The Incredibles

[grand theft sparrow]

with this being pixar first pg rated film dealing with a little bit mature topics (well kind of)...do you think there is a strong possiblity of seeing a serious drama or adult comedy being fully animated by pixar or would that be too much of a risk...

There would have to be a reason for it.  They could go an anime route and produce some more adult-oriented stuff but what does that really mean?  More sex and/or violence.  

While I have no problem with that, it would have to be a story that is virtually impossible to produce live-action, because (as Polar Express has begged the question) why produce a CGI film for over $150 million that would have been cheaper if it was live-action?

[Pwaybloe]

In a business perspective, no Hollywood company would bankroll a serious drama (R-rated) computer-animated movie.  Who would go see it?

The obvious expense would be the major reason for a denial, like hacksparrow said.  

There is a Japanese director (in which I hesitate to call his movies "anime") by the name of Satoshi Kon who makes great dramatic animated movies.  He's made Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers, all avoiding the sci-fi/fantasy spin that usually encompasses animes.  He's one of my personal faves.

[rustinglass]

I'm not sure if somebody already mentioned but there is a nice little nod to die hard 3. When the shaky cop has a gun pointed at frozone and he says "I'm really thirsty.", it reminded me of  when he is in the subway in die hard 3:" I need to answer this phone."

[Pozer]

Totally. I noticed that right away.

[Alethia]

yea so i took my little brother to see this last night.  so good.  he was imitating certain things from it the whole ride home.

[Ernie]

this is what cinema is all about, yea, i saw this either the day before or the day after thanksgiving, it's hard to remember. great movie tho. i admire pixar hugely for what they're doing.

[Alethia]

i think their shorts are worth the price of admission in and of themselves...

[MacGuffin]

UPDATED: Disney has finally OFFICIALLY announced The Incredibles for 3/15 (SRP $29.99). As we expected, the 2-disc set will be THX-certified and will be available in separate full frame and anamorphic widescreen versions. Both will include Dolby Digital 5.1 EX audio. Extras on the DVD will include audio commentary with director Brad Bird and producer John Walker, a second commentary with key animators, the all-new Jack-Jack Attack animated short, the Boundin' animated short, the Who is Bud Luckey? featurette, The Making of The Incredibles documentary, More Making of The Incredibles featurettes, the all-new Mr. Incredible and Pals "lost" cartoon (featuring audio commentary with Mr. Incredible and Frozone), character interviews, Vowellet: An Essay by Sarah Vowell, bloopers and outtakes, deleted scenes and an alternate opening, "top secret files" on all the superhero characters and a gallery of theatrical trailers and TV spots for the film.

[Two Lane Blacktop]

i think their shorts are worth the price of admission in and of themselves...

I remember when someone once said this about me...  



2LB

[matt35mm]

USA Today's Mike Snider is confirming reports that Disney and Pixar's The Incredibles will street on DVD on 3/15 (SRP $29.99). Expect filmmaker audio commentaries, an all-new Jack-Jack Attack animated short, the Boundin' animated short, bloopers and outtakes, deleted scenes and an alternate opening, "top secret files" on all the superhero characters, a behind-the-scenes documentary and much more.

For some reason, I pictured a much more minimalistic, classy 2 disc collector's edition.  Like one for the kids and then one for the adults.  They could target this for adults and do very well.  I have an Incredibles T-Shirt that's done in a minimalistic style that's very nice; I expected a classier front cover, I dunno.

I'm probably buying this.  I don't think they'll have another edition coming out (but you never know).  Didn't Disney put out a Tarzan DVD geared towards adults?

[Alethia]

i think their shorts are worth the price of admission in and of themselves...

I remember when someone once said this about me...  



2LB

hehe, you.

[MacGuffin]

For some reason, I pictured a much more minimalistic, classy 2 disc collector's edition.  Like one for the kids and then one for the adults.

This may not be the final art. They pre-released a cover art (1) for Finding Nemo that didn't end up being what was released (2).

1.) 2.)

Didn't Disney put out a Tarzan DVD geared towards adults?

[MacGuffin]

An Interview with Brad Bird
The real Mr. Incredible talks about his Oscar-winning movie.
 
