rad Bird wrote and directed The Iron Giant, his first full-length animated film, in 1999. Audiences received it with muted enthusiasm, and the movie died quickly in theaters, to the tune of just over $23 million in box-office receipts. Since that time, however, the film's growing fan base all but hit the streets to sing its praises, and The Iron Giant has since been heralded as one of the great traditional animation movies of all time. With The Incredibles, Bird's next effort, he's hoping that both critical accolade and commercial success will arrive more quickly.
The Incredibles marks Bird's first collaboration with Pixar, the studio responsible for the best-animated movies of the digital era (including Toy Story and Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo). Over a decade ago, the company established a seemingly indefatigable ability to craft smart, funny and evocative entertainment for audiences of all ages; rather than animating the things that go bump in the night or childhood toys, however, Bird expressed interest in putting the human back in superhuman.
The end result is a richly entertaining yarn about a family of former superheroes, led by Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) and Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), who are called back into service after mounting lawsuits forced them into premature retirement. Bird recently sat down with Science Fiction Weekly to discuss the development of this super idea.
How easy was it to make the transition from classical to 3-D animation?
Bird: I definitely had to learn the world, and the technology is really amazing, but it's also on the edge of failing a lot of times. It's kind of like an old TV set versus a really advanced digital one; if the signal is bad on an old TV set, you get a little bit of snow, maybe the image rolls a little bit, but it's still the image—you can still understand what it is. But if the digital thing gets its signals broken, people start sneering and turning purple and going as though you've dropped acid or something. That's kind of what this system is like. When it goes south, really weird things happen. If the decimal point isn't in the right place, really bizarre stuff happens. There's one scene where Helen is in the tunnel—we were watching it, and there's this little flash. I said, "What is this flash? Can we go back?" And so we go back a frame at a time and we find one frame where there's this white streak that goes all the way from off-screen up to her face. One of the computer guys went into it and analyzed it, and it turns out that it's one of her teeth shooting out of her head at Mach 5. Yeah. That's the kind of stuff that happens in CG, and that's weird.
That said, I think people focus too much on technique of animation, and I think the most important areas to a film's success are the same as a live-action film. Do we understand the characters? Can we empathize with them? Can we follow them? Is the plot surprising and logical? If we don't do those jobs, we're not going to have a good film, no matter what the technology is. I think what makes a good animated film is what makes a good live-action film. It's all film. When it was hand-drawn, they all said, "If you lay each drawing end to end it will go to Mars and back three times" or whatever, and it was just like, "That's not the point." You could have a million drawings that don't make you feel anything, or you could have 20 drawings that capture a feeling beautifully. People get obsessed with the numbers of things.
You have worked in traditional animation for many years now. Would you shed a tear if it disappeared completely, as many people are predicting?
Bird: Yes, I would, but I'm an optimist. I think the present stupidity that says that it's defunct will be short-lived.
Where do you think this "stupidity" is coming from? Folks like Disney, who recently decided to stop making traditional animated pictures?
Bird: No, I'm talking about a lot of the press. I don't think Disney's stopping doing hand-drawn stuff. They're still producing a lot of hand-drawn stuff—they did Teacher's Pet, and they've done a lot of small-budget things as well. I think that it's easy to blame a film's failures on technique, because if the remedy is buying a computer, everyone can get out of trouble—they just buy a computer and their problems are solved. I think they're going to find that their problems are not solved by a computer, and that if you have a bad idea, a computer isn't going to make it better.
I think that a lot of CG films are going to come out, because Hollywood tends to overdo anything that succeeds. Some of them will be good, and a lot of them won't. And when a lot of them start to fail, the inevitable headline will be—and please don't be one of the guys writing this headline, cause it's as moronic as anything else—"Audience losing interest in CG films." No, they won't be, because they're not interested in the technology. They're interested in characters and a premise, and they're interested in being taken somewhere. And if the film takes them somewhere that they want to go, they'll like it, no matter whether it's pixels or drawings or puppets or clay.
I happen to like CG, and there are advantages to CG that are wonderful, but there are all advantages to 2-D. I don't think Nick Park's films would be improved at all by CG. Nick Park's work is beautiful and perfect working in clay. I think that you should work in any medium that you feel that you can effectively tell your story in, and I like being able to move the camera and have really subtle little facial changes that are very difficult in hand-drawn [animation]. But I also think that there's a graphic quality in hand-drawn [animation] that you can't get any other way. You have to do it drawing style.
101 Dalmations would not be better as a CG film. I don't think Pinocchio would be better. I think that they are perfect the way they are, so I hope we can just fast-forward to a time where whatever medium the director wants to use to tell the story in, that's what we have. And I'm hoping people will become open enough to see any style and accept any style, and enjoy it.
Did you face any difficulties—financial or otherwise—getting this project going after The Iron Giant met with box-office failure?
Bird: I actually had the idea for this long before Iron Giant. It was the one I wanted to do next. The difficulties are the difficulties you face any time you make a movie. You're always trying to make the story be efficient, but you're trying not to make it feel rushed. You're trying to get people to make connections with the characters and be able to understand and empathize with them. You're trying to do something that is surprising but feels logical, and it's a challenge every single time.
