The Incredibles is a 2004 American animated superhero film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Written and directed by Brad Bird, it stars the voices of Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Spencer Fox, Jason Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, and Elizabeth Peña. Set in a retro-futuristic version of the 1960s,[5][6][7] the film follows Bob and Helen Parr, a couple of superheroes, known as Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, respectively, who hide their powers in accordance with a government mandate, and attempt to live a quiet suburban life with their three children. However, Bob's desire to help people draws the entire family into a confrontation with a vengeful fan-turned-foe.
Bird, who was Pixar's first outside director, developed the film as an extension of the 1960s comic books and spy films from his boyhood and personal family life. He pitched the film to Pixar after Warner Bros.' box office disappointment of his first feature, The Iron Giant (1999), and carried over much of its staff to develop The Incredibles. The animation team was tasked with animating an all-human cast, which required creating new technology to animate detailed human anatomy, clothing, and realistic skin and hair. Michael Giacchino composed the film's orchestral score.
The Incredibles debuted at the El Capitan Theatre on October 24, 2004, and was released in theaters in the United States on November 5. It earned $632 million worldwide, finishing its theatrical run as the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2004. The Incredibles received widespread acclaim from critics, with praise for its animation, screenplay, voice acting, action sequences, sound design, humor, music, and is frequently considered to be one of the greatest superhero movies of all time. The film won Best Animated Feature and Best Sound Editing at the 77th Academy Awards, with two additional nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Sound Mixing, as well as the Annie Award for Best Animated Feature. It was the first entirely animated film to win the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. A sequel, Incredibles 2, was released in June 2018.
On the day of his wedding with Helen (alias Elastigirl), superhero Bob Parr (alias Mr. Incredible) thwarts a civilian's attempted suicide by tackling him through a skyscraper window. Bob then discovers supervillain Bomb Voyage robbing the building, but is interrupted by his devoted fanboy Buddy Pine, who wants to be his sidekick. Bob rejects Buddy, and Voyage clips a bomb onto Buddy's cape; Bob gets the bomb off, but it destroys part of an elevated train track, forcing Bob to abruptly stop an oncoming train. After his wedding, Bob is sued for collateral damage by the suicidal civilian and the injured train passengers. Similar lawsuits create a negative public attitude towards superheroes, so the government initiates the Superhero Relocation Program, banning all "supers" from using their powers in public and forcing them into hiding.
Fifteen years later, Bob lives with Helen and their children, Violet, Dash, and baby Jack-Jack, in Metroville. Although he loves his family, Bob misses his superhero days and resents his mundane job as a claims adjuster, moonlighting as a vigilante with his best friend Lucius Best (alias Frozone). One day, Bob's supervisor, Gilbert Huph, stops him from preventing a mugging. A frustrated Bob injures Huph and is consequently fired. The same day, a woman named Mirage secretly offers Bob a mission to subdue a giant "Omnidroid" robot loose on Nomanisan island. Bob succeeds by tricking the machine into ripping out its own power source. Rejuvenated by the action and higher pay, Bob improves his relationship with his family, trains to get back into shape, and asks superhero costume designer Edna Mode to fix a tear the Omnidroid made in his old suit. Incorrectly assuming Helen knows of Bob's new job, Edna makes new suits for the entire family.
Summoned back to Nomanisan, Bob discovers Mirage is working for Buddy, now calling himself "Syndrome" after being embittered by Bob's rejection. Syndrome has become wealthy by inventing weapons that mimic superpowers. He also has been perfecting the Omnidroid by luring supers to fight it until it kills them. Syndrome intends to send an Omnidroid to attack Metroville, then defeat it publicly with secret controls, thereby gaining "hero" status. He then plans to sell his inventions to the world to make the term "super" irrelevant.
Helen visits Edna and learns what Bob has been up to. She activates a beacon Edna built into the suits to find Bob, inadvertently causing Bob to be captured while infiltrating Syndrome's base. Helen borrows a private plane to fly to Nomanisan; Violet and Dash stow away, leaving Jack-Jack with a babysitter. Despite knowing that there are children on the plane, Syndrome shoots it down with missiles, but Helen and the kids survive and make it to the island. Disillusioned by Syndrome's callousness, Mirage releases Bob and informs him of his family's survival. Syndrome's guards pursue Dash and Violet, who fight them off with their powers and reunite with their parents. Syndrome captures the family, then follows the Omnidroid to Metroville. Violet uses her powers to free her family, and Mirage gives them assistance in reaching Metroville.
Recognizing Syndrome's remote-control gauntlet as a threat, the Omnidroid disarms Syndrome and subsequently knocks him out. The Parrs and Lucius fight the Omnidroid; Helen and the kids retrieve the remote control, allowing Bob to destroy the robot's power source. The Parrs and Lucius are hailed by the public just as Syndrome awakens to see their victory. Returning home, the Parrs find Syndrome retaliating by abducting Jack-Jack to raise as a sidekick. As Syndrome flies away, Jack-Jack's superpowers manifest, and he escapes Syndrome's hold. Helen rescues the falling baby, and Bob throws his car at Syndrome's plane; Syndrome is sucked into the plane's engine, killing him and causing the plane to explode.
