Set around the later-middle half of The Incredibles movie, Jack-Jack Attack is an enjoyable, if somehow false-whimsical and seemingly commercial bred short film. It just hasn’t the power to survive through comparisons with some of the other, more thoughtful and personal shorts out there. It is, to me anyway, just a little short of being passé.

The short follows Kari McKeen, a teen who Helen Parr/Elastigirl hired to look after the kids when she went off to rescue her husband. Since the other two kids sneaked aboard the plane Kari only has to look after Jack-Jack, who has until how shown no signs of having superpowers. One play of the music of Mozart later and JJ is able to tap into his powers, which end up including flight, teleportation, laser vision and transmogrification.

And there I hit a hurdle, because this only exacerbates the similarities that the Parr family have with the Richards family, whose members make up the Fantastic Four. While to some this may seem like a homage to superhero comics, to me it also has a mark of laziness which doesn’t quite fit in with my image of Pixar. Jack-Jack is, when all is said and done, the Incredibles version of Franklyn Richards. While this didn’t bother me much during the film, in the short, with it sized-down scope, shorter time and stronger focus on the baby’s powers, gave me little indication of why I should not be thinking about the clichés it was spouting onscreen.

That’s not to say that the short is a bad film per se; it’s just that, to me, it’s a ‘so what’ kind of film, adding rather little to the mythos of the original. Unfortunately this kind of puts it in the same light as Mike’s New Car was to Monster’s Inc., a near pointless short that doesn’t truly add anything new and tries to answer a question that was really never asked in the first place.

Another problem is that it’s an adjunct to the original film, so if you haven’t seen it – though there’s little reason I can see for not having seen it – then you won’t know who the characters are and what’s what. Some may call this picky, but I see it as a point to make, since I would only be interested in the short if I had seen the film where most other short films can be standalones. In the end the film is subjective to knowing the world that Brad Bird has created, outside of that the film is impersonal, yet still very good in many ways. However, when you start to compared it to the best short films out there; which can be brutally personal, dark and individual, it ultimately becomes a hollow experience that only really reminds me of the original film and the thing is why should I be watching this over that?

For me, it seems that while Pixar have become giants in the motion picture industry, creating some of the best animated films that have been made in its history, their prowess in the short film sector has fallen from grace. Today some of their shorts seem to be afflicted with an over-dominating, ever increasing need to be tied down to a parent film, making them look like outtakes rather than fully fledged films, or else designed to show off nothing more than a new technique. Once, in the beginning their films had personal touches that belied the then “state-of-the-art” technology they used, but how that the production valves are a given, it seems, at least to me, that their short films have lost much of their original spark.