This was so much more rich, detailed, and fantastic of a read than I initially expected it to be. I assumed it would just be a short-ish blog post on the style of the movie but it really goes into detail on so many aspects from the behind-the-scenes. And I learned that some places in Palm Springs are like some sort of time capsule oasis time traveling machine back to 50 years ago. It's so cool that these houses haven't been renovated or torn down to be replaced with something more modern in such a long span of time.
This must've taken a while to put together and Josh Holtsclaw did a great job with it.
Is there a place that captures these types of details for lots of other movies? If not, I think there's an opportunity to collect all of these types of design analysis in one place. I can't imagine the audience would be huge, but I would guess they're passionate and super interested in this type of thing. I didn't think I would be going into this article but I came away wanting more of these types of articles.
Palm Springs is incredible. I can strongly recommend a visit.
My partner and I (we live in Australia) have visited twice, as she developed a deep interest in modernist architecture over the past few years.
The whole place has the optimistic feel of The Jetsons cartoons, and as you return to reality you wonder “what the hell happened to the world?”.
There’s an architecture tour you can do with a gentleman named Robert Imber, the president of the local architecture society (he’s mentioned/pictured as the tour guide in this article).
He says there’s an informal club called (IIRC) “victims of Robert” - people who have taken his tour, fallen in love with Palm Springs and ended up buying a house there. He claims the membership numbers in the double digits.
True or not, Robert is a wonderful character and an icon of Palm Springs, who has played a huge role in preserving its heritage and sharing it with a wide audience around the world.
Yes! The Jetsons. I knew there was something so familiar about all of this. You're 100% spot on with that and I don't know why it didn't hit me to associate it with that cartoon.
There's an artist in Palm Springs called Atomic Skyway who does super-cool clocks, wall mounts and sculptures in a style reminiscent of the Jetsons and the Flintstones.
Can be expensive for some things, but worthwhile if you value that kind of thing. We have a clock and a table sculpture, and they're our favourite pieces in the house.
It's honestly not my style, but they do look beautiful. I'm certainly surprised about the price... a little more expensive than what I thought it would be but they do look high quality. Congrats on finding something that you guys love to have in your house. I think a lot of people go through life never having that type of thing and just haphazardly collect things.
Many movies do an "art of <movie name>" book. Those are usually the best source of this. To answer the question about articles of this nature. Very rare. This person's entire blog is a treasure trove. He even worked at studio laika! <3
I don't know if it's what you're looking for (it's definitely more short-form at least) but I loved browsing round this site when I first saw it: http://moviesincolor.com/
Very thorough piece, it's good seeing all the images that form the inspiration. I'd like to see something similar for the original Incredibles.
The original Incredibles is one of my favorites. There's a simplicity, pace and elegance to everything that makes it very tight and watchable.
I enjoyed Incredibles II but thought it suffered a little from "sequel ramp-up" where everything is required to be "bigger" and "better". Story is displaced by action, and then you end up rating the movie on the action scenes and sequences rather than a unified whole with story, dialog and action in balance. The visuals were excellent but even then, sometimes too much was crammed in, and not easy to take in due to pace of story advancing quickly.
All I remember is the father -- a superhero -- unable to perform basic child rearing tasks and I tuned out. I don't know what Bird's intention was, but I felt it played into current gender politics rather than addressing them. The first movie was a critique of culture, this was -- an attempt to please?
I don't get worked up about 'dumb men' stereotypes since I'm not dumb and take an active role in raising my children but I felt the second needlessly betrayed the first film. Elastigirl was a superhero. She and her husband may have had somewhat gender-appropriate powers (brawn vs flexibility?) but she was his equal in fighting bad guys. Her becoming a housewife was the satirical part of the film.
So in the second we have a woman who never lived in her husband's shadow -- beyond their assumed identities -- but now the thrust of the story is her outshining her husband?
You can argue that his was satire -- since in the story her taking center stage was a plan driven by PR people and expected ratings -- but I really don't think it hit the mark. Instead of backing it up with something appropriate, Bird just gave us, see, isn't being a housewife hard! Again, Mr Incredible is a superhero, I'm sure he can manage.
My wife felt the same way. Loved the first one, was disappointed by the gender politics of the second.
I’m a father who shares duties equally with my wife. Between us, we cope. When one of us is away, all hell is prone to break loose. That’s what’s I interpreted Mr Incredible’s struggles as - not incompetence, but being overwhelmed by being the sole parent.
That is absolutely my experience as a parent as well. Usually when there's just one of us like that its because of an abnormal situation which adds stress as well. Just keeping the household running becomes a feat of endurance.
