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“The Incredibles” Team:Action Packedby Lynn B.
Pixar is a virtual hit machine. Starting with Toy Story, through Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo, the little studio that could has set the bar high for computer-generated storytelling. But, the Pixar team had never conceived of a movie with an all-human cast before and, according to Brad, his producer John Walker, Mark Andrews, the Story Supervisor and Technical Director Rick Sayre, that was a huge challenge. We sat down with the team behind The Incredibles in a Santa Monica beach hotel recently and got the scoop on the origin of the story and characters, the changes, the challenges and what’s up next for Pixar. When asked what sold Producer John Walker on making this film, he was pretty straightforward “Brad [Bird] asked me to. I was like ‘okay man’. I really admire him. I loved working on The Iron Giant and if he asked me to do something else, I’ll do it in a moment”. Brad tells us that, although The Iron Giant wasn’t the hit in theaters that it should have been, people are still discovering it. “We’ve had really good luck. Somebody sees it, they recommend it”. A showing on The Cartoon Network turned a lot of fans on to the film and now the DVD promises to garner the filmmaker more fans. Brad was so deeply involved in his “Incredibles” characters that he agreed to perform the voice of Edna Mode, a tiny dynamo designer of superhero costumes. “The idea was that you see all these superhero movies and they have these fantastically flamboyant costumes but they never explain who designs them. Every so often, they show the muscle-bound hero sewing in the basement but I never quite bought that. I thought somebody would be designing for them”. Edna is quite the comic focus in her scenes. She is supposedly modeled after famed designer Edith Head and Brad gave us the lowdown, “She’s a sort of half-designer and half-scientist. She’s tiny and she dominates the room. Two countries that are tiny and dominating, with great technology and design are Germany and Japan. So that’s how her accent came together; kinda half-Asian, half-German”. Brad as voice-over talent resulted from the Pixar process. “We do temporary voices to put up to storyboard drawings to get a sense of the timing and stuff. Sometimes people get attached to the voices. I was still kind of ready to look for somebody else but people within Pixar said ‘no, no man. You have to do it’”. The origin of the story for The Incredibles came from Brad’s own angst as a new dad trying to advance his career. “I was going through a period where I was working on “The Simpsons” and I was very happy but my first love is movies and I was trying to get movies off the ground and having trouble. I was starting a new family and I think I had some anxiety about where to put my time”. There are other strong story themes in the film. Story Supervisor Mark Andrews says this about the questions that Bob (Mr. Incredible) had to ask himself. “What is important to you? What are your priorities? What are you missing because you are selfish?” But, there is still that longing for the past when your tights and utility belt still fit and you were a famous hero.
Just how close does Bird get to his creations? Is he possessive of them? “At the end of the movie all these products start coming in and other people start writing for your characters and that’s profoundly upsetting. It’s like somebody writing for your mom. And it’s like, ‘My mom wouldn’t say that’. I find myself rewriting all these lines for dolls or video games at two in the morning so that they sound like the characters”. For example, Brad is particularly pound of an Edna doll line, “You repress, you depress, darling. To impress, you must express”. Bird had rather not see The Incredibles turn into a TV series since he feels the quality would have to go down but he does enjoy TV animation. “ I want to see the Sponge Bob Movie. My kids turned me on to “Sponge Bob”. I heard them singing this song (singing) ‘Sponge Bob Square Pants’ and I’m like ‘What the heck?’. I got hooked by the show. I like it that a little plankton wants to take over the world”. The Incredibles story went through quite a few changes. You won’t see one scene that focused on Bob and his pal Frozone, another superhero in hiding. According to Mark Andrews, the two were playing around on a construction site. “They’re throwing girders, trying to play kick the can with a gigantic water tower. They’re talking about the old days and that there is just nothing going on now. It got cut”. You might have seen The Incredibles go up against two rather than one supervillain. “There used to be two villains. The head villain and one, his underling who was actually running the show. But, it just wasn’t working. Syndrome (the villain we do see now in the film), finds Bob and Helen (his wife) in their nice little suburban home and tries to kill them. He holds a grudge. Lassiter (head of Pixar) loved Syndrome so much that we just inserted all the nasty stuff between the two bad guys and came up with a jilted boy wonder thing. Then, everything just clicked”. The story team also added a new villain at the very end of the film to show the family going into united action. We asked our experts about the process and challenges they faced. Mark Andrews and the story crew are first at bat. “We pre-visualize the whole movie. Brad will give us script pages and I’ll take them and do the scene or hand it off to one of my storyboard artists. We all start drawing