COMIC-CON: Previewing THE INCREDIBLES

By: Patrick Sauriol and David Wharton
Date: Monday, July 26, 2004

On Saturday at the San Diego Comic Convention, director Brad Bird, producer John Walker and moderator Mark Vaz talked about Pixar's next film, THE INCREDIBLES, at the Pixar panel presentation. According to the filmmakers, the film had wrapped production only just the day before.

Bird spoke to the crowd about the world of The Incredibles, a mishmash of modern day technology and future-tech as envisioned in the 1950s (with flying cars, jetpacks and so on.) "I just loved that stuff," said Bird. "There was a time when we all thought that by now we'd be flying around on jetpacks. Although, if anybody's going to design a jetpack...it'll be one of you," Bird said in an ominous, fun tone, thrusting a finger out into the audience.

The director of THE IRON GIANT said that the hardest part of helming his first CGI movie is that you don't see results immediately, and the animation isn't something that you can hold in your hand and compare to other cels. "You're literally dumping thousands of decisions into this box, this bottomless pit, and then you never see any progress," explained Bird. "Then, when it does come, stuff comes really fast, with incredible detail and nuance."

The biggest challenge to the team at Pixar, who had done so very well crafting the worlds of monsters, sea creatures, bugs and toys, was creating a believable human world since everyone going to see the film knows what to compare it to. Bird joked about this being the first time Pixar has dealt so extensively with people and not talking fish: "Pixar: Humans are our Achilles Heel."


He then related a story about how the animators wouldn't even blink when he'd be asking them to create giant robots stampeding through cities, but the first time he asked them to have a character grab another character by the shirt, they "went pale." Bird did, however, promise that THE INCREDIBLES will have "the best shirt-grabs ever."

The movie will have a very specific sound for the score, "That sort of mid-60s brassy, cool sound." The INCREDIBLES score is composed by Michael Giacchino, best known for his work on ALIAS.

And then came the moment for the film's creators to show two scenes from the film. The lights dimmed and the images issued forth...

The first scene showed Mr. Incredible, retired from the superhero biz for "15 years and 50 pounds," venturing out on his first mission in years. En route on a plane, a government agent explains that they'd been testing a new robot on their remote island, and it had malfunctioned. It is now rampaging around the island and they need Mr. Incredible to "stop it, don't destroy it, and don't get killed." They load him into a sort of torpedo tube/escape pod to launch him down to the island, and there's a great comic beat where his impressive gut won't squeeze into the tube. Once he's finally in, the pod is launched and sails down into the jungle.

On the ground, he again has weight issues: he can't squeeze out of the pod, so he finally just rips the pod open with his super-strength. What follows is a great sequence of Mr. Incredible alternately fighting and fleeing the combat robot. The bot is a "learning robot," so it constantly adapts to his attacks. The fight travels through the thick jungle and finally culminates inside a volcano, where Mr. Incredible manages to trick the robot into dispatching itself.

The second sequence shown follows up on the first, as Mr. Incredible needs to repair the damage the robot did to his costume. His wife doesn't know he's rejoined the superhero game at this point, so he sneaks out in the morning as if it's just another day at the office. He instead drives to the mansion of costume-designer extraordinaire Edna. She chastises Mr. Incredible for letting his suit get damaged as he tries to convince her to patch his costume. Instead, she says she'll design him a brand new one. When he suggests adding a cape, she insists "No capes!" and then runs off a quick list of superhero cape-related fatalities. This is accompanied by a montage of superheroes getting their capes snagged in nuclear missles as they launch, or being caught in tornadoes, or sucked through jet turbines...you get the idea.

THE INCREDIBLES opens in theaters on November 5.


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