INCREDIBLES 2
AFTER 14 YEARS AWAY, PIXAR’S INCREDIBLES ARE BACK FOR A SEQUEL. RICHARD EDWARDS FINDS OUT WHAT’S POWERING THEM SECOND TIME OUT...
Pixar’s first family of superheroes are back on the big screen. If you have shares in the cape industry, sell now.
We Waited 18 years for a folloW-up to Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade; 32 years to find out what happened after the rebels blew up the death star in Return Of The
Jedi; and a whopping 35 years to catch up with rick deckard in Blade Runner 2049. so in comparison, the 14 years that have passed since pixar’s The Incredibles first strutted their super stuff in 2004 are a mere blink of an eye.
yet there’s one major difference between the aforementioned generation-straddling sequels and pixar’s superpowered follow-up – for Bob, Helen, Violet, dash and Jack-Jack parr, no time has passed at all. yep, when we last saw them at the end of The Incredibles they were swinging into action to save Municiberg from the underminer who’d just emerged from under the city’s streets, yelling, “i’m always beneath you, but nothing is beneath me!” and, er, now they’re… still swinging into action to save Municiberg from the underminer. that’s a long time to keep those EastEnders cliffhanger drums pounding…
“i think [picking up from the same place] was always the plan and it’s one of those things that’s an advantage of animation,” says producer John Walker. “actors, as long as their voices don’t change a lot, 15 years can go by and they don’t have to age – you can’t do that in a live-action sequence. the only character we had to change was dash because the actor went from 10 to 22, so we weren’t able to use him again, but everyone else we were.”
biG bird
that means that the world of the movie has also been kept in suspended animation. so, just to recap, The Incredibles is still set in an alternative world where “supers” are commonplace – but have been banned from strutting their spandex-clad stuff ever since a lawsuit brought by a guy who didn’t want to be saved. Having been pulled back into the derring-do fray by the evil schemes of megalomaniac fanboy syndrome, the parr family managed to save their hometown from one of the Big Bad’s killer robots – but their powered-up alter-egos are still illegal, and they’re still forced to live undercover…
“after they had defeated the omnidroid they certainly felt like they had changed public opinion but the laws themselves had not changed,” says Walker’s fellow producer Nicole paradis Grindle. “and then they have the underminer incident, where a lot of damage is created, and so that once again turns public opinion against them. at the end of the first one, public opinion seemed to be turning in that direction, but they’re still illegal – that was one of the conflicts that Brad left unresolved that we could address in this movie.”
the Brad she speaks of is Brad Bird, the writer/director/creative force behind The
Incredibles who’s back to get them saving the
world all over again. although his super creations have been trapped in limbo for 14 years, he’s been busy elsewhere in the meantime, both in animation (Ratatouille) and live-action (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol; Tomorrowland).
you may have also noticed that the superhero movie genre hasn’t been asleep during the intervening years, either – when The Incredibles came out, Spider-Man 2, X-Men 2 and ang lee’s Hulk were the big hitters, with Batman Begins and Fantastic Four still on the horizon. since then the Marvel Cinematic universe has, well, happened, pushed the boundaries of what comic book movies can do
how much money they can make at the box office. surely landing in a world where pretty much everybody is superhero literate – and the MCu has become an all-conquering force – must make it harder to deliver an alternative spin on them?
“We love to think that this movie is primarily about a family, a family that happens to have superpowers,” adds paradis Grindle, “so in that respect it wasn’t more challenging. for the most part the powers that the family have come out of who they are. Bob is the father and generally fathers are supposed to be really strong and powerful, mothers are stretched between all sorts of different things, so you have elastigirl. teenagers are shy and they’re trying to repel people, so Violet is invisible and has her forcefields. ten-year-olds have a lot of energy, so dash is always running around. and babies have a lot of potential, so Jack-Jack, it turns out, has all sorts of different powers that he’s sorting through. the symbolism of those powers carries most of the movie.”
on the family level, there’s an important shift to the dynamic second time out. Where before it was Bob parr/Mr incredible who left the family at home, this time it’s wife Helen who’ll be out on her own – meaning Bob has to stay at home and look after the kids.
“Brad had the idea that Helen would get the next mission very early on, back when we were still promoting the first film,” recalls Walker.
