2004 Movie Titles

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Subscribe to Movies Central by Email More Movie Posters	Browse More Movies	The Incredibles Starring: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson, Jason Lee, John Ratzenberger, Sarah Vowell Directed by: Brad Bird Screenplay by: Brad Bird Release Date: November 5, 2004 MPAA Rating: PG for action violence. Box Office: $261,441,092 (US total) Distributor: Disney / Pixar  Check out Feed Central
	Tagline: Save the Day. From the Academy Award winning team behind “Toy Story,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo” comes a story of an American family that takes the animated motion picture into realms of drama and design never seen before. With The Incredibles, writer-director Brad Bird and Pixar Animation Studios pioneer the creation of a computer-generated world so rich, complex and inventively “alive” that the motion picture experience it creates is altogether human. The Incredibles follows the adventures of a family of former superheroes rediscovering the true source of their powers -- in one another. Once one of the world’s top masked crimefighters, Bob Parr (AKA Mr. Incredible) fought evil and saved lives on a daily basis. But fifteen years later, he and his wife Helen (a famous former superhero in her own right) have been forced to take on civilian identities and retreat to the suburbs. Today they live as mere mortals and lead all-too-ordinary lives with their children -- who go out of their way to appear “normal.” As a clock-punching insurance man, the only thing Bob fights these days is boredom and a bulging waistline. Itching for action, the sidelined superhero gets his chance when a mysterious communication summons him to a remote island for a top-secret assignment. Now, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the family must come together and once again find the fantastic in their family life. At the heart of The Incredibles’ unprecedented mix of filmmaking innovation and heartfelt storytelling lies the far-reaching artistic vision of director Brad Bird (“The Iron Giant,” “The Simpsons”), who also wrote the original screenplay. Joining Bird is an accomplished ensemble of actors who bring to life the comedy, drama and emotional inner worlds of these larger-than-life characters -- including Craig T. Nelson, Academy Award winner Holly Hunter, Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson, Jason Lee, Wallace Shawn, Sarah Vowell, Spencer Fox and Brad Bird himself in the role of the deadpan diva “Edna Mode.” The most complex computer-animated entertainment yet created, The Incredibles nevertheless relies on the same traditional elements as all compelling motion picture stories -- character development, production design, cinematography, costumes, effects, music and overall vision -- pushing each of these to new levels within the genre to create a film unlike any other. How "The Incredibles" Came To Life The Incredibles was born in the imagination of director Brad Bird, a filmmaker who wanted to make a motion picture that would capture everything he’d always loved about the movies: grand adventure, unconventional families, inventive thrills, cutting-edge imagery, sharp humor and characters so compelling and true-to-life you can’t help but become involved in their emotional and moral dilemmas. The hitch was that Bird wanted to do all this in an animated feature that would raise the art form to the next level of dramatic achievement. Could it be done? Bird believed passionately that it was possible. At the time that Bird came up with the story of The Incredibles he was also a brand new father—with dizzying thoughts about how a person integrates their family life with their personal dreams. This led to the creation in Bird’s mind of a father—indeed, a superhero father—who is forced to give up his passion—in this case saving the world—for the good of his family, much to his chagrin. Thus was born Bob Parr, formerly Mr. Incredible, whose family long ago entered the Superhero Relocation Program and are living typical foible-filled suburban lives—until a mysterious communiqué gives Bob a chance to rescue the planet, and his own sense of self-worth, one more time. As Bird began to write the story of The Incredibles, he realized that two very different ideas were coming together as one: he was writing the wildly imaginative spy adventure he’d always wanted to see; but, he was also writing a drama about the ties that bind us and how the greatest superpower of all might simply be the power of a family. Ultimately, Bird began to view the Parrs as being pretty much like the rest of us—facing the daily grind of bosses, traffic and minor misunderstandings that get blown out of proportion. “At its heart, I saw The Incredibles as a story about a family learning to balance their individual lives with their love for one another,” says Bird. “It’s also a comedy about superheroes discovering their more ordinary human side. As I wrote, I wanted to create a world filled with pop culture references— with spy movie gadgets and comic book super powers and outrageous evil villains using ingenious devices—but at the same time, to create a story within that world that is very much about family. I really poured everything in my heart into the story. All these personal things—about being a husband, being a father, the idea of getting older, the importance of family, what work means and what it feels like to think you’re losing the things that you love—all of these are tucked into this one big story.” At the same time that Bird hoped to push the technical limits of animation, he also hoped to push the form’s storytelling potential to a new edge. “To a certain degree, I was inspired most by the classic Disney animated films like ‘Lady and the Tramp’ which have such indelible characters that they’ve stood the test of time,” he says. “The question was how to do that with the very best tools the art form has to offer today.” When Bird finished an early draft of the script, he brought the story to the only people he was convinced would understand his vision for an animated film that he hoped would look, feel and be produced unlike any other: Pixar Animation Studios. Innovation has long been the name of the game at Pixar, the company behind many of animation’s biggest blockbuster hits and critical sensations including the pioneering “Toy Story,” as well as “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo.” The studio is always looking for original stories from creative visionaries, and the minute John Lasseter—Pixar’s vice president of creative and an Oscar winning filmmaker in his own right—heard Bird’s pitch, he knew he had found one. “It was a like a homecoming to have Brad here to pitch the story because this studio was created for people like him— people who are passionate about taking entertainment, animation and great characters in unforeseen directions,” says Lasseter. “His idea for The Incredibles was truly breathtaking. I loved the idea of this great adventure about a superhero family trying to do what all families try to do—make one another happy. And I knew in Brad’s hands it was going to go beyond being just an incredibly fun story to have phenomenal style and dramatic power.” Lasseter also knew that The Incredibles would be an unmatched challenge for Pixar—not only would it be the first time the studio had tackled wholly human characters, it would be the most technically innovative, logistically complex and overall most monumental production the studio had ever undertaken. The story unfolds on nearly 100 different sets—ranging from a whimsical, modernesque suburbia to the lush and untamed jungles of Nomanisan Island. Furthermore, because the film emphasizes the characters’ humanity, Bird was asking the Pixar team to create the most believable human animated forms in history—with palpably kinetic skin, hair and clothing. Enthusiasm spread like wildfire through the studio to meet the challenge of The Incredibles. The process of creating any animated film goes through multiple, carefully planned stages. First, the story is written and preliminary storyboards are drawn to help tell the story visually in the earliest stages. The storyboards are then turned into a form of early animation—known as “reels” or “animatics”—that allow the filmmakers to finetune the sequences before actually animating them. Simultaneously, the art department is hard at work, illustrating every last physical detail of the individual characters and the entire universe in which they exist—also brainstorming the design of “virtual” sets, props, buildings, surfaces and color palettes. Once the story and look of the film are decided upon, actors are brought in to record the voice performances—giving the characters indelible personalities, which are, in turn, used to inspire the rest of the creative process. At last, the process of metamorphosing these 2-D representations into a 3-D reality begins. The first step in this process is for the modeling group to build the characters and sets in the computer. The layout crew is instrumental in the next phase—fine-tuning the characters and the camera from the story reel to create the “shots” that will tell the story to its greatest effect. Following this, the characters are fully animated—move by move, shot by shot—coming to life with a full range of expressions, movements and emotions. Then nuanced shading and “digital lighting” complete the production phase…and the entire movie is “rendered.” In rendering, all of the information that makes up the motion picture is translated from digital data into actual frames of film. Finally, the film is completed much like any other motion picture—via final editing, scoring and the addition of sound and special effects. With The Incredibles, Brad Bird asked his team at Pixar to innovate, expand upon and find new ways to push this process to its farthest creative extremes. Comments producer John Walker: “This film started with a personal vision and a passion that spread throughout Pixar. Pixar is a place that is built on excellence and Brad’s vision was completely supported by everyone there, because even though they could see it was going to be very tough and challenging to make this movie come to life, they also knew it would be highly stimulating. It’s an exciting thing to break new ground, pioneer new techniques and invite audiences into an experience that is as emotional and fun as it is innovative.” Recalls Bird: “As director, I became well acquainted with what I called the ‘Pixar Glaze,’ where these complete technical geniuses would just grow pale and start looking at each other like ‘Does he know what he’s asking?’ But no one ever gave up—every problem found a solution that kept pushing the film’s creativity. It’s a real testament to Pixar that they kept coming up with magic from thin air.” In the end, says John Lasseter, The Incredibles took everyone involved on an imaginative ride. “The creation of The Incredibles required a tour de force,” he says. “Fortunately, our guys at Pixar keep getting better and better. With this film, they’ve really outdone themselves. When you see the characters in this movie act—and you look into the pools of their eyes— you can feel what’s going on inside their soul. The subtleties of their facial animation and their body gestures are remarkable. You get so caught up with the characters and the story, you don’t think about what genre of movie it is. You simply know you are watching a remarkable story.” Cast Of Characters As he embarked on the intense journey of making The Incredibles, Brad Bird knew that he would need to surround himself with devoted talent to bring his vision to life—not just on the technical side, but also through gifted actors who could give his characters all the depth and dimension they deserved. Once an animated film’s screenplay is completed and the storyboards created, the next step is to cast the film. For Bird, who came to know and love the characters of The Incredibles like they were his own family, the casting was extremely close to his heart. He began the process by making sure the storyboards would communicate enough to the actors to elicit multitonal performances. Bird worked with story supervisor Mark Andrews, artist Teddy Newton, and supervising animator Tony Fucile, who each played a major role in designing the characters and bringing them fully to life. Explains Teddy Newton, who drew many of the characters in the film for the first time: “Brad would simply describe the characters to me—he wouldn’t use too many adjectives, but he would often do an impression or a voice for them. Sometimes the voice alone would put enough pictures and ideas in my head. It’s like when you listen to the radio and you start to imagine what the person would look like. You get inspired