Staring ‘em down
Emeryville, Calif. — Poor Bob Parr. Not too long into the opening of the new animated film “The Incredibles,†the man formerly known as the superhero Mr. Incredible has become a faceless corporate drone -- consigned to the quietly humiliating life of a powerless insurance adjuster. Driven by skyrocketing malpractice claims into a witness protection program for superheroes, his once fabulous physique has gone to seed, his spirit has deflated and he’s literally squished into a tiny office chair where his days are ruled by the mercurial whims of a Nazi bean counter.
It’s a comic portrait of gifts denied, of society’s penchant to penalize the unusual and the outsize.
Parr’s journey into mediocrity comprises the first sequences of the film that its writer-director, Brad Bird, devised, and it’s hard not to see the metaphoric implications for any artist who’s gone unappreciated, and for Bird in particular.
In his late 40s, Bird is one of those talents who almost got squashed by the Hollywood system. He knocked around for years, impressing some with his “Family Dog†episode of Steven Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories,†his work on “The Simpsons†(where he breathed life into Krusty the Clown), his little-seen but often admired animated film, 1999’s “The Iron Giant.†He got fired from other jobs for being too opinionated, for pushing too hard to make films better. He spent a lot of time watching film projects wither. “I could always get on the runway, but various things would happen that are boring and typical in Hollywood,†he says. “There’s not a lot of courage in Hollywood and not a lot of vision.â€
Bird is speaking from the vantage point of someone who’s narrowly escaped his fate. As his film winds toward its debut Friday, he’s moving with the surefire efficiency of an East German swimmer, where every millisecond counts.
Compelled to slow down for an interview, he’s hunched over a table at the press room at Pixar, the Northern California computer animation studio that has begotten an unparalleled string of computer-generated hits, such as “Toy Story,†“Monsters, Inc.†and “Finding Nemo.†Pixar’s work fuses technical prowess and creativity as seamlessly as an iPod. The whole cavernous complex practically hums with the sound of true believers, all worshipping the gods of animation.
For Bird, it’s even more than animation -- it’s storytelling itself. With his elongated wholesome features and strawberry blond hair, Bird looks like a kid from “Leave It to Beaver†all grown up. He’s consciously trying to tone down his famously opinionated mouth, but his message still sounds urgent. “Everybody is going, ‘What is the magical, mysterious trick that Pixar is doing?’ †says the director. He’s referring to the awe in which Hollywood holds Pixar; after its public squabble with corporate partner Walt Disney Co., the company has been courted by every studio in town. “There must be some secret formula in a vault somewhere that they’re all drinking.
“The basic thing is the people here love movies....They make films they themselves would want to see. I don’t think a lot of people want to hear that, because there’s no way they can just magically make that appear.â€
Indeed, it sounds so deceptively simple, but it’s not, in an era of corporate consolidation, when movie studios are increasingly just small divisions of megaliths churning out new versions of films they made decades ago.
“I always felt Brad Bird was a thoroughbred race horse attached to a very heavy plow,†says Pixar’s creative chief John Lasseter, a college friend of Bird’s from Cal Arts, who brought him to the company. “We were able to unhook him and let him run in a big beautiful field. He kept walking close to the plow, not realizing that he was free from it. He was like, ‘Oh, Pixar is great. When are the executives coming to squash my idea?’ We kept saying, ‘Go, go, go,’ and all of a sudden that horse is running faster than he’s ever gone.†Run he did.
A world of firsts
BIRD’S film represents a number of firsts for the company. It is Pixar’s first PG venture, the first that features zippity-zip head-spinning action sequences, the first to star human characters. The stakes are particularly high for Bird too -- it is the first to be directed by an outsider, not someone from the homegrown Pixar farm team. He had to prove himself inside as well as out.
In the beginning, when the folks at Pixar saw the story reels of Bob in his depressed mode, they were skeptical. “People would go, ‘What are you guys making, some sort of Bergman film?’ †recalls producer John Walker. “Brad would go, ‘No, no, no, there’s more’ -- but we didn’t have it to show anybody yet. Fortunately at Pixar, John Lasseter throws his body in front of the tracks. He was able to build us a fence.â€
Indeed, gloomy Bob soon gives way to buoyant Bob. Set in a retro-futuristic world much like Disneyland’s World of Tomorrow, “The Incredibles†is the story of how an aging superhero rediscovers his heroics, and the strength of family. After Mr. Incredible is kidnapped on the Island of Nemoanism, by Syndrome, a one-time fan turned nemesis, Helen Parr (a.k.a. Mrs. Incredible, a.k.a. the former superhero known as Elastigirl) flies to the rescue along with two of her children, Violet and Dash, who possess their own distinctive superpowers, although they’ve never been allowed to use them among the mere mortals of suburbia. Each family member’s superpower is a witty comment on their life issues: multitasking Mom has arms that can stretch down the street; shy, body-conscious teenager Violet can literally disappear; and irrepressible 10-year-old Dash can run faster than a rocket.
