Of course, long before Steve Jobs bought Pixar in 1986 from Lucasfilm—where Pixar had been the computer division—and set it up as an independent company, Disney was making animated movies. But what a difference between the old and the new animation! It's because of Disney that we think of animated movies as children's fare, yet Pixar's roots are in the more sophisticated tradition of DC and Marvel comics. Buried in the dual nature of the comic-book creation of Clark Kent/Superman is a provocative contest between superior human qualities and the ordinary virtues of democratic man—"Superman" was where Nietzsche tussled with Walt Whitman. Pixar embarked more from such playful insinuations than from Disney "magic." It brought mainstream, commercial animated film into the realm of the graphic novel. The Incredibles—a story about superheroes who have to hide their powers in order to avoid the envy and resentment of their fellow citizens—is both a nod to Superman's hidden dilemma and an infinitely interpretable parable about the limits of our so-called meritocracy. That's about as far from Mickey, Donald, and Co. as you can get. And it's why Pixar is more historically significant than, say, Dreamworks, which hasn't produced films of similar depth.