The Incredibles

**The Incredibles** is an American film that was released on November 5, 2004. It is the first instalment in The Incredibles Franchise.

The film was written and directed by Brad Bird.

## Plot

Public opinion turns against Superheroes due to the collateral damage caused by their crime-fighting. After several lawsuits, the government initiates the Superhero Relocation Program, which forces Supers to permanently adhere to their secret identities and abandon their exploits. Fifteen years later, Bob and Helen Parr, formerly known as Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, and their children Violet, Dash and baby Jack-Jack are a suburban family living in Metroville. Although he loves his family, Bob resents the mundanity of his suburban lifestyle and white-collar job. Together with his best friend Lucius Best, formerly known as Frozone, Bob occasionally relives "the glory days" by moonlighting as a vigilante.

After his supervisor prevents him from stopping a mugging, Bob loses his temper and injures him, resulting in his dismissal. Returning home, Bob receives a message from a woman called Mirage, who gives him a mission to destroy a savage tripod-like robot, the Omnidroid, on the remote island of Nomanisan. Mr. Incredible battles and disables it by tricking it into ripping out its own power source.

Mr. Incredible finds the action and higher pay rejuvenating. He improves his relationship with his family and begins rigorous physical training while awaiting another assignment from Mirage over the next two months. Finding a tear in his super suit, he visits superhero costume designer Edna Mode to have it mended. Assuming that Helen knows what Bob is doing, Edna also makes suits for the rest of the family. Setting out for Nomanisan once again, Mr. Incredible discovers Mirage is working for Buddy Pine, a disaffected former fan whom he had rejected as his sidekick. Having adopted the alias of Syndrome, he has been perfecting the Omnidroid by hiring different superheroes to fight it, killing them in the process. Syndrome intends to send the perfected Omnidroid to Metroville, where he will secretly manipulate its controls to defeat it in public, becoming a "hero" himself. He will later sell his inventions so that everyone can become "super", rendering the difference meaningless.

Helen visits Edna and learns what Bob has been up to. She activates a beacon Edna built into the suits to find Mr. Incredible, inadvertently causing him to be captured while infiltrating Syndrome's base. Elastigirl borrows a private plane to travel to Nomanisan. She finds out that Violet and Dash have stowed away, leaving Jack-Jack with a babysitter. Elastigirl's radio transmissions are picked up by Syndrome, who sends missiles to shoot her down. The plane is destroyed, but Elastigirl and the kids survive and use their powers to reach the island. Helen infiltrates the base and discovers Syndrome's plan. Discontented with Syndrome's indifference when her life was threatened, Mirage releases Mr. Incredible and informs him of his family's survival. Helen arrives and races off with Mr. Incredible to find their children. Dash and Violet are chased by Syndrome's guards, but fend them off with their powers before reuniting with their parents. Syndrome captures them all, leaving them imprisoned while he follows the rocket transporting the Omnidroid to Metroville.

The Incredibles escape to Metroville in another rocket with Mirage's help. Due to its advanced artificial intelligence, the Omnidroid recognises Syndrome as a threat to itself and shoots off the remote control on his wrist, making him incapable of controlling it and knocking him unconscious. The Incredibles and Frozone fight the Omnidroid together. Elastigirl acquires the remote control, allowing Mr. Incredible to use one of the robot's claws to destroy its power source. Returning home, the Incredibles find Syndrome, who plans to kidnap Jack-Jack and raise him as his own sidekick out of revenge. As Syndrome flies up toward his jet, Jack-Jack's own superpowers manifest and he escapes Syndrome in midair. Elastigirl catches Jack-Jack, and Mr. Incredible throws his car at Syndrome's plane as he boards it. Syndrome is sucked into the jet's turbine by his own cape and the plane explodes.

Three months later, the Incredibles witness the arrival of a supervillain called the Underminer. They put on their superhero masks, ready to face the new threat together as a family.

## Cast and Characters

* Craig T. Nelson as Mr. Incredible
* Holly Hunter as Elastigirl
* Spencer Fox as Dash Parr
* Sarah Vowell as Violet Parr
* Jason Lee as Syndrome
* Samuel L. Jackson as Frozone
* Eli Fucile and Maeve Andrews as Jack-Jack Parr
* Elizabeth Peña as Mirage
* Brad Bird as Edna Mode
* Jean Sincere as Mrs. Hoganson
* Bud Luckey as Rick Dicker
* Wallace Shawn as Gilbert Huph
* Lou Romano as Bernie Kropp
* Michael Bird as Tony Rydinger
* Dominique Lewis as Bomb Voyage
* Bret Parker as Kari
* Kimberly Adair Clark as Honey Best
* John Ratzenberger as The Underminer

## Music

See Also: The Incredibles (Soundtrack)