and everything starts to take shape.” As the characters took form, Bird began to visualize the film in ever deeper layers. “Brad had a new process for storyboarding the film,” explains Mark Andrews. “He wanted everything to be incredibly detailed and was concerned not only about the character design but even about lighting, backgrounds and camera movement right from the earliest stages. He knew everything had to be perfect to keep the audience completely immersed in the world of The Incredibles. And starting this way really helped the entire production to get a clear vision of the film from the beginning.” With the characters well established, casting for The Incredibles could begin at last. The filmmakers began looking for actors capable of bringing out the ordinary, everyday feelings that reside inside these superhero characters. At the center of the film, of course, is Bob Parr, Mr. Incredible himself, the family’s muscular powerhouse of a patriarch who is trying to come to terms with the changes in his life that have taken him from superhero to suburban dad. To play Bob, Brad Bird was soon drawn to the combination of down-to-earth humor and tough-guy charisma represented by Craig T. Nelson (“Coach,” “The District”). “Craig has an authoritative voice but also a wonderful, easygoing kind of humor that really lends itself to who Mr. Incredible is,” says Bird. “You can definitely see his voice fitting into this big, strong, hulking body yet there is also a real vulnerability in him—enough so that you really relate to him simply as a man looking for something he has temporarily lost—and when the scene needed to be intense, he was right there.” For Nelson, the character—animated or not—proved irresistible. “I really empathized with him as a human being,” notes Nelson. “Here’s a guy who is literally able to leap tall buildings and do all kinds of super-heroic things, but that isn’t what makes him special. It’s his value structure and his moral strength, not his mighty feats that I really responded to. He is one of those people I’d really like to meet and get a chance to shake his hand, because he knows what counts and he has a good sense of himself and his family.” Despite his excitement about the role, Nelson faced an unexpectedly daunting task. “The role of Bob was probably one of the more difficult things I’ve ever done,” he says. “I quickly discovered that Brad and his team had an extremely specific idea of what they wanted because they’d lived with this story so closely for such a long time. They perfected the script and knew this family inside and out, and every other which way. So it was up to the actors to bring to life exactly what they had in their mind’s eye.” He continues: “This isn’t as easy as it might seem. The delivery has to be correct tonally and the energy has to be at precisely the right place at the right time. You end up doing a lot of experimenting and concentrating on your vocal energy, but at the same time you’re also trying to imagine the situation as if you were involved in it. It was a real challenge as an actor, but it was definitely a fascinating ride.” Coming to her husband’s rescue when the chips are down is the family’s lithe matriarch, Helen, who was formerly the ultraflexible Elastigirl. This character was created in part as a celebration of the typical modern-day mom who, says Bird, “has to stretch in hundreds of different ways each day.” To get to the core of Helen’s mix of maternalism and stoic strength, Brad Bird trusted the finely honed instincts of Academy Award winner Holly Hunter. “Holly struck me as a consummate actress who could portray someone sensitive, yet with a very sturdy center,” observes Bird. “You feel like there’s a part of Holly that would never crack. She has such great resiliency in her and that was something that I needed for Helen because she’s such a very strong woman.” Hunter was intrigued by the film because she liked that it was an unconventional story about family and human dynamics— and this was unlike any other she’d ever seen in that department. “What I really liked is that beneath all the superhero adventures, The Incredibles is basically a story celebrating family— real families with all their differences and quirks—and what a family’s individuals can do when they come together,” she says. For Hunter, who has never done any animated voice work before, it was also an exciting way to step out of her usual terrain. “It was a really different and exciting experience for me, learning to be expressive through your voice alone,” she says. “From the start, I was pulled into it by Brad, because his imagination is so very alive and he really knows this character.” She continues: “Brad thinks musically. For him it’s about finding a rhythm and an intonation that can be really more related to music more than anything else. The back-and-forth exchange is very staccato and very dynamic—and this was very interesting to me as an actress and a lot of fun.” Rounding out the family of Bob and Helen Parr are their three children: the reclusive teenage Violet, the speedy ten year- old Dash and little baby Jack-Jack. In developing their individual superpowers, personalities and human foibles, Brad Bird looked at typical American families all around him for inspiration. “Violet is a typical teenager, someone who’s not comfortable in her own skin, and is in that rocky place between being a kid and an adult. So invisibility seemed like the right superpower for her,” explains Bird. “Dash moves at lightning speed because the average ten-year-old boy can move twice as fast as anybody else, and something always has to be happening or they just crash and fall asleep. So he goes so fast you can barely see him. Meanwhile, I think babies are unrealized potential, which is why Jack-Jack is the only normal one in the family, and yet…you never know. Maybe he’ll have a combination of his parents’ powers one day.” To play Dash, the boy whose parents have to cheer “slow down” when he enters a school race, the filmmakers cast rising eleven-year-old Spencer Fox who makes his feature film debut in The Incredibles. Meanwhile, for the voice of Violet, Bird made a most unusual choice as a result of an epiphany. “I’m a big fan of the National Public Radio show, ‘This American Life,’” he notes. “And there’s this wonderful author of books and essays who appears regularly on that show: Sarah Vowell. One day, I was driving in the car one day listening to Sarah’s voice, and I immediately thought, ‘That’s Violet.’ When I called Sarah to ask her if she’d play the part of a teenage girl who just wants to be invisible, she was kind of scratching her head and telling me that she had never done voices before. She turned out to be perfect.” With the family cast, the filmmakers set out to find an actor cool enough to portray Frozone, a superhero who can always put his enemies on ice. Bird was thrilled to be able to cast Oscar nominee Samuel L. Jackson. “Nobody sounds cooler than Sam Jackson,” observes Bird. “And he makes it seem so effortless, too. He can be funny, soft, or tough as nails. I think he’s one of the most versatile actors around today. We were blessed to get him for the part of Frozone and he just nailed it right away. The animators had a blast working with his voice because there’s so much happening inside his performance.” For the voice of Syndrome, the filmmakers turned to Jason Lee (“Almost Famous”). Bird explains, “I’ve enjoyed Jason’s work in some great independent films and he has a very quirky sensibility. He put his all into creating this unique voice for a villain. You can hear the kid in it, but he’s definitely not a kid.” Lee empathized with the character, despite his dastardly ways. “It was fun to play a really mean guy who wanted to be something more,” says the actor. The entire experience of The Incredibles was eye-opening for Lee, as for much of the rest of the cast. He summarizes: “This was an amazing experience for an actor, especially to be a part of Pixar, which is one of the most unique and creative studios I’ve ever seen. It’s full of youthfulness and spontaneity and imagination. They are interested in creating true classics—and going way beyond the expected. I look forward to the day when my kid is old enough, and I can say, ‘Let’s watch The Incredibles. I was in that movie.’” Finally, one of the great scene-stealing characters in The Incredibles is the deliciously deadpan and truly diminutive fashion diva, Edna Mode, or “E” for short, who specializes in designing costumes for an elite superhero clientele. After several attempts to cast the voice, Bird gave in to popular demand from his colleagues at Pixar and agreed to take on the role he created himself. Bird explains, “I wasn’t intending to play Edna, but we had trouble finding any other voice and it just seemed easiest for me to do it. I really like this character because I’ve always been fascinated by the question: who designs superhero costumes? You know, costumes are such a big deal in the superhero world because it gives them their identity and sets them apart from everyone else. Yet nobody ever explained where the costumes came from and who was behind them. The way I saw it, the costumes had to be created by somebody with a scientific and engineering background. So I started thinking of German engineering. And then I got to thinking that the Japanese make all those unbelievable cars and cameras. So I thought about a half German, half Japanese, tiny powerhouse of a character and Edna just emerged.” “I really like E,” concludes Bird. “She’s not remotely intimidated by superheroes or anyone at all for that matter. She’s incredibly insistent on her own way of seeing things. The word ‘no’ just doesn’t exist in her vocabulary, especially if it’s in opposition to her. She is incredibly confident and sure of herself. Doubt is not in her— and I suppose you could say I have a side to me like that.” The Epic Design With the characters coming into their own, the filmmakers now set out to build the richly stylized world of The Incredibles around them. The design scope of that world turned out to be entirely unprecedented—unfolding on over 100 carefully created sets that forge a witty, eye-popping alternate reality. From the beginning, Bird envisioned The Incredibles taking place inside a distinctive universe that would be at once futuristic and full of retro nostalgia. “I saw the world of The Incredibles as looking sort of like what we thought the future would turn out like in the 1960s,” explains the director. “During that period, there were all these shows that promised people that, in ten or fifteen years, we would all have jet packs or use hydrofoils to travel across the water and then drive up on land. Today we do have some of those things but they don’t quite work like we thought they would. With this film, we wanted to put our story into that type of skin. For me, it’s the 1960s view of what we believed life was going to be like today.” To help capture this very special look—and all its variations as the story unfolds—Bird collaborated closely with production designer Lou Romano and art director Ralph Eggleston (the Oscar winning director of the Best Animated Short for 2002, “For the Birds,” who previously served as the production designer on “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo”). Romano and Eggleston were faced with an enormous task. Although they weren’t designing “physical” sets, their job was no less creatively challenging—if anything it was even more so, because they weren’t limited by the rules of existing architecture and design! Romano explains, “Our work was about creating the entire human gamut of feelings, moods and atmosphere with shapes and colors. We wanted the overall design aesthetic to be retro but with sudden splashes of the modern, so we borrowed lines and forms from contemporary architecture and took them in other directions. As for color, the film starts off very bright and saturated during the golden age of superheroes, but then the color drains out as we find Bob working away at his boring job at Insuricare. As the film progresses, we start to bring in more color until we come full circle to the big confrontation scene at the end.” Eggleston has his own description of the film’s design: “I call the look suburban-mid-century-Tiki by way of Lou Romano,” he explains. “Throughout all our work Brad kept encouraging us to keep going to the next extreme—he simply never settled for anything less, which brought out the best in us.” While Romano and Eggleston proceeded with their prolific designs, set sequence supervisor Nigel Hardwidge worked sideby- side with them to make sure their vision was clearly communicated to those on the technical side of the film. Much of Hardwidge’s job involved creative problem-solving— assuring that artistic vision