Like any normal family, they bicker and, at the beginning, Mr. Incredible -- who can do a little of everything -- is pining for his glory days, oblivious to the joys of his family. Mr. Incredible’s ambivalence was the genesis of the film, the idea for which Bird first hatched 12 years ago or so, when his middle son, Jack (the baby in the film is Jack-Jack), was an infant. He was working on “The Simpsons†at the time and fretting that he’d never get to direct a movie. “I wanted work that I was fully invested in, and I wanted to be fully invested in my family. And I was worried that having not made it at that point I would never make it. If I was truly a good father, I would never be able to dedicate the time necessary to break through,†he recalls. “And I felt like I was at a crossroads where I was either going to be a lousy filmmaker or a lousy dad. And I didn’t want to be that either. The film came out of that anxiety of, you know, wanting to do what you love and also wanting to give your family all that it’s due.â€
Bird is undoubtedly ambitious. For instance, “The Incredibles†features more than 100 background sets, while “Finding Nemo†has only 20. Yet he wanted to make sure that the price tag remained $145 million, about the cost of the other Pixar films, a feat that required him to plan to the last detail, and to be sure to be right. The film’s biggest technical challenge was also front and center -- the animation of humans, with their muscles, their pliant clothes and their hair that blows in the wind, all of which provided distinctive challenges.
CG animation is something akin to building a computer puppet in 3-D. It requires 150 controls just to animate the face, and paradoxically, if it’s too lifelike, the effect is soulless and creepy. Says Bird, “It’s like the zombies are kissing.â€
Bird gambled that it would be better to keep “The Incredibles†as cartoons, human caricatures, albeit with vulnerable human-like pathos.
“I think the goal of photorealistic humans is a really weird goal,†Bird says. “To me it’s like saying, ‘Hey, look, I can make an orange out of dog poop. Now if I spend $20 million, I can re-engineer the dog poop on a subatomic level and make an orange. It doesn’t taste very good. But it’s kind of like an orange. And isn’t that amazing?’ Well, the bottom line is, an orange will cost you 25 cents and it will be delicious. Don’t spend your time on that. Spend your time on something that is going to be meaningful.â€
Besides writing and directing, the director also acts in the film. No, Craig T. Nelson plays Mr. Incredible, and Holly Hunter provides her distinctive way of talking out of the side of her mouth for the spunky-yet-maternal Elastigirl. Bird, by contrast, plays Edna Mode, the diminutive, half Japanese, half German designer of superhero costumes. Part Coco Chanel, part weapons designer, she’s a genial autocrat. Self-doubt is not in her emotional repertoire.
“[Bird’s] a little like Edna in that way,†says Walker, who also worked with Bird on “The Iron Giant.†“He’s very confident about what he wants to do. He has a very clear picture in his head of the entire movie and he expresses that. ‘This is what I want.’ And if somebody comes up with something better, he is happy to change. But it’s not sort of open for discussion.â€
Boinky, version 1.0
In the beginning was Boinky, a box with a circle on it and two dots for eyes. A rabbit. Bird was 3 at the time and, most significantly, he drew the Boinky pictures sequentially. “I would just show the pictures moving from the top of the stack to the bottom of the stack and tell the story while I was showing it,†Bird says. “I didn’t figure it out until years and years later. I was trying to do sort of the crudest version of filmmaking.â€
Bird grew up in Oregon. At age 11, he began drawing animation in earnest, and at 14, finished his first film, “The Tortoise and the Hare,†a Road Runner-like version of the Aesop’s fable in which the tortoise was the bad guy trying to slow down the hare. The film won some awards from a contest sponsored by Kodak, and Bird sent it to Disney, where it ultimately found its way to the animation department, still run by the nine grand old men who had created such classic animated films as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves†and “Pinocchio.â€
They invited Bird to visit the next time he was in L.A. and he immediately flew down. They cleared an equipment room and gave him a desk, and on vacations he’d fly down to study with Milt Kahl, a legendary taskmaster.
“It was like being an aspiring actor and all of a sudden you get to work with Brando,†he says. Kahl drilled in him artistic relentlessness, “this idea that you need to push yourself and there’s always a better way.â€
Despite the encouragement, Bird found himself isolated from his peers, whose eyes would quickly droop when he began talking animation. “I started to realize that I was missing out on life,†he says. He quit, rejoined the adolescent world, played football, discovered girls.
