Jack-Jack Parr



Jack-Jack is a major character from the 2004 Disney/Pixar film, The Incredibles and its 2018 sequel. He is the youngest son of Bob Parr and Helen Parr and the younger brother of Violet Parr and Dash Parr. Despite coming from a family of Supers, it was initially believed that Jack-Jack was born without any powers. In a surprising turn of events, the Parrs would later discover that Jack-Jack has at least seventeen powers.

Personality
Jack-Jack acts like a typical baby. He laughs and giggles a lot but cries whenever he is disturbed. Like many infants, Jack-Jack's emotions are unpredictable; and since his powers are stimulated by them, being with Jack-Jack when the baby uses his powers becomes very difficult when attempting to pacify or restrain him. For instance, Jack-Jack loves Mozart's music to the point where he is stimulated by it. He also becomes enraged if he is given a cookie and is not allowed more. One of the few things that can calm him down is his mother. He is smart and intuitive for an infant as he recognized Syndrome as an enemy and identified the exploding plane as a danger. He was, in fact, capable of defeating Syndrome single-handed which even the rest of his family combined had failed to do.

Physical appearance
Jack-Jack is small, albeit at the average size for a baby as he stands 2'6". He has a single tuft of light brown hair on his head. Although he is usually seen in a yellow onesie during his on-screen appearances in the film, he also has a red super suit with a black mask. When he transforms into a little monster, Jack-Jack's skin turns red and gains sharp fangs and claws, that he can use to defend himself and look intimidating.

Mozart's music will trigger Jack-Jack into manifesting his powers, which Edna Mode uses to design a new suit that has sensors and a hand-held monitor, which alerts his family to upcoming use of his powers and allows them to counter them quickly. His powers and abilities are significant enough for his siblings to use him as a third member of a rescue team.

Powers and abilities

 * Polymorphing: More than simply shapeshifting, Jack-Jack can manipulate his physical properties to achieve a variety of effects. So far he has displayed the following abilities:
 * Metal Form: Jack-Jack is able to convert his body into heavy metal, giving him a much greater weight and density.
 * Mimicry: Jack-Jack is able to mimic features of other people, such as their noses and hair, as well as mimic objects. It is unknown whether he can completely transform to another person.
 * Monster Form: Jack-Jack is able to transform into a monster-like creature, with red skin, long nails, and sharp teeth. In this form, Jack-Jack has a much greater muscle mass, leading to bolstered strength and maneuverability.
 * Rubber Form: Jack-Jack can become soft and pliable with a visible sheen in order to fend off sharp attacks.
 * Self-Combustion/Flame-Form: Jack-Jack alter his physiology to set himself aflame and can, to some limited extent, extend the fire around him. As his body remains solid, it seems that it is simply his skin that combusts. His flames can be doused with flame retardant foam. The Lego Incredibles video game also shows that Jack-Jack can create a beam of intense heat while in his flame form.
 * Size Manipulation: Jack-Jack can increase his mass and physical size to break through small spaces or crash through walls. While in giant form he is visibly chubbier all over. He can also change his overall size while remaining the same in physical shape when he shrinks.
 * Smoke Form: Jack-Jack can convert his body to smoke, making certain objects able to pass through him.
 * Sparkler Form: Jack-Jack can convert his body into a mass of sparks while spinning in circles, which gives him a degree of control over electromagnetism (he was able to short out the power all across Edna's estate).
 * Water Form: Jack-Jack can convert his body to water while maintaining his shape, but a simple touch can cause this form to pop like a water-filled balloon.
 * Balloon/Plastic Mimicry: He can become soft and pliable with a visible sheen in order to fend off sharp attacks.
 * Molecular Vibration: He can vibrate at an extremely fast rate, dislodging himself out of the arms of enemies or to shake items off.
 * Teleportation: He can disappear and mysteriously reappear in another location several feet away.
 * Dimensional Travel: He can cross dimensional barriers (labeled 4 on Edna's monitor) and travel through. He can be heard and can hear others through this dimension.
 * Intangibility: He can pass through solid objects including force fields with no visible injuries. This is usually accompanied by a blue electric effect.
 * Wallcrawling: He can cling to, climb and sit on ceilings and vertical surfaces. This may or may not be tied to his levitation ability.
 * Enhanced Bite/Matter Ingestion: He can chew and eat his way through the bars of a wooden crib.
 * Telekinesis: He can move objects with his mind.
 * Levitation: He can lift himself into the air with his mind. It is unknown at this time if this power is self-propelled flight or if he is telekinetic, but he can manipulate the direction he wants to go as well as launch himself in the air to a tremendous height with just a sneeze.
 * Laser Vision: He can fire needle thin green lasers (blue in Jack-Jack Attack) from his eyes. These are apparently light-based as they can be reflected easily by a hand mirror.
 * Electrokinesis: He can generate electricity.
 * Self-Duplication: He can create duplicates of himself.
 * Size Manipulation: He can increase his mass and physical size to break through small spaces or crash through walls, and decrease his size to the size of an ant. While in giant form, he is visibly chubbier all over.
 * Enhanced Strength/Invulnerability: He is strong enough to physically fight a raccoon and throw lawn furniture. He does this without physical damage as stated by Bob Parr.
 * Superhuman Speed: As shown in Auntie Edna, Jack-Jack can move at high speeds. However, he doesn't appear to be as fast as his brother.

