Sky High (2005)

Sky High arrives from 2005, a Disney superhero comedy about a floating high school where teenagers are sorted into Heroes and Hero Support, and it conducts itself with a modesty the intervening decades have made look almost quaint. Actors of color appear throughout the ensemble, including Dee Jay Daniels as a boy who melts and the Haqq twins as a duplicating bully, and the film never once stops to congratulate itself for their presence. They are simply there, doing the work. This is representation as furniture, sturdy and unremarked, and there is something restful about it.

The film's more deliberate gestures concern gender. The director has said the production ran on the premise that the girls are smarter than the boys, and the evidence supports him: Layla, Principal Powers, the villainous Gwen, and the supersonic Jetstream all run circles around their male counterparts. Layla even volunteers for the sidekick track to protest a two-track system that sorts children by innate ability, which is as close as the film comes to a political thesis. That protest resolves tidily within the existing order, the stratified school left standing, its hierarchy bruised but intact. A faint whiff of structural critique, quickly aired out.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. No climate anxieties, no body politics, no neurodivergent reading of the boy who turns to stone, no historical revision, and no romantic arrangements beyond the conventional boy-girl pairing. The moral, that sidekicks deserve respect, is delivered softly enough that a child could miss it and an adult could ignore it. What remains is a pleasant relic, culturally alert in a way that predates the era's louder vocabulary, and content to stay light on its feet.