Normal life, he says, helped his animation, grounding it in real experience rather than just other movies. He went to Cal Arts, in the newly relaunched animation program where he met a fellow devotee in Lasseter. They were keepers of a dying flame, Bird recalls. “The TV was filled with just the worst ‘animation’ that you could imagine. It was like all the good ideas had long ago been done, so now here’s the Harlem Globe Trotters meet the Brady Bunch in the Flintstones’ living room. It was like a meal that’s been cooked and recooked so many times that now it’s breaking down on a cellular level and just turning into goo.â€
“We learned more from each other than even our teachers,†recalls Lasseter. “This is 1975. In the library at Cal Arts, there are 16 mm prints of six Disney films, ‘Snow White,’ ‘Pinocchio,’ ‘Dumbo.’ ... We would check one of these out, bring it to the animation room where there was a projector that could stop and play the film backwards. We’d study and study and study. Every frame, we got to know.â€
When Bird graduated, Disney was essentially the only animation game in town, and attracted all who were interested, including Bird, Lasseter and Tim Burton. Unfortunately, the art form was at its nadir, the era after the nine old men but before the renaissance under Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
“What was happening was that they promoted the guys that had been there for 20 years but were never really good enough to rise to the top under the old masters. So those guys made the kind of decisions that they made, and anybody that aspired to do more than that was kind of considered a troublemaker,†Bird says.
“We were in there ready to change the world, ready to entertain audiences, and they looked at that like a threat,†Lasseter says.
Bird got fired, as he did from another animation job in San Francisco. “I had this false idea that you could be outspoken and if you could back it up, that was OK,†he says.
He wound up directing and animating “Family Dog†for “Amazing Stories,†about a dog whose whole emotional life could be discerned by the way he moved. Yet, when the studio decided to turn the episode into its own series, Bird declined the job “because I didn’t want to fail in front of someone I admire as much as Steven Spielberg.†He thought it couldn’t be done without a lengthy full animation schedule. Instead, he took a supporting role on “The Simpsons,†where he was often charged with unpacking the show’s fat suitcase of jokes and turning them into visuals. Bird contributed enormously to Krusty the Clown, says “Simpsons†creator Matt Groening. “Brad and I both grew up in Oregon and we were mesmerized by a local TV clown named Rusty Nails, and even though Rusty Nails was a very sweet clown, it was fun for Brad to take Krusty and push him to extremes. All those crazy poses that we come to expect from Krusty originated with Brad Bird.â€
“Brad’s very opinionated,†Groening says, “but when he tells you you’re completely wrong, it’s charming. It’s not offensive. It’s not about ego. It’s about the shared assumption that we all want to make the best piece of art we can. I knew from the moment I met him, this guy was going to be destined for big things.â€
Yet Bird couldn’t get those bigger things going. For several years he had a deal at Turner Pictures, but none of his movies took off.
“I wish I had the good sense to make every single thing he wanted to make,†sighs Amy Pascal, the chairwoman of Columbia Pictures who ran Turner at that time. “I didn’t understand animation in those days.â€
Turner was eventually absorbed by Warner Bros., and Bird finally made the film “The Iron Giant.†Poet Ted Hughes’ original story was about a boy’s friendship with a giant robot. Bird set the story in Maine, circa 1957, when America was gripped with Cold War paranoia and gave it a moral underpinning.
“I said, what if a gun (i.e. the giant) had a soul and didn’t want to be a gun?†he recalls. It was a small, thoughtful animated film that went up against the Disney animation juggernaut then in its “Lion King†glory. Critics loved it, but audiences never came.
Bird was actually considering making “The Incredibles†as a traditional animated feature for Warner Bros. when Lasseter came calling ... again.
“Studio executives have never quite understood Brad,†says Lasseter, who at the time was finishing “Toy Story 2.†“He will never accept stupidity. He has no patience for executives that are just worried about their standing or their jobs. He cares about making the best possible movie, and he’ll work and push and push and push and take every battle to the very end, no matter how small. People kept saying, ‘I can’t work with this guy.’ I kept going, ‘This is exactly what I want.’ ... Brad was so disappointed in [‘Iron Giant’], he finally started listening to me.†For Bird, the decision to move himself and his family northward was simple.
“I didn’t want any kind of uncertainty,†he says. “I wanted somebody that said, ‘I want to make this,’ and Pixar said, ‘We’ve got to make this.’ †There were those who toiled in traditional animation who were disappointed in his decision to leave. “Some of them said, ‘You’re selling out to CG,’ †he recalls with a shrug.
He points to the original drawings for the 2-D version of “The Incredibles†on the wall; the characters look precisely how they look in the completed film, albeit flat. “I said, ‘I’m not going to Pixar to work on CG. I’m going to Pixar because they protect their stories.’ â€
Only good movies
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