Three months later, the Parrs witness the arrival of supervillain the Underminer. They don their masks and suits, ready to face the new threat.
The Incredibles as a concept dates back to 1993 when Bird sketched the family during an uncertain point in his film career.[8][9] Personal issues had percolated into the story as they weighed on him in life.[10] During this time, Bird had signed a production deal with Warner Bros. Feature Animation and was in the process of directing his first feature, The Iron Giant.[11] Approaching middle age and having high aspirations for his filmmaking, Bird pondered whether his career goals were attainable only at the price of his family life.[10] He stated, "Consciously, this was just a funny movie about superheroes. But I think that what was going on in my life definitely filtered into the movie."[12] After the box office failure of The Iron Giant, Bird gravitated toward his superhero story.[10][11]
He imagined it as a homage to the 1960s comic books and spy films from his boyhood and he initially tried to develop it as a 2D cel animation.[10] When The Iron Giant became a box office bomb, he reconnected with old friend John Lasseter at Pixar in March 2000 and pitched his story idea to him.[9] Bird and Lasseter knew each other from their college years at CalArts in the 1970s.[13] Lasseter was sold on the idea and convinced Bird to come to Pixar, where the film would be done in computer animation. The studio announced a multi-film contract with Bird on May 4, 2000.[10] The Incredibles was written and directed solely by Brad Bird, a departure from previous Pixar productions which typically had two or three directors and as many screenwriters with a history of working for the company.[14] In addition, it would be the studio's first film in which all characters are human.[13]
The dad is always expected in the family to be strong, so I made him strong. The moms are always pulled in a million different directions, so I made her stretch like taffy. Teenagers, particularly teenage girls, are insecure and defensive, so I made her turn invisible and turn on shields. And ten-year-old boys are hyperactive energy balls. Babies are unrealized potential.
– Brad Bird, writer and director of The Incredibles.[15][16]
Bird came to Pixar with the lineup of the story's family members worked out: a mom and dad, both suffering through the dad's midlife crisis; a shy teenage girl; a cocky ten-year-old boy; and a baby. Bird had based their powers on family archetypes.[10][16][17] During production, Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli visited Pixar and saw the film's story reels. When Bird asked if the reels made any sense or if they were just "American nonsense," Miyazaki replied, through an interpreter, "I think it's a very adventurous thing you are trying to do in an American film."[18]
Syndrome was originally written as a minor character who assaults Bob and Helen at the beginning of the movie, only to die in an explosion that destroys the Parrs' house (in this version, the Smiths), but he was made the main antagonist because the filmmakers liked him more than the character of Xerek, who was intended to fulfill that role. The Snug character that Helen talks to at the phone in the final film was intended to fly Helen to Nomanisan Island and to die, but he was removed from that position when Lasseter suggested having Helen pilot the plane herself.[19][20] Syndrome was based on Brad Bird himself.[21]
Holly Hunter, cast as Helen Parr/Elastigirl,[22] never voiced an animated character before and saw the role as an exciting opportunity to expand her repertoire. She was also drawn to the film by its unique and "unconventional story about family and human dynamics".[22] Bird considered Hunter "one of the finest actresses in the world", capable of playing a "sensitive" character who also has "a very sturdy center".[22][23] Spencer Fox was cast as Dash Parr, which was also his feature film debut.[24] Brad Bird wanted to give Dash a realistic out-of-breath voice in certain scenes such as the jungle scene so he made Fox run four laps around the Pixar studio until he got tired.[25] Samuel L. Jackson was cast as Lucius Best/Frozone, Bird cast him because he stated that he wanted the character to have the coolest voice.[26] Lily Tomlin was originally considered for the role of Edna Mode, but later turned it down.[27] After several failed attempts to cast Edna Mode, Bird took on her voice role himself. It was an extension of the Pixar custom of tapping in-house staff whose voices came across particularly well on scratch dialogue tracks.[17] Sarah Vowell was offered the role of Violet unexpectedly;[28] Bird wanted to cast Vowell as Violet after hearing her voice on the National Public Radio program, This American Life.[29][30][31] Bird stated that she was "perfect" for the part and immediately called her to offer her the role.[29]
Upon Pixar's acceptance of the project, Brad Bird was asked to bring in his own team for the production. He brought up a core group of people he worked with on The Iron Giant. Because of this, many 2D artists had to make the shift to 3D, including Bird himself. Bird found working with CGI "wonderfully malleable" in a way that traditional animation is not, calling the camera's ability to easily switch angles in a given scene "marvelously adaptable." He found working in computer animation "difficult" in a different way than working traditionally, finding the software "sophisticated and not particularly friendly."[32] Bird wrote the script without knowing the limitations or concerns that went hand-in-hand with the medium of computer animation. As a result, this was to be the most complex film yet for Pixar.[8] The film's characters were designed by Tony Fucile and Teddy Newton, whom Bird had brought with him from Warner Bros.[33] Like most computer-animated films, The Incredibles had a year-long period of building the film from the inside out: modeling the exterior and understanding controls that would work the face and the body—the articulation of the character—before animation could even begin.[32] Bird and Fucile tried to emphasize the graphic quality of good 2D animation to the Pixar team, who had only worked primarily in CGI. Bird attempted to incorporate teaching from Disney's Nine Old Men that the crew at Pixar had "never really emphasized."[32]