“He’d always wanted Helen to be out there,” adds paradis Grindle, “and it made sense that Helen’s first assignment would be to help turn public opinion to make supers popular again, so that the law could finally change and they could all live out in the open. the important thing was to leave Bob home alone with the kids and to get Helen out of that family dynamic and get back in touch with her professional ambitions. Bob thinks it’s going to be easy with the three kids because, after all, he’s Mr incredible, he can do anything. But of course, anybody who’s a parent understands
how challenging that really is. you start out with a little baby and they seem so easy, and then they continue to challenge. i have two young adult children now and i can tell you it never really gets easy, it’s just different!”
as hard as any baby can be to raise, Jack-Jack parr is on a different level – he doesn’t just cry, poo and puke, but is also a shapeshifting creature who can change his body mass, turn into fire, make laser beams come out of his eyes… in other words, it’s the stuff babysitter nightmares are made of, though the family are still blissfully unaware that their youngest member is anything but a normal baby.
“toddlers want what they want, they don’t quite know what they can do, and you’re always on the kind of edge of danger taking care of a toddler,” laughs paradis Grindle. “it just so happens this one has superpowers, so to that extent he’s dangerous and exhausting his father, similar to any toddler any of us has to take care of.”
ORIGIN STORIES
The Incredibles may not have explained how the parrs got their powers, but in most other respects it was a pure origin story, explaining how a superteam comes to be. Now that the shackles are off and the group established, however, you’d think that would give the storytellers a bit more freedom to explore a wider world without worrying about introducing its heroes ....
“i think it was actually more challenging,” counters Walker, “because what was great about the first time is that you had storylines about all of them, specifically the kids, discovering their powers – dash doesn’t know he can run on water, Violet doesn’t really know how to use the forcefields. We did that in the first film so now you have to replace that with something else and i think it became more about how they’re going to use those powers together. the kids know what they can do, they want to do it, they want to be a part of it and society’s not letting them.”
“and they’re still kids,” says paradis Grindle, “so there’s still a lot to figure out, to build their own confidence.”
this time there are crucial new characters thrown into the mix: businessman Winston deavor (voiced by Breaking Bad’s Bob odenkirk) and his genius sister evelyn (Catherine Keener) are a pair of siblings who recruit Helen in a bid to get supers back into the mainstream. there’s also a new villain, who hypnotises the masses via television and goes by the rather brilliant name of the screenslaver.
“Brad really pays a lot of attention to the names of both characters and things,” explains Walker. “like the island on the first film was Nomanisan island, which is ‘no man is an island’. i think the idea that this guy is going to use screens is coincident with his name, and because we’re all slaves to the screen, it seems so topical!”
even when you have a killer moniker, however, it’s not necessarily that easy coming up with a convincing modus operandi.
“there’s always a bit of a challenge coming up with the villain, because so many villains have been done!” points out paradis Grindle.
“We wanted to do something different to syndrome and we did,” says Walker. “But while the first film didn’t change so much over the course of the production, this one changed a lot. that was something that was challenging but also i think we got a better film out of it. some of the original ideas around the villain were completely scrapped and we started over, and the only two things that really lasted from the original pitch were that Helen gets the gig and that the family doesn’t know about Jack-Jack’s powers – and Bob will discover at exactly the wrong time…”
INCREDIBLES JOURNEY
The Incredibles was pixar’s sixth movie, Incredibles 2 is the studio’s 20th. Back in the ’00s every pixar movie seemed to be marked by a technological breakthrough (the fur in Monsters, Inc, the water in Finding Nemo etc), but now pretty much anything you can
imagine can be rendered convincingly on screen. so how does that square with the fact that The
Incredibles had a singular, retrofuturistic look that made sure it existed entirely in its own world? “We want to maintain that look that people fell in love with in the first movie, but because you can do so much more, you’re able to realise your vision more fully,” says paradis Grindle of the dichotomy. “Brad’s often saying that the characters were more like he originally intended them to be in this movie than they were in the first one.”
“We’re just able to do more than we could on the first one,” adds Walker. “on the first one the technology hadn’t caught up with our aspirations yet, but it certainly has now. We can do anything given enough time and money. We can have a lot more background characters, denser sets, more detail, more beautifully rendered interactive lighting. and it’s not just the technology improving – also the people at
Jack-Jack’s superpowers make him dangerous
pixar have 15 years more experience, as well as the input of talented newcomers.”
so given the talent, the tech and the universe, surely a third instalment has to be a no-brainer – maybe some time around 2032?
“it’s possible,” laughs Walker, “but it’s certainly not anything were talking about. if we wait another 14 years i don’t know… We’ll have to have oxygen in all of our offices!” if pixar can make you believe a family can have super-strength, stretch, go invisible, run fast and do all that other stuff, we’re sure oxygen in the office will be a doddle.