The Incredibles
Jack-Jack is first introduced being bathed in the sink by his mother, Helen as she talks on the phone to his father, Bob. He is later seen at dinner, with Helen trying to get him to eat his baby food by making funny faces, which he mimics. This also makes his older brother, Dash, feel weird. He laughs when his older siblings, Violet and Dash, get into a fight, enjoying the action and thinking they are playing.

In the montage scene, Jack-Jack is seen being taken care of by Bob, who has recently gained a large amount of confidence, after secretly taking a job on a remote island. He gives him a kiss on the cheek. Realizing that his dad has come to care for him more despite the latter's responsibilities, Jack-Jack giggles. Helen encourages Bob to take a turn feeding Jack-Jack, which he does. Later, Dash and Violet stow aboard a plane Helen had rented, and quickly called Violet's friend, Kari McKeen, to babysit him. The baby is seen playing with an orange ball in his high chair while Kari is talking to Helen on the phone.

He is not seen again until the end of the movie when Syndrome tries to kidnap him to raise him as a sidekick to get revenge on his family. However, thanks to Kari playing Mozart for him, he has learned of his powers and uses them (fire, steel, and demon forms) to escape from Syndrome who is flying up towards his hoverjet. As he is falling towards the ground, Helen catches him. He and the rest of the family are then saved from Syndrome's exploding plane thanks to Violet's force field. Jack-Jack then joins the others in laughter after Dash asks if they will have to move again. At the end of the movie, he is shown clapping for Dash from the bleachers during the track meet and is then shown to be ready to fight The Underminer, thereby setting up the events of the sequel.

Jack-Jack Attack
In his own mini-movie, we see what happens to him and Kari while the rest of the family is fighting Syndrome. Kari decides to stimulate his cognitive abilities by giving him some educational toys and playing Mozart for him (as she has heard that Mozart makes babies smarter). Listening to the music, he has an epiphany about his powers. Over the course of the night, he demonstrates many different powers, such as floating through the walls, catching on fire, and shooting laser beams out of his eyes, and Kari tries to keep him and the house in one piece. By morning, Kari has been up all night and figured out how to counter his powers. In her frazzled state of mind, she hands him over to Syndrome, whom she believes to be a replacement babysitter contacted by Helen.