And remember, Mr. Incredible is not just acting as the sole parent. He's acting as the sole parent of a baby exhibiting random super powers. If my youngest could phase through walls at will... holly hell! I'm not sure that any solo parent could keep up with that; I don't even think two would be enough.
This is why every kid I know has only one Pixar film they rave about and that's Cars, objectively one of their worst films. Pixar films used to appeal to everyone now they just seem to try to appeal to people who grew up with Pixar and are now adults.
I'm not talking about the gender politics angle, I'm more just talking about they have moved from telling stories about a simple whimsical idea that captures all imaginations which follows through to emotion to maybe trying to be too clever and maybe poignant with their ideas, it's almost like they're writing to the target of an adult Pixar fan that needs validation for their interests rather than everyone.
Just feel like they've lost the joy along the way, putting a Pixar film feels like I'm going to be in for a emotional slog now rather than something enjoyable, can't imagine any child getting excited about watching Inside Out or Up (I understand this is a fan favorite for good reason, but is it any child's favorite?)
Well, it reviews worse than a lot of Pixar movies. Although the idea that all Pixar movies review well is a bit of a selective memory thing too. I observe there's basically two tiers of Pixar movies, the ones that get 9+ out of 10, and the ones that come in at 7 or below. There's not a lot of "OK" Pixar movies, though Incredibles 2 happens to be one of them.
Also, somewhat ironically, I disagree that Cars (Metacritic: 73) is one of Pixar's worst, on the grounds that there are quite a few worse movies from Pixar, not least of which are the two sequels Cars 2 (Metacritic: 57) and Cars 3 (Metacritic: 59) and the spinoff Planes (Metacritic: 39 (!)). Cars is slow, and dripping with nostalgia callouts for people who are now in their 70s or 80s (I asked my father, currently mid-60s, and he said it was even older than anything he was nostalgic for), but it's at least watchable once.
But it will be highly, highly correlated to any reasonable objective metric agreed to by the general public, so it's close enough for government work. I wouldn't use Metacritic to declare an 81 is better than an 80, but a 85 being better than a 44 is pretty solid.
Of course, there's a multiplicity of possible objective metrics, but then, that's why I phrased my sentence the way I did. You're free to define your own, but then, nobody else will care, either.
Any true objective metric would rank films would likely be uncorrelated with reviews - stuff like frames per second, duration, resolution, etc.
I'm of the opinion that talking about "objective metrics" in a discussion of the quality of films makes zero sense. I don't think there is any meaningful way to say any film is objectively worse than another.
Perhaps it seems I'm being too narrow in my definition of "objective," but i don't think so. I'm using it to mean what the word actually means, instead of using "objectively" to mean "in my opinion, which is better than yours," which is how 'whywhywhywhy used it, as far as I can tel.
Which is why I said "will be highly, highly correlated to any reasonable objective metric", rather than "is an objective metric".
This is a technique used all the time in science and engineering, when the underlying hypothetical metric is either impossible to obtain or may not strictly speaking exist.
To be honest, I have no idea what you are trying to say. Metacritic score is "highly, highly correlated" with film duration?
This isn't science or engineering, it's art. You can't objectively determine whether any film is "better" than any other, because the only thing that matters is how an individual viewer likes the film.
We seem to be talking past one another. Have a nice day.
"You try raising a toddler that can uncontrollably turn into a demon, burst into flame, warp into another dimension, and shoot lasers from its eyes."
I was actually somewhat disappointed that the sequel started literally right as the previous one ended. Seeing the parents deal with a non-baby Jack Jack would have been interesting. He's already just barely controllable by some of the world's greatest superheros. It will only get worse when Jack Jack isn't a baby anymore.... given the staggering array of powers Jack Jack is given even in just the original movie, it's not that long before he could straight-up defeat his family members. All the things added in the new movie just make it worse. Keeping one Jack Jack in the house when he wants to play outside in the traffic or whatever is hard; keeping six or eight of them will be impossible. This is for the traffic's protection, not Jack Jack's, because Jack Jack is basically an invincible god on Earth by the end of the second movie. This is going to be a huge parenting problem, because parenting, one way or another, involves a great deal of coercion.
It's been a while since I've seen the original but what threw me for a loop was that at the end of the first movie didn't they basically find out that baby had powers? I thought there was a conversation with the babysitter where she was freaking out and told them that their baby had special needs. Wouldn't you as a parent ask your babysitter at some point in the next few days/weeks/months what she meant about your child given they also saw (maybe not perfectly, but still could see something was up) the villain just had your baby and could've easily escaped with him yet something happened in midair to defeat him? I'm just surprised that they tossed that part of the plot out the window for the 2nd movie. It certainly took me out of the story a bit while I was wondering why they were rehashing that they're all just finding out that the baby has these crazy powers when it seemed likely they would've already known.
