Jack-Jack Attack (2005)

Jack-Jack Attack arrived in 2005 as a DVD appendage to The Incredibles, seven minutes in which Brad Bird takes a scene cut from the feature and lets it run. The premise is simple. A teenage babysitter named Kari McKeen, armed with Mozart and flashcards, discovers that the Parr infant has an alarming range of abilities. He floats, phases through floors, and bursts into flame when shown a picture of a campfire. The short plays all of this as slapstick. The Rondo alla turca triggers the chaos, Eine kleine Nachtmusik scores the wreckage, and the Dies irae lands like a joke from the grave. It is efficient and genuinely funny, and it has no interest in anything beyond the next visual gag.

For classification purposes, the ground is barren. There is no minority presence to speak of and no casting agenda behind the small voice ensemble. Race, class, and capital go unexamined. The environment is never raised, though a baby does set a bathroom ablaze. Kari is the nominal lead, but the film renders her frantic, panicked, and outmatched, then erases her memory of the whole affair, so no argument about her agency outlives the credits. Nobody here is coded as queer. Nobody is on a journey toward bodily self-acceptance. Neurodivergence does not enter the frame, and history is not revised, since there is no history to revise.

The instruction manual is absent as well. Rick Dicker, the government agent, does not lecture Kari on the ethics of memory erasure. He simply wipes her and moves on. Syndrome's brief appearance exists to set up a gag about the letter S on his costume. Seven minutes pass. A babysitter is traumatized, a baby is collected, and the audience is returned to the feature presentation. Some films carry a message. This one carries a barbell and a set of tongs.