Jen Clay
Staff Writer
We’ve seen the triple-threat types. They write their own screenplays, they direct the resulting movies and they have the audacity to star in the darn things. What makes writer-director-voice actor Brad Bird any different?
To begin with, audiences will never see him on screen. Bird is the triple-threat behind Pixar’s latest animated film “The Incredibles,” opening Nov. 5. And did we mention Bird provides the voice for a female character?
Bird exudes energy, albeit the kind your first-grade nephew radiates after ingesting a particularly sugary bag of Halloween candy. Full of impressions, playful verbs and a fast-paced laugh, Bird is a child who refuses to grow up, and it’s no wonder he has spent much of his professional life working in animation.
After working as an animator on Disney’s “The Fox and the Hound” in 1981, Bird eventually moved on to edgier fare, directing an episode of Matt Groening’s animated primetime upstart “The Simpsons” in the late 1980s.
The next decade saw Bird serving as executive consultant on Mike Judge’s “King of the Hill” and “The Critic,” as well as directing 1999’s critically acclaimed “The Iron Giant.”
It was while Bird was working on “The Simpsons” that he had the idea for “The Incredibles,” Pixar’s first PG-rated film. Bird said “The Incredibles” was a story he kept returning to, particularly because his own personal struggle paralleled that of Bob Parr, “The Incredibles” lead.
“I think that [The Incredibles] came out of the fact that I was trying to get movies off the ground,” Bird said.
“At the same time, I had a new family, so it was that anxiety out of where best to devote your time. If you did what was necessary to break through in the movies, would you be shorting your family? And if you were truly a great dad, would you ever crack through the movies? The movie is kind of about that anxiety about finding meaningful work and being, you know, a great member of your family, so it’s that struggle.”
In “The Incredibles,” the Parrs are a family of superheros who have been governmentally relocated to the suburbs to live civilian lives. Fifteen years after the move, Bob Parr (Mr. Incredible) finds solace re-living the “glory days” with friend, fellow superhero and cold-temperature expert Lucius (Frozone).
But when Mr. Incredible accepts a mysterious top-secret assignment on Nomanisan Island, his wife Helen and children Dash and Violet must call on their once-prohibited superpowers (flexibility, speed and invisibility, respectively) to save their patriarch and keep the family together.
The cast includes Craig T. Nelson as Bob Parr, Holly Hunter as his wife Helen, Samuel L. Jackson as Lucius and Jason Lee as the evil Syndrome. Bird is the voice of Edna Mode, the pint-sized, glasses-toting designer (and spitfire) who designs flexible (and machine washable) outfits for her superhero consumers.
Bird said he voiced Edna during the “Incredibles” storyboard stages and had to be “conned” into leaving his voice in the film.
“She’s a really weird character, and probably the days I was happiest as a writer on this were the days I was writing scenes with her,” Bird said.
“I thought it was funny to have a character that idolizes superheros but also intimidates them.”
Interestingly enough, “The Incredibles” was a kind of superhero feat for Pixar as the film marks the first time the studio has cinematically tackled wholly human characters. In fact, the animators created the characters from the inside-out, studying the human body’s skeleton and muscles to develop a realistic animated depiction of human movement. Bird said he writes with animators in mind.
“I’ve been an animator, and I look to write scenes that I would want to animate, and they are not always defined the way most people would define a good scene to animate,” Bird said.
“I think most people think a good scene to animate is somebody juggling balls while being on a unicycle, you know, that’s flamboyant.
But I think the scene of Bob and ‘Frozone’ talking in the car where they’re just sitting there is a great scene to animate because they’re too very different characters that get along with each other and have a shared history, have a lot of the same points of view on things but also disagree. They’re two distinct visual approaches to movement.”
Bird, who said animation is about catching the essence of reality, said the field transcends a “genre.”
“Animation is an art form that can do any genre,” Bird said. “It shouldn’t do it exactly the way that a live-action film does it, but I think it can tackle any subject that you can name if it did it in a way that took advantage of the medium. My goal when I set out to make a film is just to make a good film, a film that I would want to watch.”
While “The Incredibles” is Pixar’s first PG-rated film, the movie is the inspiration for a large number of recently released “Incredibles”-themed products, products which include Pringles, Poptarts and – the more conventional – pillows. Still, Bird fights off attempts to say the movie is aimed at a specific audience.
“There’s something patronizing about that goal,” Bird said. “I don’t like this but ‘little Billy’ will like this. I mean, ‘little Billy’ probably won’t like it if you don’t like it. I think that you have to like something first and then hope that other people like it.”
Luckily in this case, we can bet that childlike Bird really, really likes it.
“The Incredibles” opens tomorrow.
11-04-2004