and technology would jibe. “My job is to ask a lot of questions about each environment—what does it look like, how much are we going to see of it, what time of day is it, and how are we going to create it in a way that will satisfy these guys who dreamed it up in such wonderful detail,” he explains. “Right off the bat, we knew this film was going to be an unprecedented undertaking because The Incredibles has nearly three times as many sets as we’ve dealt with on any previous film,” continues Hardwidge. “Adding to the complication, a lot of the film takes place outdoors on a huge tropical island that is a couple of square miles in size. One of the first big challenges for me was the scene on the island where Dash races through the dense jungle to escape from the Velocipods. Dash ended up running at about 200 mph, which meant we needed literally to create twice as much ground as originally planned. This required investing enough time and energy to get the desired results to satisfy Brad—but also spending our money wisely to find an efficient way to deal with it. It was just one sequence, but we quickly realized how massive this project was going to become.” With the dozens upon dozens of sets completed, the next task was for the layout team to establish the staging, blocking and timing of each scene—and start transforming ordinary 2-D drawings into the fantasia of a 3-D world. To allow for maximum creative flexibility with the camera and the character action, Pixar changed their typical layout process for The Incredibles. Patrick Lin, one of the film’s three directors of photography and a layout expert, explains: “In the past, Pixar would first build detailed models of the sets, and then we would go in and figure out our camera positions just like on a live-action film. With this film, we did things in reverse. On some of the big scenes, we actually filmed using a very simple, low geometry model. After the director approved the shot, more complete models were then built out to the camera. This allowed a great deal more flexibility. A good example of this is the final battle scene in the city. The battle is so big and complex that it wouldn’t have made sense to build a city and then figure out how to try and film it. So we pre-visualized the scene and then filmed the action. Only then did we build a final model based on all that work to add deeper detail.” One of the seemingly simplest scenes in the film—the Parr family gathered around the family dinner table—proved to be one of the most complex from a layout and set dressing point of view. “The dinner table scene was one of the trickiest to stage,” comments Lin. “It starts out as a typical family meal but gradually escalates into complete chaos. Staging things around a table is always hard because you need to keep the camera moving and you don’t want to confuse the audience as to where the characters are sitting. As chaos erupts, with Dash and Violet fighting and Jack-Jack shrieking, Helen stretches to grab the clashing siblings and keep them apart. Bob gets everyone’s attention by lifting the whole table just as his pal Frozone arrives. None of the set could be dressed in advance because everything was driven by the animation. Food on the table gets thrown around, so you have to keep track of every item on each plate, including the gravy. The entire sequence was a continuity and dressing nightmare.” Meanwhile, director of photography Janet Lucroy, who specialized in lighting The Incredibles, was facing her own unique challenges. “From a lighting perspective, this film had an enormous magnitude to it because of the large number of sets and shots,” says Lucroy. “In fact, it had about 600 more shots than, say, ‘Monsters, Inc.’” In addition to the magnitude of the job, Lucroy was challenged by trying to create richly cinematographic, carefully plotted lighting schemes that match the unique look of the film. “We decided to try out a darker, more constrasty look to the film—something different than people are used to in an animated world and more akin to a contemporary thriller or adventure story,” says Lucroy. “We also wanted there to be an intriguing mix of theatrical and naturalistic lighting. So, there are times in the film where we push the theatricality, like in the glory days of the superhero prologue when everything is very contrasty and visually strong. But there’s a huge part of the film where the family is at home or in the office, and for those scenes we used very natural photographic lighting.” Lucroy was also thrilled to have a chance to create more delicate lighting effects that add to the overall photo-realism and impact of the film. “I really love some of the quieter, more subtle moments,” she says. “There’s a little sequence where Dash and Mom are in the car, and you get the window shadow across her face, but there’s still enough fill light to read her eyes. And then you get the bar across her face. The feel of the sunlight and the bounce coming from the seat onto them is so believable and makes for a very nice moment.” Animation & Technology After tackling the sheer scale and intricacy of production design for The Incredibles, the filmmakers at last turned to their most difficult and essential task: animating the characters so that they would be far more than “cartoon cutouts” but people you actually care about. The bottom line was finding the soul in the characters through the broadest possible gamut of human-like movements and expressions. This would take the film’s crew into an infamous forbidden zone. After all, it is widely believed that computer animation and such human qualities as hair and skin aren’t quite ready for one another. Brad Bird, however, was convinced the technology existed— or could be invented—to allow his characters far more “life” (that intangible essence of energy, verve and humanity) than previously thought possible. Using the rich shadings of the cast’s performances as a guide, the technical wizards at Pixar were inspired to rethink their limitations—and attempt some of the most advanced computer modeling work ever used in a motion picture. Although computer animation has progressed by leaps and bounds over the last decade, it has still lagged behind in achieving many key human characteristics. It was previously considered downright impossible to ask an animator to create muscles that would flex and ripple like true muscles, hair that could flip and