Incredibles 2
In the sequel, the fight with The Underminer picks up where it left off. Jack-Jack is left in the care of his big siblings. Later, his family is moved into a motel and then into a fabulous new home after his mother gets a new job. While Helen is gone, Jack-Jack reveals to his father that, thanks to Kari, he has awakened at least seventeen of his powers when he fights off a raccoon. Bob is overjoyed but decides to hide this from his family as it could bring Helen home.

Jack-Jack's powers make this an overwhelming task as whenever he uses his dimensional travel power, Bob has to use cookies to bring him back. Bob then has to keep giving his infant son cookies until he is satisfied. If he is unable or unwilling to do so, Jack-Jack will get angry, causing him to turn into his Monster form and attack his father. By the time Violet and Dash find out Bob is so sleep-deprived from trying to reign in Jack-Jack, they call Lucius, who describes Jack-Jack's abilities as "freaky" and advises Bob to get some outside help.

Bob leaves Jack-Jack in Edna's care, much to her delight after seeing his powers in action. When Bob picks Jack-Jack up, Edna reveals she upgraded Jack-Jack's suit to help Bob handle him and gives a demonstration. During the demo, Edna reveals that listening to Mozart's music caused Jack-Jack to unleash his powers. When Jack-Jack sees a giant cookie, Bob declares that he must get cookies. Edna tells him that not only does he not need cookies, but he also should not use them with Jack-Jack no matter what he does: Any solution involving cookies will inevitably make him angry enough to not only use his Monster Transformation Power but his Self-Combustion power as well.

Shortly after Bob leaves upon being contacted by Evelyn Deavor that Helen is in trouble, Jack-Jack and his siblings are visited by the mind-controlled "wannabe" Supers. The children escape by the Incredibile and make their way to the Devtech ship where their parents are being held. Upon finding Bob, Helen, and Lucius, the children are forced to take cover in Violet's force-field as their mind-controlled parents and "Uncle Lucius" attack them, but Jack-Jack floats through the force-field and up to his mother. Noticing the goggles, he uses his telekinesis ability to levitate the goggles off Helen, freeing her from Evelyn's control. Helen then removes the goggles from Bob and Lucius before embracing her children and expressing how proud she is for the children coming for them. Jack-Jack uses his powers to assist in freeing the other hypnotized Supers from Evelyn's control. Following Evelyn's arrest, the Supers are made legal again.

After his family drops Tony Rydinger off at the movies, he officially joins them in fighting crime.

Trivia

 * According to official sources, Jack-Jack is 1 year old, is 2'4" (0.71 m) and weighs 30 lbs (13 kg).
 * In issue #0 of the comics, Jack-Jack 's full name is John Jackson Parr.
 * Jack-Jack is not seen or mentioned in the video game and is the only non-playable character of the Parr family in the Disney INFINITY games (he does, however, appear in early concept art for the game, indicating he was likely to appear as an NPC as part of the Incredibles playset before being dropped and is mentioned directly by Helen in her in-game quotes when she is left idle, wondering how Kari is handling him).
 * In the comic series, Jack-Jack is a main character but his only used power is that of molecular transformation and appears limited to metal, fire, and monster forms. In the story arc "City of Incredibles", he plays a central role when he gets a cold and inadvertently spreads his transformation powers to others (including his own family), causing their own natural superpowers to be updated to their maximum potential.
 * On art and merchandise for the first film, Jack-Jack wears his super suit, but in the film itself, he doesn't at all (except for the very end of the film).
 * Jack-Jack has 17 known superpowers, potentially making him the most powerful Super in the Incredibles universe.
 * However, he could have just general shape-shifting powers.
 * It was planned for Jack-Jack to melt as part of his shape-shifting powers, but this idea wasn't used; it can be assumed that this was due to technical limitations at the time or the fact that it would have seemed too disturbing for younger viewers at the time.
 * This limitation appears to have been corrected for the 2018 sequel as seen during his fight against the raccoon.
 * Jack-Jack is the only member of his family who doesn't have an "i" emblem on his super-suit.