A Term Paper on the Incredibles
The 2005 Disney Pixar film The Incredibles imagines what it would have been like for an American family with secret extraordinary abilities to suppress its identity under the guise of a normal suburban family. It is the nineteen fifties; the only difference from the world we remember is that some people are born with super powers and are classified as Supers, especially when they don outfits and give themselves superhero names. When the Supers are forced to give up heroics and go underground, they have to try to live mundane lives that never reveal their above average abilities. Fifteen years later, a family of supers finds that the constant relocating and pretending to be normal puts a huge strain on the family dynamics. The patriarch Bob can’t help finding ways of use his ability of superhuman strength to help people. It is only when they use all of their abilities, be they supernatural or interpersonal, that they can happily work together as a family.
An elastic super being is not just stretchy, but also can add or subtract body mass.
Helen at one points become paper-thin against a wall to avoid being hit by a moving pod-vehicle. Like a paper doll, Helen’s dimension of height stays the same (100% of her regular dimension). If we estimate that her regular depth dimension is in the ballpark of 20 inches, it appears that she becomes flat or nearly flat against the wall. Even if she was as thick as 2 inches, 10% of her regular depth, her width should have increased ten times her regular width (1 * 0.1 * 10 = 1). Her width barely increases at all; her arms gain the most noticeable width (which you can see best when her arms look like they become “skinnier” as she peels off the wall) but her hips at head look to the naked eye like the exact same size they are when she is not squished flat.
Arcs
The paths of objects and super beings through the air have parabolic arcs.
A lot of objects and people are propelled through the air, sometimes with incredible speed or momentum, or in Helen’s case with mass of the object increasing or decreasing during flight. When playing catch with his son, Bob can throw a football over a hill and off into the horizon, but the football still flies in a parabolic arc that visibly descends at about 45 degrees. Helen can stretch and leap over and across buildings when she flirts with Bob, but she still slows in to the apex of the arc and slows out as she starts to fall.
There is a lot of action in this movie that seems to contradict this rule; when the Supers leap about occasionally it looks like their abilities let them defy physics as we know them. It raises the question if the Supers do not always travel through the air in parabolic arcs, and this is part of them being super. The scene where this is most obvious is when Bob is on the island for the first time doing battle with a smart robot. Bob starts to leap over the robot as it is coming towards him, and we see the computer calculate his path of action to determine where it can hit him out of the air. The path that the robot shows is a flat circular path that clearly doesn’t follow the 1 to 4 ratio let alone the proper arc. But closer observation shows that the actual slow motion images of Bob starting to jump actually observe a proper arc with his center of gravity, and it is only the computer’s analysis of it that is incorrect.
