For super-powered hero Mr. Incredible, life is good. He has the cool powers and the cool car, he's so on the top of his game that he can rescue a cat from a tree and stop a robbery with one fell swoop, and he's just married the lovely and powerful Elastigirl. Then it all goes south - when Mr. Incredible stops a would-be suicide, he's sued for wrongful non-death. That opens the floodgates for a host of liability lawsuits against the heroes, and soon the government shuts them all down, relocating them to new civilian identities and asking them to kindly stop saving the world. Years later, Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl are Bob and Helen Parr, a run of the mill suburban couple. Bob works for an insurance company, trying to satisfy his need to help people by quietly guiding them through the perils of bureaucracy. Helen tries to help their three kids lead normal lives - no easy feat when the two oldest, Violet and Dash, possess powers they're not allowed to use and Bob sees that normal life as a stultifying trap of conformity. His frustrations ultimately boil over and he loses his job - but that loss quickly becomes a new opportunity when another super offers big bucks to secretly bring Mr. Incredible out of retirement. At home, Bob's rejuvenation cuts through much of the family tension, but it also raises Helen's suspicions about how exactly Bob is dealing with his midlife crisis. Deep within his benefactor's volcano stronghold, Mr. Incredible discovers that he's not the only one trying to relive the past, and when Helen's investigation puts him at his enemy's mercy, the entire Parr family must heed the call to action.

Do not let the ad campaign for this movie fool you. This is a PG-rated action-adventure film on its merits, with some absolutely dazzling sequences and a non-insubstantial body count. There's comedy as well, with some great quips, amusing situations, and the occasional wry nod at genre conventions, but this is not a parody. Indeed, The Incredibles is one of the best superhero action movies ever made, if not the best, combining action, humor, and emotional complexity. The film centers on characters who have been forced to give up the things that make them excel, to sacrifice part of who they are in order to blend in with everyone else. Some are willing to accept that, some rebel against it, and the resulting conflict and tension drive the characters' choices in very compelling ways. Once again, Pixar uses a fantastic story as an allegory to a very serious issue; in this case, it's the conflict between excellence and egalitarianism. To recognize someone as excellent means to recognize somebody else as not excellent by comparison - not in terms of inherent dignity and worth as a human being, but in terms of particular abilities and what kind of responsibilities they can handle. Unfortunately, we seem to confuse the two far too often, and The Incredibles hints at some of the consequences.

Brad Bird, who wrote and directed the film, balances those character moments with some thrilling chases and battles, and Pixar's animators are every bit up to the task. The final assault on the volcano stronghold is full of characters and aircraft moving at breakneck speed, but the movement never becomes hard to follow and the level of detail in this stylized animated world never suffers. (And kudos for the designers who developed that stylization; it's a retro-future kind of look that works very well for this respectful treatment of superheroic archetypes.) The voice cast rises to the level of the material, with Holly Hunter capturing Elastigirl's blend of maternal concern and heroic determination and Craig T. Nelson giving Mr. Incredible an essential emotional vulnerability and passionate core. Frozone seems to be written for Samuel L. Jackson, and the character gets one of the best dialogue exchanges in the movie - if you've seen the trailer, you've seen part of it, but rest assured, it gets better from there.

This is a great thrill ride of a movie, and it deserves every one of the gajillion dollars it's going to earn for Pixar.

• written and directed by Brad Bird
• music by Michael Giacchino
• Cast: Craig T. Nelson (Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible), Holly Hunter (Helen Parr/Elastigirl), Samuel L. Jackson (Lucius Best/Frozone), Jason Lee (Syndrome), Sarah Vowell (Violet Parr), Elizabeth Pena (Mirage), Spencer Fox (Dash Parr), Wallace Shawn (Gilbert Huff), John Ratzenberger (The Underminer), Jean Sincere (Muriel Hogenson), Brad Bird (Edna Mode)