20 Years Ago, The Incredibles Became Pixar’s First Family

Given the amazing legacy of Pixar Animation Studios since the launching point of 1995’s Toy Story, as the studio approaches its own 30th anniversary, it is perhaps easy to overlook that for almost the first decade of its existence, its filmmakers depicted humanity only on the fringes of the stories it was telling. Toy Story and Toy Story 2, as the name would imply, explored the secret lives, joys and sorrows of our seemingly disposable playthings, never venturing too far into the pathos of their human owners. A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo drew from the natural world, applying human characterization to non-sentient creatures. Monsters Inc. prominently featured one human supporting character (Boo), but made her a three year old just beginning to grasp vocalization. It wasn’t until six films into the Pixar canon that we finally got a story unequivocally centered around human characters, though to be fair, they weren’t exactly “normal” people–they were The Incredibles. But “super” or not, it was a major step in the company’s development that happened 20 years ago this week, a pinnacle of the superhero film genre that succeeded where various adaptations of The Fantastic Four had failed both before and after it. And it all comes back to the beating heart of humanity in Brad Bird’s Pixar classic.

Part of the reason for the studio’s relative aversion to human characters to that point had been the sheer technical difficulty of bringing those types of characters to life in the emerging art form of three-dimensional computer animation, which Pixar had pioneered. The human form had long been considered one of the most difficult to animate because we’re simply more familiar with it as a species, meaning it must clear a higher bar to read as authentic (avoiding the uncanny valley) than something like the flip of a fish fin or a giant, hirsute monster. So too would textures be a major challenge: Shiny, plastic skin and immovable hair was all well and good for Woody, given that he was literally made from synthetic materials, but it wouldn’t be acceptable when it came to truly evocative human characters. Pixar had already made concessions on previous films when it came to toning down its human characters, such as giving Boo pigtails in Monsters Inc. in order to make her hair more immobile and easier to animate. Bird, an animator himself, was adamant that they wouldn’t be making such concessions on The Incredibles, repeatedly pushing his team into unfamiliar territory as they attempted something measurably more complex than anything Pixar had done before. It was all a necessity for a film that intended to showcase human faces in a way that had never really been done in a computer-generated feature film.

Thus began the grueling process of bringing the Parr family to life–a year-long period of modeling the characters before animation could even begin, figuring out how to translate the storyboards envisioned by Bird and co. to the screen. Bird himself had only really worked in traditional 2D animation (such as the classic The Iron Giant) to this point, and in the process of learning the new technology also wanted to stress to his crew that the lessons of traditional animation should not be lost, incorporating teachings from Disney’s Nine Old Men in an effort to retain characterization in a process that could very well strip it from the three-dimensional people he was attempting to create. Special attention was paid to creating more detailed and finely textured surfaces than Pixar had ever encountered before, especially when it came to aspects such as hair, skin and clothing. Today, we could easily overlook the depth of this technical challenge, but so many of the problems Bird and crew were tackling were integral to The Incredibles story, and could not be compromised on. Take, for instance, the hair of Violet Parr. That couldn’t be stuck in a ponytail to hide its lack of malleability. Because her character’s shyness and lack of confidence was directly tied into her tendency to wear he hair down, falling across her face, Pixar animators had no choice but to adapt and develop entirely new techniques to successfully animate it. In an interview upon the film’s release, Bird described The Incredibles as effectively being a stress test for the entire company, saying the following:

A number of people didn’t think that the studio was up to it, and they were smart people. It certainly was a gulp. But there were other people who were looking for just this kind of challenge. I had the knees of that place trembling under the weight of this thing. But, you know, if they weren’t up to it, I don’t know who would be. I think the film is a testament to what kind of talent is under that roof.

And with human appearances, a more deeply human story came naturally as well, steeped in a more recognizably universal sense of ennui, particularly from the perspective of Bob/Mr. Incredible. Here is a family man, a father, struggling with the inescapable recognition that his own perceived glory days are well in the past. He loves his family, but does he not also resent them at least a little bit, sitting alone at night in his office filled with mementos and monuments to the glorious past era when “supers” were not just welcome in society but venerated as beloved heroes? It’s not that he regrets his life, necessarily, but he mourns for the part of him that he has increasingly come to believe no longer exists. The world has beaten the spark out of him, nearly extinguishing the drive he once possessed to help people–not for the adulation, although that certainly played a part–but for the simple reason that it’s the right thing to do. Bob is of course blind to the fact that there are other ways to bring a positive difference to the world that he could be embracing in a society that has shunned superpowers, and the dissonance between where he is and where he’d like to be, back in his glory days, has manifested as thinly veiled depression. The question is whether he can find fulfillment in life as it exists today, or whether he’ll always yearn for what he can no longer have. What other Pixar film to this point had dealt with anything so subtly human as Bob’s midlife crisis? This wasn’t Flik being tasked to save the colony like a traditional hero in A Bug’s Life or the obvious imperative of Marlin to find his own lost child in Finding Nemo. Those are character motivators that no protagonist would be able to resist. Bob’s life has a few more shades of gray that come with his human baggage.

The result: A more complex form of emotional resonance that the audience builds with the Parr family, a group far more likely to evoke comparison to our own family dynamics. It should perhaps come as no surprise that this midlife uncertainty was ultimately culled (somewhat unconsciously) from Brad Bird’s own experience as a middle-aged artist who felt at the time that he had yet to achieve a lasting mark in life, The Iron Giant having been a notable box office failure. And yet Pixar saw fit to not only trust the director to develop this story drawn from his love of 1960s superhero comics and spy movies, but to infuse him more deeply into that film’s development than any creative had perhaps been with a single Pixar film to this point. Before The Incredibles, the typical Pixar feature had been inherently more of a committee approach, with multiple directors and screenwriters. Here it was just the inimitable Bird, who returned again 14 years later for first sequel The Incredibles 2 and is currently in development on The Incredibles 3, which could be his first film since 2018. His singular vision, which would later be applied to Ratatouille, is synonymous with the DNA of The Incredibles. Even his literal voice plays a major role: Bird voiced diminutive superhero costume designer Edna Mode, reluctantly taking on the role himself after finding no auditions that captured the tiny but volcanic presence and odd, German-Japanese accent he envisioned. In doing so, Bird managed to accidentally work himself into becoming what is arguably The Incredibles‘ breakout character.

There are obviously many more tangible, tactile reasons beyond characterization for why The Incredibles became such an iconic success for Pixar and Bird, from the simple delight of its action, to its witty jokes, evocative retro-futurist production design, or the rollicking score from Michael Giacchino that you’re probably subconsciously humming at this very moment. But at the end of the day, what the film contained that no Pixar film ever had before was a living, breathing family unit–a group of real people who were no less recognizable and empathetic for the fact that they were capable of incredible feats of strength, speed, etc. Bird eyed the trending superhero genre and brought a story to it that would resonate with any American family, even those who had no idea they would be suffering through Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer a few years later. Two decades later, The Incredibles remains an inspiration for any artist who dreams of being “super.”

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.