bounce like authentic hair, skin that might pucker and stretch like actual skin and clothing that could move independently of a body just like the real thing. Indeed, computer animators have long avoided human-like characters because of previous results that fell far short. As Tony Fucile, one of the supervising animators for The Incredibles, notes: “Human characters are fairly impossible to animate because we spend our whole lives watching other humans and we know right away when something, even the smallest little thing, isn’t quite right.” Adds character supervisor Bill Wise: “There’s something about human beings, even stylized human beings, that really raises the bar for animators. We’re so keyed into subtleties of emotion and expression in human faces and bodies that they have to be pretty close to perfect—or our brains simply quit believing in what we’re seeing.” From the beginning, Bird’s aim was to forge characters who aren’t quite human—after all, The Incredibles exist in a unique hybrid universe in which superheroes can live in the suburbs! Instead, Bird aimed for characters who were clearly born in a comic strip world yet who can smile, grimace, worry, leap, run, have family arguments and save the world with complete physical believability. For John Lasseter, this was the key to his faith that Bird’s vision could be achieved. “Everyone at Pixar knows that the closer to reality you try to make something, the easier it is to fail—but the secret Brad uses with The Incredibles is to produce something that the audience knows does not exist, something so stylized that they are ready to believe in it if it all works seamlessly,” he explains. “With the technology that we’ve been pioneering at Pixar, I felt we were ready to achieve that. Our goal on The Incredibles was to create very stylized human beings who could never pass as real humans but have hair, skin and clothing so true-to-life that their reactions have a stronger, more dramatic impact.” Pixar has been building up to this breakthrough for the last decade. Indeed since the debut of “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar has consistently set the standard and pushed the envelope of computer animation with each of their subsequent films. “A Bug’s Life” introduced organic environments and characters that squashed and stretched; “Monsters, Inc.” ventured further into the world of round organic shapes and successfully tackled the previously unthinkable realm of photo-realistic hair and fur; and “Finding Nemo” convincingly portrayed a wide variety of aquatic life and settings on a fantastic journey under the sea. But The Incredibles would require everything Pixar had learned from these films and much, much more to tell its wide-ranging story of a family facing its greatest adventure. Rick Sayre, who served as the film’s supervising technical director explains, “This film had every conceivable technical challenge you can imagine. It could have been completely daunting for us technically, but our attitude was always, ‘It’s impossible—so it just has to happen.’ We took our cues as to what we had to invent directly from the story. This is how it has always been done in animation. The way we approached it is that you can’t go back and say, ‘What if Violet doesn’t have long hair?’ or ‘What if Bob isn’t a muscular guy?’ We loved the story and we weren’t going to let any perceived limitations of the medium stop us from telling it.” Faced with the challenge of moving the characters in a realistic fashion, Sayre and the technical team decided to literally get physical. Copies of the classic medical school book, Gray’s Anatomy, were handed out to all the digital sculptors (modelers who design and build the characters in the computer) and the rigging team to help them better understand how the body moves during specific actions. Live-action footage of people flexing, walking and moving also came in handy as the team began to tackle the animation taboos of muscles, skin, hair and clothes. Rick Sayre knew that the first key to realistic articulation was to be found deep inside the body, at the level of the skeleton and its surrounding musculature. This is where all human motion begins and so it was with the characters of The Incredibles. It all started with the body of Bob Parr—AKA “Mr. Incredible”—who was literally created from the inside out. “Bob was definitely the toughest character for us to model and rig because he is such a muscular guy,” says Sayre. “As we began to create him, we developed a completely new and different approach for his skeleton and the way muscle, skin, bones, and fat would attach to it. We used a fantastic new technology called ‘goo,’ which allows the skin to react to the muscles sliding and sticking underneath in a very true fashion.” This changed the entire animating process. Animators are not so much technicians as they are artists—actors or puppeteers of a sort who creatively choreograph the characters’ movements and expressions through specially programmed computer controls. Now, the animators had greater, and deeper, control of the characters than ever before. Explains Sayre: “It’s very typical in visual effects for an animator to animate a rigid skeleton, and that’s all they see. But with the complex characters in this film, that wasn’t going to be acceptable. What I think is groundbreaking is that we ended up building a system where the animators are essentially moving the underlying skeleton, and the muscles are being activated, and the fat layer is causing the skin to slide over the muscles, and then the skin is rendered. The animators can see all that happening while they’re working. When they move Bob, they’re posing his full muscle-skin-skeleton rig, and it’s happening essentially in real-time, giving them far more information and flexibility.” Dissecting the weaknesses in computer-generated human characters further, the team turned to some of the body’s most traditionally “tricky” joints—especially the shoulder. “You may have noticed that it is very hard to get a convincing shoulder motion in CG animation. This is why you often see animated characters that have shoulders that are too broad!” notes Sayre. “We wanted to make a shoulder breakthrough on this film, so to speak.” Once Bob was completely modeled, he served as a template to create the skeletons of the other characters—becoming the film’s Adam, in a sense. “With Bob, we really concentrated