Talk about timing. We scheduled our interview with The Incredibles director Brad Bird just three days after the biggest night of his professional life - he had just won an Oscar for Best Animated Film. Bird was also nominated in the Best Original Screenplay category, but lost out to Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

Bird began his career in animation in 1981 as an animator for Disney's The Fox and the Hound. He also worked for Steven Spielberg on an episode of Amazing Stories in 1985. He'd make a brief foray into live action, co-writing the screenplay for *batteries not included.

He would spend several years working as a consultant for The Simpsons, The Critic and King of the Hill. In 1999, made his feature film debut with The Iron Giant, which received massive critical acclaim (97 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and the few who saw it absolutely fell in love with the heart-felt film.

Unfortunately for him and the movie, Warner Bros. had decided to ditch its animation efforts and more or less threw the movie on the market with no promotion and it promptly sank. Like another Warner title, The Shawshank Redemption, the movie's fan base would grow slowly on the home video market and its fan base didn't just like the movie, they adored it. Such is its popularity that every year on Thanksgiving, Cartoon Network runs an Iron Giant marathon, replaying the movie for 24 hours straight.

For his next trick, Bird went to an animation studio that had its pixels together; Pixar Animation Studios. His film The Incredibles had everything fans loved about The Iron Giant; intellectual honesty, it was relatable, heart, and it spoke to us like we were adults. Audiences responded in kind, to the tune of $260 million.

The Incredibles represented a real change for Pixar. It had never used humans to any great extent before in one of its films, and human motion is a lot more complex than a fish swimming. The extras for The Incredibles shows the effort that went into this, as Pixar animators recorded themselves walking, just to get the hang of proper human motion.

We only had 15 minutes to chat with Bird, but could have talked for three times that length. He has plenty to offer. Here's what he said to us.

IGN DVD Editor Andy Patrizio: Congratulations on your big win.

Brad Bird: Thanks.

IGN DVD: Be honest. Did you think you had it locked up?

Bird: Every time I started going in the direction of thinking how it might turn out, I started to just turn my brain around and not go there, because I think the surest way to guarantee that you won't win is to assume that you will. So I tried to not think about anything else except "Hey, I get to go to the ceremony and a bunch of cool parties later."

IGN DVD: What was the feedback from your peers and fellow directors at the show?

Bird: Everyone is delighted. Part of us would have loved to have gotten the screenplay as well, but we were delighted, and felt like it capped a wonderful experience of making the film. It was really, really hard to make but we had a really good time and we all got very close to each other making it. It was kinda like going through a war or something, we all had this huge mountain to climb, the weather got bad a few times, we got stranded at the 16,000 foot level a few times. But we all made it down alive and we're very happy with the film. So it's just been a wonderful experience all around.

IGN DVD: Perhaps you're a better man than me, because I would have been on the Warner lot the next day rubbing it in, after the way they bungled The Iron Giant.

Bird: (chuckles) You know what? We got to make that film, and you can focus on that, but the bottom line is they gave me my first opportunity to direct a film, and even though it could have been an easier experience and they could have handled it better, they did allow me to make the film I wanted to make, so I am grateful.

IGN DVD: You said how difficult it was. How long have you worked on the project?

Bird: Well I had the idea 12 years ago but came up to Pixar in March of 2000.

IGN DVD: You must be sick of it by now.

Bird: You know, I'm not. I'm probably getting sick of talking about it but I still really love the characters and love the movie. You'd think I would be sick of it. But I don't just see the movie when I see the movie, I see all the great people who worked on it and all their hard work, because they could not have worked any harder. They were just absolutely committed. I had about the biggest, longest wish list anyone could have, and 99 percent of what I wanted to get on the screen we got on the screen within our schedule and within our budget and within our resources. So I'm just stunned we were able to do it. We were told at the beginning of it by some people here that it was an unmakable movie.

IGN DVD: In what sense?

Bird: Just way too complicated, too many characters, too many costume changes, too many effects, too many locations, too many sets. If we had done the humans the way Pixar had done them prior to this, it would have taken four years just to build the characters. So we had to invent a whole new way to build them. We were told it would take ten years and cost a gazillion dollars by people here who are very smart.

IGN DVD: So it was very different from doing bugs and fish.

