Bird Brad - The Art of Incredibles 2

Derek Thompson ink Josh Holtsclaw digital Josh Holtsclaw digital : Brad Bird digital Copyright 2018 by Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 978-1-4521-6384-0 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4521-6411-3 (epub, mobi) Designed by Taylor Roy Chronicle Books LLC
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The first was that almost every house had a copy of The Art of The Incredibles on the coffee tablea compliment to our artists that made me burst with pride. The second was a comment Nancy made partway through the tour. After the third house, Nancy got onto the bus and said, You know what? I finally get your mothers taste. I grew up in southern California in the 1960s and 70s, and the home I grew up in was a mid-century modern one. The house was mid-century modern; the furniture was all mid-century modern. To my mother, though, who lived in that house for over fifty years, it was all just modern.

My mother grew up in northwestern Arkansas during the Depression. After she graduated from high school, she and her family traveled across the country on an old truckjust like in The Grapes of Wrath. When the rest of her family stopped in Arizona, where my grandfather found work picking citrus, my mom bought a oneway ticket to Los Angeles. She worked her way through beauty school so she could then put herself through Pepperdine College. After graduating, she became an art teacher. Looking back, I realize that the mid-century modern look appealed to her so strongly because it symbolized the new life she came west to find.

Nowadays, we think of mid-century modern design as being cool or hip, but to the people from that era, it said so much more. For people like my mother, whose life growing up had been full of struggle, it represented prosperity, optimism, and the promise of the future. I had always loved the world Brad envisioned for The Incredibles, but before that moment I had assumed it was partly because it reminded me of my childhood. Nancys remark made me realize that part of why the Incredibles aesthetic worked so well was because the optimism of the mid-century modern-inspired look connected powerfully with the underlying spirit of the story. Brad is one of the most passionate people Ive ever met. He loves his family, he loves his work, and he loves and believes in the challenge of giving his best to both.

You can see that heart, that positive way of seeing life, expressed perfectlyand beautifullyin the bright, smart, exciting, and thoughtful world of The Incredibles and now Incredibles 2. I have been waiting for an Incredibles sequel for seventeen yearsliterally from the moment I first saw the story reels for the original film. I was so happy when the time was finally right for Brad to make Incredibles 2. The new story has expanded the mid-century modern designed world in fantastic ways. The new homes, buildings, and vehicles are breathtakingly beautiful, and so cool that you will wish, as I do, that you could step into this world and vacation here. Ralph Eggleston digital

In The Incredibles, Bob, a.k.a. Mr. Incredible, had begun to appreciate how much family meant to him, but he didnt really know what it was like to be in the trenches of parenting, especially with toddler Jack-Jack, whose many and uncontrolled powers the family was still unaware of. And as settled as Helen, a.k.a. Elastigirl, thought she was as a stay-at-home parent, I knew there was a part of her that missed superhero work. A lot of the feeling of the Parr family has its roots in my own life: in the family I grew up in as the youngest child, and in the family I raised with my wife.

Their world feels very comfortable to me; I know the characters almost like I know my own family. But the process of creating the right story for them for a second movie was a bigger challenge than I imagined. Every movie is its own creature, and each one needs its own care and feeding, as you discover over the course of making it. For this film, the fundamental idea of role reversal always stayed the same, but the circumstances of the world, the superhero plot, so to speak, changed dramatically. A story about A.I. yadda yadda yadda, you get the idea. yadda yadda yadda, you get the idea.

Balancing the voracious needs of production with a story whose growth I tried to control without overly limiting it was very difficult, and Ted Mathot and I relied on the ten-thousand-foot overview of John Lasseters fresh eyes, along with Mark Andrews, Michael Arndt, and others for perspective. The challenges of the film were immense, and greatly intensified when a full year was taken off the films production schedule. In a way, I was having the same problem that Bob and Helen were having. The interviews that began the original film were a way of saying that our ideas of what our lives are going to be and what they actually turn out to be are very different. We think we can see the future, but we cant. But what both movies also say is that if you are lucky enough to have a family you can count on, it will help carry you through any obstacle life can throw at you.

And the same thing was true here. A crew is its own kind of family, and we had a great one on this film, just as we did on the first. Their resourcefulness and creativity made it possible to achieve things we had always hoped for with this world, and discover parts of it Id never imagined before. This book is a distillation of the journey we took, the roads both traveled and abandoned, to arrive at the finished film. Incredibles 2 demanded a hurricane of art, and the eye of that storm was Ralph Eggleston, who managed an overstressed, super-talented art team of veterans and newbies on a frightening schedule, without going (noticeably) insane.