on achieving a high level of complexity in body motion,” says character supervisor Bill Wise. “Once we were able to rig his movements, we were able to use that same articulating skeleton for the other characters, with some changes, of course. A female character, for example, isn’t going to have as defined a musculature, but she’s still got a deltoid that pulls down over the top of the humerus. There’s still a collarbone there. And so you could reshape that same rig to fit any character.” One character in particular proved to be especially challenging in her muscular movements: Helen Parr, alias Elastigirl, who had to be able to stretch, bend and fold into a vast array of pretzel shapes that would flummox the finest Yogi. Elastigirl pushed the animators one step further. “Helen had probably the most complex articulation rig we’ve ever made,” comments Wise. “The animators could actually pull her body around into a parachute shape or stretch her arm out into a long ribbon of flesh and bone with control points. Christian Hoffman wrote a program called a ‘deformer’ to allow her to twist and turn as needed. She’s really unlike anything anyone’s ever created before.” The Pixar animators also knew that the qualities that really create realism in a character are the appearance of skin and hair—revealing how the grandness of life is ironically best created through minor subtleties. In further important breakthroughs for the production, new approaches to lighting and shading the skin, as well as sculpting hairstyles, added yet another level of credibility to the characters. The skin created for The Incredibles is purposely one step removed from the full imperfections of human flesh. Explains Sayre: “Brad was adamant from the beginning that he didn’t want the characters to have pores and hair follicles and freckles—he didn’t want them to look entirely human but rather a bit more abstract. So their skin texture is very, very simple as a conscious choice. But, as it turns out, creating simple skin that didn’t look fake was really hard. It’s one of those cases where simplicity was…complex!” The skin, too, required coming up with pioneering technology. “We came up with a new technology called ‘subsurface scattering’which let us give more translucency to the skin,” says Bill Wise. “A lot of what your eye picks up as realism in people is the light transmitting through their skin. For example, you see light behind their ears when the sun is behind them. Another good illustration is the difference between white paint and milk; light just bounces off white paint, but it goes through and scatters around in milk, which is more like skin. This approach to lighting the skin was very effective and really kicks things up a notch. The characters start to feel alive.” Meanwhile, with hairstyles ranging from Helen’s short, well-manicured coif to Violet’s long, free-flowing locks, new programs and approaches were also required to give the filmmakers what they wanted on top of the character’s heads. Mark Henne, the film’s hair and cloth simulation supervisor, guided the effort. “The characters came into our department bald and naked— and they left with wardrobes and hair that would move in a realistic way,” Henne explains. “Hair in a CG film has always been tough because it’s so multi-layered and made up of millions of strands that have friction against each other and a sense of cohesion. It breaks apart and re-forms in response to how the head is moving and how the wind is blowing. The trouble comes from all the layers wanting to pass through each other and how you keep that from happening as it interacts with arms, shoulders and other solid objects.” By far, the most difficult character to animate from a hair standpoint was Violet. She remained an “unsolved research project” well into the production of the film, due to her long, flowing hair—the bane of an animator’s existence. In fact, no one had ever animated this kind of hair before for a CG film. Henne and his team came up with five different sculpted hairstyles for Violet for the different phases of the film. Each of those styles could then be modified to reflect the various environmental conditions she encounters, including rain, wind and the zero gravity of her own force field. Eventually, Violet’s hair became one of the film’s triumphs. “Violet’s character is all about the fact that she hides behind her long hair,” observes Sayre. “It’s such a crucial part of the character that we had to get it right. There may have been times when we wondered if it wouldn’t just be easier to give her short hair but she just had to have long hair and the result was wonderful—a significant advance in showing hair move in a believable manner while retaining its stylistic look.” With their bodies honed nearer to animated perfection, it still remained for the characters of The Incredibles to “get dressed.” Even in regards to wardrobe, The Incredibles was infinitely more complicated than any animated film in history—and more akin to an epic costume drama. More than 150 distinct garments had to be specially designed and tailored to fit the lead and background characters. But Bird didn’t just want great looking clothes for his characters—he wanted clothes that would move like actual fabric. Pixar is already renowned for its pioneering work in cloth motion. The advances made with Boo’s T-shirt in “Monsters, Inc.” and the clothing in the Oscar winning Pixar short, “Geri’s Game,” served as research and development for The Incredibles—which took these advances even further. Notes Brad Bird: “One of the things I learned on The Incredibles is that it is far easier to blow up a planet in CG animation than it is to have a character simply grab another person’s shirt! I saw that there was a lot of room for exciting new developments in these areas. Mark Henne and his team found an inventive new way to “bake” garments onto the characters, especially in the case of tight-fitting supersuits. Instead of simulating the clothing for each individual frame, this process analyzes the different poses and motion patterns for a character (including walking, spinning and elbow bending) and automatically creates the appropriate movement for the clothing. For example, when Bob sits in a chair, wearing his supersuit, the suit knows what to do and where to crease because it has already been through a comprehensive training set. Due to the wide range of