentation and flair.