For the technical crew members, the film's human characters posed a difficult set of challenges.[14] Bird's story was filled with elements that were difficult to animate with CGI back then. Humans are widely considered to be the most difficult things to execute in animation. Pixar's animators filmed themselves walking to better grasp proper human motion.[9] Creating an all-human cast required creating new technology to animate detailed human anatomy, clothing, and realistic skin and hair. Although the technical team had some experience with hair and cloth in Monsters, Inc. (2001), the amount of hair and cloth required for The Incredibles had never been done by Pixar up until this point. Moreover, Bird would tolerate no compromises for the sake of technical simplicity. Where the technical team on Monsters, Inc. had persuaded director Pete Docter to accept pigtails on Boo to make her hair easier to animate, the character Violet had to have long hair that obscured her face; in fact, this was integral to her character.[14] Violet's long hair, which was extremely difficult to animate, was only successfully animated toward the end of production. In addition, animators had to adapt to having hair both underwater and blowing through the wind.[32] Disney was initially reluctant to make the film because of these issues, thinking that a live-action film would be preferable, but Lasseter denied this.[34]
The Incredibles was everything that computer-generated animation had trouble doing. It had human characters, it had hair, it had water, it had fire, it had a massive number of sets. The creative heads were excited about the idea of the film, but once I showed story reels of exactly what I wanted, the technical teams turned white. They took one look and thought, "This will take ten years and cost $500 million. How are we possibly going to do this?"
So I said, "Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody's listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door." A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well.
We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here. For less money per minute than was spent on the previous film, Finding Nemo, we did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do. All this because the heads of Pixar gave us leave to try crazy ideas.[35]
— Brad Bird speaking to McKinsey Quarterly in 2008
Not only did The Incredibles cope with the difficulty of animating CGI humans, but also many other complications. The story was bigger than any prior story at the studio, was longer in running time, and had four times the number of locations.[32][36] Supervising technical director Rick Sayre noted that the hardest thing about the film was that there was "no hardest thing," alluding to the amount of new technical challenges: fire, water, air, smoke, steam, and explosions were all additional to the new difficulty of working with humans.[32] The film's organizational structure could not be mapped out like previous Pixar features, and it became a running joke to the team.[32] Sayre said the team adopted "Alpha Omega," where one team was concerned with building modeling, shading, and layout, while another dealt with final camera, lighting, and effects. Another team, dubbed the "character team," digitally sculpted, rigged, and shaded all of the characters, and a simulation team was responsible for developing simulation technology for hair and clothing.[32] There were at least 781 visual effects shots in the film, and they were quite often visual gags, such as the window shattering when Bob angrily shuts the car door. Additionally, the effects team improved their modeling of clouds, using volumetric rendering for the first time.[32]
The skin of the characters gained a new level of realism from a technology to mimic "subsurface scattering."[33] The challenges did not stop with modeling humans. Bird decided that in a shot near the film's end, baby Jack-Jack would have to undergo a series of transformations, and in one of the five planned he would turn himself into a kind of goo. Technical directors, who anticipated spending two months or even longer to work out the goo effect, stealing precious hours from production that had already entered its final and most critical stages, petitioned the film's producer, John Walker, for help. Bird, who had himself brought Walker over from Warner Bros. to work on the project, was at first immovable, but after arguing with Walker in several invective-laced meetings over the course of two months, Bird finally conceded.[37] Bird also insisted that the storyboards define the blocking of characters' motions, lighting, and camera movements, which had previously been left to other departments rather than storyboarded.[14]
Bird admitted that he "had the knees of [the studio] trembling under the weight" of The Incredibles, but called the film a "testament to the talent of the animators at Pixar," who were admiring the challenges the film provoked.[32] He recalled, "Basically, I came into a wonderful studio, frightened a lot of people with how many presents I wanted for Christmas, and then got almost everything I asked for."[34]
The Incredibles is the first Pixar film to be scored by Michael Giacchino. Brad Bird was looking for a specific sound as inspired by the film's retrofuturistic design – the future as seen from the 1960s. John Barry was the first choice to do the film's score, with a trailer of the film given a rerecording of Barry's theme to On Her Majesty's Secret Service. However,