retro, futuristic and avant garde styles presented in The Incredibles, the film also relied more on traditional high fashion design than a conventional animated film. “This film required an incredible range of very stylized garments, from gowns and business coats to capes and supersuits,” says Henne. “So we asked Christine Waggoner, one of our character technical artists, to serve as our costume designer. She built almost all of the outfits from scratch. Bryn Imagire, the film’s shading designer, would bring her sketches, photo reference and fabric samples, and Christine and Maria Cervantes (a tailor) would take those designs and implement a computer-generated garment. We take a lot of pride in the fact that our clothing was actually built from flat patterns just like fashions that are created in the real world.” Now, with the universe and characters of The Incredibles fully animated, the effects team went to work adding the final, dazzling touches. The film’s effects supervisor (and an 18-year veteran of ILM), Sandra Karpman says this was by far the most ambitious effects effort she’s ever witnessed on any film of any genre. Karpman oversaw the creation of effects that delved into every possible natural element—from water to fire to ice (for Frozone’s super-cool antics). Indeed, more than one third of the final 2200-plus shots in the film include special effects. “The effects seen in The Incredibles are completely fresh and very spectacular,” says Karpman. “The biggest leap from an effects standpoint is the fact that we have beautiful, amazing, 3-D volumetric clouds that you can actually fly through. Most clouds in other effects movies or even previous CG films are matte paintings or stock photography. In our film, when Helen is in the airplane flying through the clouds, it’s very 3-D and you see the clouds moving against each other. They’re transparent and if you stack them they become opaque. It’s very beautiful. This same proprietary shader program (Atmos) that allowed us to do clouds also gave us the ability to do great explosions. We ended up doing a lot of things we’ve never imagined doing before.” Perhaps this last phrase best sums up how nearly everyone involved in The Incredibles felt: that they were heading into realms of the imagination never before visited in a motion picture. Sums up Brad Bird: “I think the main concern of everyone who worked on The Incredibles in every capacity—from the actors to the artists to the technical geniuses—was making the characters and the story really feel alive. That’s different than reproducing straight reality, of course. But believability is what was so important on this film. For me that’s where it all starts: creating characters and a world that feels real because it means something to you.” About The Music With The Incredibles coming almost to the end of its incredible production journey, the filmmakers knew that the drama, design and vision of their film would require an equally incredible musical score to highlight it all. They enlisted talented young composer Michael Giacchino—whose previous credits include scores for the television show “Alias” as well as a number of popular video games and animated shorts—who makes an auspicious feature film debut with The Incredibles. Brad Bird collaborated closely with Giacchino, asking him to go back to the brassy, rhythmic, jazz-inflected scores of 1960s thrillers for initial inspiration. “I was searching for a specific sound that I have always associated with action movies, spy movies, comic books and inventive television shows,” Bird explains. “Michael and I talked about revisiting the work of composers like John Barry and Henry Mancini. There’s a certain bold, splashy way that adventure music was done back then, and I wanted to revitalize that sound for this film. Luckily, I soon discovered that Michael loved this kind of music as much as I did, and that helped him to create something very special for The Incredibles.” Giacchino says: “For me, this was the greatest creative challenge possible because it involved my favorite kind of music. When I got the job, it was like someone opening the gates to the coolest stuff in the world and saying ‘go play.’ It was like going to the forbidden playground of jazz orchestral music! I always admired what Henry Mancini did with the ‘Pink Panther’ music and how it gave audiences a great sense of energy, stealth, and action—and that’s what I wanted to do here.” Giacchino used a 100-piece orchestra—consisting of a full rhythm section, strings, horns, piano, bass, drum, trumpets, and percussionists—to create a score intended to be as agile, playful, and at times dramatic, as the characters who drive The Incredibles. Bird also asked the composer to create individual themes or motifs that would define each main character and evolve with them throughout the film, adding to its multi-layered complexity. Giacchino explains: “For example, Mr. Incredible has a theme that starts off very heroic and jazzy; then it changes as he matures from superhero to family man, slowly evolving over the course of the film. This was a lot of fun—composing music that would grow with the character and reflect his or her unique situation. I spent a lot of time finding a different style with each character—Dash has a theme that sounds a little like a whirring hummingbird and Violet’s theme is quite coy and mysterious, etc. Basically, the filmmakers told me the story of The Incredibles and I tried to tell it back in musical form.” As he wrote the score, it was clear that Giacchino was going to have to break away from much that has become standard in contemporary film scores. “Today’s film scores are, for the most part, either quite traditional in structure or rely on music laden with electronic elements to keep the energy up,” he explains. “By contrast, a lot of the scores that were done in the ’60s had cool, in-your-face music—featuring lots of exotic percussion and instruments like the xylophone, bongos, or vibraphone. You don’t hear those instruments or styles incorporated much nowadays into orchestral scores—but I happen to love that sound. I’m so glad Brad wanted to bring it back and especially that he recognized that it can still create a wonderful range of moods today. You can really say he was never afraid to push for any aspect of this film to be even more incredible.”  Official Site

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