out the sequence, shot by shot. Then we scan it in the computer, paint it in Photoshop and make it move. That’s a story reel”. After this blueprint is finished, Rick Sayre and his tech wizards start making the film. The biggest challenge? Human characters. “Pixar had never done human characters front and center”, says producer John Walker. “You often see humans as secondary characters in Pixar films or see them from the waist down or their feet walking through. We spend all day looking at people, reading their body language and expressions and how they move but you look at a bad CG character and think ‘that looks a little weird’. Oftentimes it’s weight. Their movements are a little floaty. The acid test, the real creep factor comes if you have two CG human characters kiss. That will send the hair on the back of your neck up it it’s not done well”. Rick Sayre told us, “the biggest ground that we broke was in being able to combine caricature and physical correctness. Bones, muscle, skin, all these things working on a character like Bob, so that you believe he’s alive. That was a hard problem to tackle. Also getting a long-haired character to work at all was definitely the cause of sleepless nights and purchase of vast quantities of sleeping pills”. Teen daughter Violent was Sayre’s worst nightmare. “Violet gave me the most grief. Back on Monsters Inc., we encountered some similar problems with Boo. She had shorter hair. Helen (Mrs. Incredible) has a lot of product in her hair and has a certain hairstyle but Violet is a woman of no fixed hairstyle. Just as she moves her head, the hair shifts around and that’s just a huge, huge challenge”. Even the food on The Incredibles’ dinner table has to look good! “The food needs to look appealing, attractive. It needs to not look like plastic. Just making the broccoli not look plastic is going to take work but nobody, maybe except for you, is going to go ‘Man, that macaroni was great!” Brad Bird was often cornered by Sayre’s team with comments like “Now, to return to the question of the gravy…”. The Incredibles is not a musical film… the superheroes don’t burst into song but there is a great soundtrack. Walker elaborates. “Brad knew he wanted a gumbo of 1960’s spy movies and action films and that big brassy, jazzy sound of Henry Mancini. So we found Michael Giacchino (music for “Alias” and “Lost” on TV) and he had a great demo tape and was into those composers from that time period. We couldn’t be happier with the score”. Walker assured us there weren’t any of the usual Pixar animated “outtakes” that depict the characters blowing their lines etc. but Rick Sayre revealed some cute Pixar “in jokes”. “There is a car from Cars (the next Pixar animated film) and a fire engine that responds to an emergency call is a fire engine from Cars. There is also a main character in Cars that is just a car parked on the street in the city in a couple of shots. And there are some fish from “Nemo” as well swimming around in the tank in Edna’s living room and probably some Toy Story toys kicking around Bob and Helen’s house”. Since The Iron Giant carried so many great messages, we wanted Brad Bird to tell us if this is so for The Incredibles. “I think it’s about being okay with yourself and not feeling like you have to cut yourself to fit some big conceived notion of what you should be. It was very liberating for me when I figured out that I could define who I was and that it was okay. If people liked that, then it was great and if they didn’t, sorry but I’m not going to change. I think it’s something like that.” Rick Sayre sums up the whole experience like this, “I’m most proud that we pulled off the movie. Every shot, there is usually something where I’ll think, ‘yeah, we really did that right’ and, of course there are plenty of other things where we go ‘No, we’ll do that better next time’”. |
 
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If
you’ve seen The Iron Giant, (out soon on DVD)and you should,
then you’ve been introduced to the heart and creativity of Brad
Bird, the writer/director of that film and the upcoming Disney/Pixar animated
actioner The Incredibles. Brad pitched his idea of a super-hero
family living undercover as “normals” and longing for the
good old days to Pixar’s head honcho John Lassiter and this story
of a couple who can’t quite fit into their old hero uniforms, was
launched. 
We
tend to adore, then tear down our heroes, according to the “Incredible”
team. “I think the moment that we declare them heroes is the moment
we start going after them”, says Bird. “We’re trying
to go through their laundry, and if anyone is genuinely heroic, I think
it starts getting undercut. It’s very hard to be a hero nowadays”.
But, is a hero a guy in tights or a fireman in the Twin Towers? “How
you define a hero is not always somebody bashing through a door. I could
be someone who is adopting a child. This is ancient stuff really. We’ve
been having flawed Gods since Greek myths”. The theme of middle-aged
angst grew from Story Supervisor Mark Andrew’s idea for an early
teaser for the film shown with “Nemo”. “I did this bit
about a superhero getting ready for action, putting on his gloves and
mask but when he gets to the belt, it doesn’t fit. Everybody started
rolling and we knew that was the trailer we needed”. Mrs. Incredible
was once “Elastigirl” and there is a great scene in which
she puts on her old costume and checks her growing fanny and thighs in
the mirror. “That’s all Brad”, says Mark. “He
had all sisters so he had a front row seat for all their angst”.