Bird: Oh yeah. Even in hand drawn animation, humans are widely considered to be the most difficult to execute, because everybody has a feeling for how they move. If your goal is just to be funny then you can do something simple like The Simpsons and South Park. But if you're trying to be dramatic and put your characters in jeopardy and have them feel pain and regret and complexity, then you have to be very careful as to how you put them on screen.

IGN DVD: Right, you couldn't do the Helen and Bob argument-

Bird: -with Homer and Marge. The thing is, our goal wasn't to reproduce reality. We didn't want it to look real, we wanted it to feel real. We wanted to have very stylized characters that were designy and fun to look at, but we wanted to move them through space convincingly, so Bob feels heavy when he moves, and there's a feeling of real physics when Helen stretches, even though it's physically impossible to do. If you look at a lot of animated movies, they don't pay attention to how things move through space. If you move something 10 pounds through space and then stop suddenly, there's a little overshoot. When you transfer weight from one leg to another, there's a certain way that it happens. Again, we're doing unrealistic stuff all the way through the film, but we're trying to pay attention to real physics when we do the unreal stuff so you believe it. We had a number of people come up to us and say "Five minutes into the movie I forgot I was watching an animated film." I don't think the film looks realistic, I don't think it looks remotely realistic. But it feels realistic.

IGN DVD: One of the things I noticed was Bob's proportions were very similar to that of the Iron Giant. He had a massive torso and almost no lower body.

Bird: (laughs) Well what's funny is, again, people say they believed what was going on, but again, Bob's hands are about three times bigger than his feet. So these are very caricatured. Particularly in the area of computer graphics, when people do humans, they get suckered into trying to make them realistic. Without naming names, I think other movies look more realistic but they feel less real.

IGN DVD: I know what you're saying. In a lot of anime they walk stiff as boards.

Bird: Yeah stiff or they feel like they are weightless. I think if you have a really big, heavy person, there's a feeling of an invisible puppeteer jerking them around in space. They don't feel like they are moving themselves. Also, a lot of people don't pay attention to the differences in how they move. Ten-year-old boys move differently than middle-aged women, who move differently than athletic guys, who move differently than government bureaucrats.

IGN DVD: So did you put people in motion capture suits like Andy Sirkis had to do?

Bird: No, not remotely. We just have very good animators who observe things and invent. I think that motion capture has its place, but for me, from an animation point of view it's just a modern equivalent of rotoscope in a lot of ways and has the limitations of rotoscope, because neither has the subtlety of real live action or the clever caricature of animation. So it's neither fish nor fowl and it feels neither fish nor fowl. Now if you have a team of animators to go over the motion capture to get the most out of it and plus it, like Gollum, I think the results are extraordinary. But if you leave it alone and just take the information that's given to you from the machine, you get creepy, unconvincing stuff.

IGN DVD: So are you a permanent part a of Pixar?

Bird: Oh yeah, I'm still employed at Pixar and I love it here.

IGN DVD: So your next project will be with Pixar?

Bird: Well I gotta pitch it and see if they wanna do it, but-

IGN DVD: If you had your choice?

Bird: I think it's the most extraordinary studio around. I would love to do my next project with Pixar.

IGN DVD: Let's talk a little about the DVD. What are your favorite elements on the DVD?

Bird: You know, I get asked this and I get asked who's my favorite character and I truly don't know what to answer because I was very involved in the DVD, I wanted to jam as much stuff as I possibly could on there. There are things that are put on a lot of DVDs that I didn't want to put on there. We had discussions about it, but I didn't have to do anything I didn't want on the DVD, so I just enjoy all of it. I really enjoy the Jack-Jack short, I think the TV pilot for the 60s animation show that we uncovered was a real cool thing-

IGN DVD: Ok spoil it. Was that for real or a joke?

Bird: Oh no, it's real. Bob, Mr. Incredible, allowed his likeness, and Frozone did to, allowed for their likeness to be used in a Saturday morning pilot way back when they were young, and when the superheroes were forced underground and the pilot was shelved. The pilot got made, and this is the first time Mr. Incredible and Frozone have seen it and did a commentary for it.

IGN DVD: Ok, I gotcha. One of the things I liked was Bob's frustration, when he talked about celebrating mediocrity, and Syndrome's comment that if everyone is super, then no one is. Do you think people picked up on that point?