The baby demonstrates powers in the first movie when Syndrome tries to abduct him at the very end. But the baby in the air and the rest of the family are on the ground, so maybe they didn't see what was happening? They do see the baby fall, so Mr. Incredible throws up Elastigirl to catch him, who then parachutes the baby down.
> I thought there was a conversation with the babysitter where she was freaking out and told them that their baby had special needs. ... Wouldn't you as a parent ask your babysitter at some point in the next few days/weeks/months
That's in the short 'Jack Jack Attack'. Let me think through this:
* During I1, baby is terrorizing babysitter and destroying house with powers as shown in Jack Jack Attack. JJA explains the baby's newfound powers by saying the babysitter played him classical music. (This aligns with Edna Mode's observation in I2 that the baby responds to music.)
* Syndrome relives the babysitter towards the end of JJA, as he attempts to abduct the baby. (So there's no immediate opportunity to talk to the original babysitter.)
* End of I1, baby escapes from Syndrome using powers that maybe his parents didn't see. Because the crashing plane destroys the house, they can't see the damage his powers did to the house.
So at the end of I1, their house is destroyed, which I think is supposed to explain why they're in a motel at the beginning of I2. But if that's the case, how much time was there between the destruction of the house at the end of I1 and the track meet at the very end of the same movie? (Where Violet gets asked out and the Underminer shows up.)
I think for it to be consistent, you have to believe that there wasn't much time before the track meet in I1, and the parents hadn't talked to the babysitter. Maybe reasonable, given that their house was just destroyed? That said, the family depicted at that track meet didn't look like a family that had just been displaced out of their home because it was destroyed by a plane crash...
Great analysis. Yeah, the family could've easily not seen what happened with Syndrome, though it would be weird if he was flying away with the kiddo and then suddenly the kiddo drops (it's not his MO).
Very interesting... the version of the movie I saw has a scene where the family is in a car and the mom is talking to the babysitter and she's leaving freakier and freakier voicemail messages about JJ. Eventually she says something like 'your baby has special needs.' It wasn't super long and didn't show anything from the babysitter's perspective I don't think. Maybe it was cut out of some other versions.
You're right that they don't seem like a family displaced at the track meet. Everything seemed to be back to normal. Given all the chaos it's possible they never talked to the babysitter but if I were in those shoes I would certainly have found out why she freaked out at least at some point after the end of I1.
Good analysis though. Appreciate you digging in on that.
Good points, I agree with all that. Political correctness and the efforts to flip stereotypes, were overcooked. It's a shame that stories are managed now instead of written.
The whole "screen slave" thing was also a bit too close to current media attention around the topic of screen-time. Too obvious and blunt. Not a lot of imagination in that concept, only a reflection of recently canvased popular topics, like kids being addicted to screens. Viewers want to escape from reality, not be reminded of recent articles about screens, or gender stereotypes.
I really felt this conflicted horribly with the setting, too. I'll accept for movie purposes the nifty modern computer screens that Syndrome uses or is on the Elastibike, but this is the 50s or very early 60s. Yeah, people were fulminating against TV screens then, but not to an extent I'd make a huge movie about it. It's a modern issue in a 1950s world, making even less sense than some of the strained political commentary sometimes set back in time.
I think that's one of the problems with Incredibles setting that 2 only makes worse: the films don't seem to be set in the 50s/60s, they seem to be set in a world that never grew out of the 50s/60s. There is too much anachronism for it to be the 50s/60s. It's maybe the case that Incredibles 1 started in the equivalent of our 50s or 60s, but the time jump of "no supers" and the births and ages of the kids would indicate that most of the Incredibles happened maybe in the 80s/90s.
The timeline is probably a mess, but the clear point is that it can't be set in the 50s/60s so much as a world trapped in the 50s/60s idea of a future. It's retrofuturist nostalgia, at best. (Which between Incredibles 2 and Tomorrowland is perhaps where poor Brad Bird is trapped mentally and needs help escaping?)
> Again, Mr Incredible is a superhero, I'm sure he can manage.
Being physically strong enough to lift a car doesn't really help that much in the parenting front.
As a parent, seeing him struggle with stuff like Common Core math was extremely relatable, and that's what Pixar excels at - fantastical stories about things real people are going through. Up dealt with loss and infertility. Toy Story dealt with growing up. Incredibles deals with trust and family.
