I feel like I’m the only person who’s not really looking forward to the announced sequel to Disney/Pixar’s The Incredibles.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not because I didn’t enjoy the first movie, quite the opposite, I thought it was great, one of my favorites, if not my all-time favorite Pixar movie, but I was actually OK with The Incredibles being a one-and-done film. The story was told: Superheroes fell out of favor with the public, the Parrs settled down into domestic life, a crisis erupted, the Parrs faced adversity (and their own personal issues) and triumphed, the public became OK with Supers again, and the family was back in business. The end. What more needs to said? What questions did the first movie leave unanswered?

It’s usually at this point that some wag pipes in with:

“Duh, they need to make a second movie since the first one ended on a cliff hanger. Ah-hyuk!”

Yeah, no. The ending of The Incredibles wasn’t a cliff hanger ending, it was a “We’re back in business” ending. Did you honestly think that Pixar was planning to devote an entire movie to The Underminer? Anyways, there was already a video game about that, Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer.

Which brings me to the other reason why I’m not exactly anticipating an Incredibles sequel: the reason the first one was so good was because it was about the superhero mythos as a whole; it wasn’t your typical “Bad guy makes trouble, good guys have to go out and stop him kind of deal”, it dealt with so much more: family, marriage, relationships, acceptance, hero worship, hubris, isolation. My big fear is the next movie will just end up being another generic superhero story, and reading some of the fanfics and story ideas that people have suggested for an Incredibles 2, most of which stink like day-old sushi, doesn’t make me any more optimistic. I really hope they don’t opt to make it a time-skip, ’cause I hate those.

However, Brad Bird has said that he wasn’t going to embark on an Incredibles sequel until he had a good enough story for one, and Pixar has managed to surprise us before (Finding Dory seems to be going over well with audiences, though it’s worth mentioning that I still haven’t seen Finding Nemo yet–yeah, I know; talking fish movies just generally aren’t my thing), so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m trying to remain optimistic, though I still have reservations.