The Incredibles is the first Pixar film to be scored by Michael Giacchino. Brad Bird was looking for a specific sound as inspired by the film's retrofuturistic design, the future as seen from the 1960s. John Barry was the first choice to do the film's score, with a trailer of the film given a rerecording of Barry's theme to On Her Majesty's Secret Service. However, Barry did not wish to duplicate the sound of some of his earlier soundtracks; the assignment was instead given to Giacchino. Giacchino noted that recording in the 1960s was largely different from modern day recording and Dan Wallin, the recording engineer, said that Bird wanted an old feel and as such the score was recorded on analog tapes. Wallin noted that brass instruments, which are at the forefront of the film's score, sound better on analog equipment rather than digital. Wallin came from an era in which music was recorded, according to Giacchino, "the right way", which consists of everyone in the same room, "playing against each other and feeding off each other's energy". Many of Giacchino's future soundtracks followed suit with this style of mixing, which has divided critics who feel that the recordings sometimes don't sound natural. Tim Simonec was the conductor/orchestrator for the score's recording.

The film's orchestral score was released on November 2, 2004, three days before the film opened in theaters. It won numerous awards for best score including Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, BMI Film & TV Award, ASCAP Film and Television Music Award, Annie Award, Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award and Online Film Critics Society Award and was nominated for Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, Satellite Award and Broadcast Film Critics Association Award.

## Sequels

The film had one sequel:

* Incredibles 2 (released June 15, 2018)

## Production

### Writing

The Incredibles as a concept dates back to 1993 when Bird sketched the family during an uncertain point in his film career. Personal issues had percolated into the story as they weighed on him in life. During this time, Bird had signed a production deal with Warner Bros. Feature Animation and was in the process of directing his first feature, The Iron Giant. Approaching middle age and having high aspirations for his filmmaking, Bird pondered whether his career goals were attainable only at the price of his family life. He stated, "Consciously, this was just a funny movie about superheroes. But I think that what was going on in my life definitely filtered into the movie." After the box office failure of The Iron Giant, Bird gravitated toward his superhero story.

He imagined it as a homage to the 1960s comic books and spy films from his boyhood and he initially tried to develop it as a 2D cel animation. When The Iron Giant became a box office bomb, he reconnected with old friend John Lasseter at Pixar in March 2000 and pitched his story idea to him. Bird and Lasseter knew each other from their college years at CalArts in the 1970s. Lasseter was sold on the idea and convinced Bird to come to Pixar, where the film would be done in computer animation. The studio announced a multi-film contract with Bird on May 4, 2000. The Incredibles was written and directed solely by Brad Bird, a departure from previous Pixar productions which typically had two or three directors and as many screenwriters with a history of working for the company. In addition, it would be the company's first film in which all characters are human.

Bird came to Pixar with the lineup of the story's family members worked out: a mom and dad, both suffering through the dad's midlife crisis; a shy teenage girl; a cocky ten-year-old boy; and a baby. Bird had based their powers on family archetypes. During production, Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli visited Pixar and saw the film's story reels. When Bird asked if the reels made any sense or if they were just "American nonsense," Miyazaki replied, through an interpreter, "I think it's a very adventurous thing you are trying to do in an American film."

Syndrome was originally written as a minor villain who assaults Bob and Helen at the beginning of the movie, only to die in an explosion that destroys the Parrs' house (in this version, the Smiths), but he was made the main villain because the filmmakers liked him more than the character of Xerek, who was intended to fulfill that role. The Snug character that Helen talks to at the phone in the final film was intended to fly Helen to Nomanisan Island and to die, but he was removed from that position when Lasseter suggested to have Helen pilot the plane herself.

### Animation

Upon Pixar's acceptance of the project, Brad Bird was asked to bring in his own team for the production. He brought up a core group of people he worked with on The Iron Giant. Because of this, many 2D artists had to make the shift to 3D, including Bird himself. Bird found working with CG "wonderfully malleable" in a way that traditional animation is not, calling the camera's ability to easily switch angles in a given scene "marvelously adaptable." He found working in computer animation "difficult" in a different way than working traditionally, finding the software "sophisticated and not particularly friendly." Bird wrote the script without knowing the limitations or concerns that went hand-in-hand with the medium of computer animation. As a result, this was to be the most complex film yet for Pixar. The film's characters were designed by Tony Fucile and Teddy Newton, whom Bird had brought with him from Warner Bros. Like most computer-animated films, The Incredibles had a year-long period of building the film from the inside out: modeling the exterior and understanding controls that would work the face and the body, the articulation of the character, before animation could even begin. Bird and Fucile tried to emphasize the graphic quality of good 2D animation to the Pixar team, who had only worked primarily in CG. Bird attempted to incorporate teaching from Disney's Nine Old Men that the crew at Pixar had "never really emphasized."