I've not seen Incredibles 2 yet, but I have told my kids that they are to "turn off" any show that makes me, their loving dad, out to be some kind of an idiot. I am not a TV dad, we are not a TV family, this is real life, and I love and care for you. And just because we don't drop $10k on yearly Disney vacations doesn't mean we don't have a good life.
I don't necessarily care about the gender politics angle, I think it's just the tale of Bob learning to be a single parent. My problem is with the basics, the basic plot wasn't very well though out. I think Bird really shot himself in the foot by deliberately avoiding a time skip.
Then at the end of the movie supers are legal again thanks to one judge's ruling even though we've been told in previous movies that this is a government ban. There were so many little details that just wrapped themselves up nicely with no thought.
A judge overturning laws and other government decrees can happen in any country with a decent separation of powers, and particularly in the US. I agree that it was a bit rushed in the movie, but the concept is not that unlikely in theory.
It's not just gender politics. Incredibles 2 wasn't an animated film. It was a regular film with bland, unoriginal and in your face critique of modern world. For some reason it was animated.
For example, I can't imagine kids sitting through Screenslaver's monologue on society's vices when I as an adult was immediately bored out of my mind. Or, for god's sake, a meeting of world leaders to sign documents.
The whole movie was one inconsequential set piece after another with exactly one of them being funny and interesting: Edna.
Edit: can anyone explain to me why Frozone is a) so useless and b) given so much screentime?
Ah yes, the grass is always greener on the other side - what a common fallacy! I'm also prone to thinking this. But the truth is that a job is a job: you are under presssure to perform, no matter what you do. And in the case of designing for a movie, you have to churn out dozens or hundreds of images of a certain type and style and actually creating them can turn into a dull task.
Having said that, I find the sheer amount of work that has gone into thendesign of the movie astounding. Having to design every aspect of an imaginary world to that level of detail is hard.
Lots of people think that, but it's not true. The competition for studio work is extraordinarily intense--labor supply significantly exceeds demand--and compensation reflects that. If you think living in the Bay Area is tough as a programmer, try it when you're making a quarter of an engineer's salary (and Pixar, unlike the major L.A. studios, is not unionized). Though I can't speak to Pixar specifically, generally most such positions are on contract--when the production's done, so is the budget for staffing--so you're bouncing from studio to studio constantly looking for work.
Besides, a lot of a production like this is essentially just writing code. I've had multiple industry artist friends tell me that, if they could go back and start over, they would have done computer science as a career and art on the side.
The environments in The Good Dinosaur were stunning....and then the characters were less so. It's like they were designed by two completely different studios.
Pixar really wants to stay out of the uncanny valley with their characters, so they intentionally design them to look "cartoony"--closer to the classic hand-drawn animation of the past. They want their movies to look like animated movies.
"Live action" movies try to make it to the other side of the uncanny valley. Usually the most successful efforts cheat a bit by avoiding human characters. Think Avatar, Gollum, Snoke, Thanoes, etc. They look so real! (If aliens or ring-wracked wretches were real...)
Where movies looks weird is when there are elements on both sides of the uncanny valley--in the case of The Good Dinosaur, the backgrounds look real and the characters look like cartoons.
This was surprising because Pixar is usually careful to avoid this. The sea in Finding Nemo looked amazing, but it didn't really look 100% real--it looked like a beautiful stylized version of a sea. Same with the environments in The Incredibles, as the top blog here details.
Good Dinosaur and Up are both interesting cases of Pixar's environment team exploring if they could use Google Earth (and equivalents) for location scouting, to the point where Good Dinosaur used a lot of direct satellite imagery and terrain data to bootstrap the animation process. Which is fascinating technically, but absolutely an interesting comparison to the less realistic approaches of everything else in the film. Up they managed it quite well because the real place they found as example is fantastic enough to support the rest of the film and the pulp adventure storyline supported that uncanny valley realism; The Good Dinosaur did not find something fantastic enough nor did it really support the story near as well.
I think The Good Dinosaur was one where the directors and writers got removed and replaced during production. Might have been due to the vision changing.
Inb4 “darned execs”: Pixar did basically the same with Toy Story 2, throwing out 90% of the movie with barely a year to go before release date, and it worked out. Sometimes reworking it is the right thing to do.
This must've taken a while to put together and Josh Holtsclaw did a great job with it.
Is there a place that captures these types of details for lots of other movies? If not, I think there's an opportunity to collect all of these types of design analysis in one place. I can't imagine the audience would be huge, but I would guess they're passionate and super interested in this type of thing. I didn't think I would be going into this article but I came away wanting more of these types of articles.