How did you become involved with Pixar?
Bird: I've known John [Lasseter] for a while, and they had actually been talking to me about coming up and joining Pixar since A Bug's Life. And I was talking to them, but I was always involved in something and they were doing their thing, but we kept talking, and after Iron Giant was done it just seemed like a good time, and I pitched this idea to them. They got it immediately and didn't seek to change it into anything else. They just totally signed on to what the film was and the flavor of that thing. They didn't try to make me make it more like Toy Story or any one of their other movies. They just said, "We want to do all different kinds of films, and this is great. Let's go for it." That was refreshing.
What was your inspiration for the film?
Bird: This is a sort of gumbo of all the adventure movies and spy movies and comedies and TV shows and comic-book things that I liked as a kid, kind of stirred together with my own personal family stuff—both the family that I grew up in and the family that I have now with my wife and sons. It's just kind of a gumbo of all that stuff stirred together. It's supposed to feel like a lot of things and nothing.
To what degree is this film an homage to these genres, and to what degree is it a parody?
Bird: I think we have fun with it, but I never intended to wink at the audience. I wanted people to care about these characters and believe in this world. I think there's a tendency with some filmmakers to act like they're above the material, and I think they're limiting what a film can be, because they're always saying, "I don't really believe any of this, and you shouldn't either." I'm hip to the fact that this is kind of silly. Well, I wanted to make something that had fun with that world but was sincere about it. And I wanted people to worry about the characters, to care about the characters, and I don't think you can do that to a certain point if you're always winking and nudging the audience. Well, I think winking and nudging, to a certain extent, is patronizing, unless you're doing an all-out comedy like Young Frankenstein. Then wink and nudge away. I'm right with you.
Was there a concern the themes of this might be too mature for kids?
Bird: Well, it's a comic-book adventure. Are you going to put pillows around the conflict? No. You do a superhero story, things are going to blow up. There were people where we said, "OK, now, we're deviating from the norm—hold hands. Is that OK?" And we all held hands and said, "Yeah." We don't want to do just one kind of movie, and I think that parents ought to take the PG seriously. Only they know what their kids can see, but some kids were mildly traumatized by Raiders of the Lost Ark, and they probably shouldn't have seen it. But I don't think you would ever say, "Yeah, take all of that stuff out of Raiders of the Lost Ark." Raiders of the Lost Ark is the movie that it set out to be.
The difference being that animation still carries a stigma as being only for kids.
Bird: Well, that's a long-held bias that I don't happen to agree with. I can't name another art form on the face of the earth that limits its audience by saying it's aimed at one age group. I mean, you don't say, "Opera—it's only aimed at 35- to 60-year-olds." I have people asking me what it's like to be working in the animation genre. It's not a genre. It's an art form that can do any genre, and it's been limited by people's perceptions, but I think it can tell any story there is.
Was the character you voiced, Edna Mode, inspired by Edith Head?
Bird: Well, we certainly looked at Edith Head, but there are actually a lot of female fashion designers, if you research it, that have giant glasses. But also, Patricia Highsmith was an influence. She wrote The Talented Mister Ripley. Linda Hunt. When you're designing a character, you're just saying, "Who is that?" We have drawings, and you can see them in The Art of [The Incredibles] book, where she's taller and fatter and older and younger. We tried a lot of stuff and we kept saying no, no, more like this, but I like the nose on this one, and maybe the pageboy cut, maybe glasses should be bigger. And you end up with something that reminds you of Edith Head and you of Linda Hunt.
How did you end up contributing her voice?
Bird: We do a temporary soundtrack where we take existing music and kind of cut it together so it kind of represents where we hope to go. We do storyboards, and we kind of cast within Pixar people who get in the ballpark of what we're looking for, and sometimes those voices stick. Andrew Stanton, the writer and director of Finding Nemo, was the voice of Crush, and people just liked his voice from the story reel. Joe Ranft, who's a top story guy there, did Heimlich in A Bug's Life and did the asthmatic penguin in Toy Story 2. Bob Peterson, another top story guy, did Roz in Monsters, Inc., and they tried actresses, but they ended up having to keep telling the actress, "No, make it lower, like this." And finally they went, "Look. He's already doing it. Why don't we just keep it?" So I think that's kind of what happened. Kari the babysitter is one of our animators, Bret Parker. Rick Dicker, the government guy, is [performed by] Bud Luckey, who wrote and directed the little short you saw beforehand. We just try to find a voice. Pixar doesn't really care about how famous somebody is. It's more about how right they are for the character.
Am I nuts, or does Syndrome look like you?
Bird: Well, yeah, but I didn't figure that out, I didn't notice it until we were deep into it, because I didn't see it, but everybody's like, "Hey man, he looks like you." And I was like, "Well, it's too late now. We've already built him." How do I feel about being the villain? Am I the villain?
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Pamela Sargent