Bird: I think so. I think it got misinterpreted a few times. Some people said it was Ayn Rand or something like that, which is ridiculous. other people threw Nietzsche around, which I also find ridiculous. But I think the vast majority of people took it the way I intended. Some people said it was sort of a right-wing feeling, but I think that's as silly of an analysis as saying The Iron Giant was left-wing. I'm definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd.

IGN DVD: How in the world can you see The Iron Giant as left-wing?

Bird: It was one New York paper, not the Times, I don't remember which one, but a reviewer said the Iron Giant represented Russia and that my standpoint was that Russia was just a cuddly friend and we never should have had nuclear missiles against Russia, and he said that was a ridiculous thing, that Russia was dangerous. And I'm sitting here thinking "You think the Iron Giant is Russia? Where the hell did you get that?" But you can't control how people interpret your stuff. Have you ever met someone and you say something nice to them and they make a face and are deeply offended? You just don't know how people are going to take things. Ninty-eight percent of the people got that stuff the way I intended and two percent thought I was doing The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.

IGN DVD: Well I just thought you were expressing what I've heard other parents say.

Bird: Well the cool thing about it was even though I may have disagreed with a couple of writers' analysis of what it was, the fact that it was written about in the op/ed section of the New York Times several times was really gratifying to me. Look, it's a mainstream animated movie, and how often are those considered thought provoking? It's meant to be a great time at the theater, but it's also designed to work on more than one level.

IGN DVD: That's the unfortunate thing I've noticed about most American animation, is that it's aimed at kids with maybe a bone thrown to adults, whereas the Japanese are very good at making mature animation.

Bird: But you know what? My kids love anime, but I don't show them the really graphic stuff. Look, I think if you talk down to a kid or aim specifically at a kid, most kids aren't gonna like it, really, because most kids can feel when you are being patronizing. And if you are making entertainment that you yourself wouldn't watch, I think there's something insulting about that. People have gone the other way and asked, not only to me but about Pixar in general, "How do you guys do just the right balance," as though there's some really complex equation that we follow. It's really, really simple. We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.

IGN DVD: So what's next for you?

Bird: Well I'm still working on The Incredibles. So I'm going to take a little time off. I've got a couple of tricks up my sleeve. I'm not ready to talk about them yet, but expect the unexpected.

IGN DVD: Would you do an Incredibles 2?

Bird: Look as a movie fan, there are two kinds of sequels. There's the great sequel you want to see. The Empire Strikes Back, T2, Godfather 2, Toy Story 2. those are all done by the original filmmakers and done with the assumption the filmmakers could match or better the film everyone liked. Then there's Jaws 2 and Butch and Sundance: The Early Days and Grease 2, that are done cynically to cash in on the film, but have none of the original team. I don't think the world needs any more of those sequels. If I could figure out an idea that was worth exploring and we could reassemble the original team, I would do it, because I love the characters. I don't think every movie deserves a sequel, but if I could meet those two criteria and make a sequel to The Incredibles what Toy Story 2 was to Toy Story, I would do it.

[Ravi]

There has to be at least one sequel to this film.  I'm sure it will be even better.

[Weak2ndAct]

So, up until The Incredibles, I had seen every Pixar flick in theatres, liked them all (well, A Bug's Life isn't a masterpiece, but I remember it being watchable), and for some ungodly reason, this one slipped through the cracks (I'm trying to pinpoint if it was b/c of my mega-drinking-binge during my time unemployed, or if I was too busy once I started working again, or too busy writing... anyway...).

So yeah.  Finally caught this on dvd.  I'm a dumbass.  Hands down, my favorite film of 2004.  Dammit.  I'm seriously kicking myself I didn't see this in theatres.  The last half hour was so damn amazing, I can only imagine would it sounded/looked like in a nice theatre.

I now plan on spending my weekend devouring the dvd, playing the Incredibles video game, and finally seeing the Iron Giant (yes, my dumbass never caught that either, I guess too much time spent being a Miike compleatlist).

Please, Brad Bird, make a sequel... pretty please...

And despite my overjoyed reaction... I have absolutely no faith in Cars.  What the fuck is THAT about?  I hope there's something I'm missing here...