For the technical crew members, the film's human characters posed a difficult set of challenges. Bird's story was filled with elements that were difficult to animate with CGI back then. Humans are widely considered to be the most difficult things to execute in animation. Pixar's animators filmed themselves walking to better grasp proper human motion. Creating an all-human cast required creating new technology to animate detailed human anatomy, clothing and realistic skin and hair. Although the technical team had some experience with hair and cloth in Monsters, Inc. (2001), the amount of hair and cloth required for The Incredibles had never been done by Pixar up until this point. Moreover, Bird would tolerate no compromises for the sake of technical simplicity. Where the technical team on Monsters, Inc. had persuaded director Pete Docter to accept pigtails on Boo to make her hair easier to animate, the character Violet had to have long hair that obscured her face; in fact, this was integral to her character. Violet's long hair, which was extremely difficult to animate, was only successfully animated toward the end of production. In addition, animators had to adapt to having hair both underwater and blowing through the wind. Disney was initially reluctant to make the film because of these issues, thinking that a live-action film would be preferable, but Lasseter denied this.

The Incredibles was everything that computer-generated animation had trouble doing. It had human characters, it had hair, it had water, it had fire, it had a massive number of sets. The creative heads were excited about the idea of the film, but once I showed story reels of exactly what I wanted, the technical teams turned white. They took one look and thought, “This will take ten years and cost $500 million. How are we possibly going to do this?”

So I said, “Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.” A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well.
We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories and we changed the way a number of things are done here. For less money per minute than was spent on the previous film, Finding Nemo, we did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do. All this because the heads of Pixar gave us leave to try crazy ideas.
Not only did The Incredibles cope with the difficulty of animating CG humans, but also many other complications. The story was bigger than any prior story at the studio, was longer in running time, and had four times the number of locations. Supervising technical director Rick Sayre noted that the hardest thing about the film was that there was "no hardest thing," alluding to the amount of new technical challenges: fire, water, air, smoke, steam and explosions were all additional to the new difficulty of working with humans. The film's organizational structure could not be mapped out like previous Pixar features and it became a running joke to the team. Sayre said the team adopted “Alpha Omega," where one team was concerned with building modeling, shading, and layout, while another dealt with final camera, lighting, and effects. Another team, dubbed the "character team," digitally sculpted, rigged and shaded all of the characters, and a simulation team was responsible for developing simulation technology for hair and clothing. There were at least 781 visual effects shots in the film and they were quite often visual gags, such as the window shattering when Bob angrily shuts the car door. Additionally, the effects team improved their modeling of clouds, using volumetric rendering for the first time.

The skin of the characters gained a new level of realism from a technology to produce known as "subsurface scattering." The challenges did not stop with modeling humans. Bird decided that in a shot near the film's end, baby Jack-Jack would have to undergo a series of transformations, and in one of the five planned he would turn himself into a kind of goo. Technical directors, who anticipated spending two months or even longer to work out the goo effect, stealing precious hours from production that had already entered its final and most critical stages, petitioned the film's producer, John Walker, for help. Bird, who had himself brought Walker over from Warner Bros. to work on the project, was at first immovable, but after arguing with Walker in several invective-laced meetings over the course of two months, Bird finally conceded. Bird also insisted that the storyboards define the blocking of characters' motions, lighting, and camera movements, which had previously been left to other departments rather than storyboarded.

Bird admitted that he "had the knees of the studio trembling under the weight" of The Incredibles, but called the film a "testament to the talent of the animators at Pixar," who were admiring the challenges the film provoked. He recalled, "Basically, I came into a wonderful studio, frightened a lot of people with how many presents I wanted for Christmas and then got almost everything I asked for."

### Casting

Lily Tomlin was originally considered for the role of Edna Mode, but later turned it down. After several failed attempts to cast Edna Mode, Bird took on her voice role himself. It was an extension of the Pixar custom of tapping in-house staff whose voices came across particularly well on scratch dialogue tracks. Sarah Vowell was offered the role of Violet unexpectedly; Bird wanted to cast Vowell as Violet after hearing her voice on the National Public Radio program, This American Life. Bird stated that she was "perfect" for the part and immediately called her to offer her the role.

## Broadcast

The film opened on November 5, 2004, as Pixar's first film to be rated PG (for "action violence"). Its theatrical release was accompanied with a Pixar short film Boundin'. The promotional campaign included an official website with video segments, games, and printable memorabilia. While Pixar celebrated another triumph with The Incredibles, Steve Jobs was embroiled in a public feud with the head of its distribution partner, The Walt Disney Company. This would eventually lead to the ousting of Michael Eisner and Disney's acquisition of Pixar the following year.

In March 2014, Disney CEO and chairman Bob Iger announced that the film would be reformatted and re-released in 3D.

On May 11, 2018, Disney and IMAX announced that the film would be reissued and digitally re-mastered for IMAX theaters (alongside its sequel, Incredibles 2) using their DMR Technology in a double feature for a one-day only, "Fan Event", on June 13.

## Reception

### Critical Response

The film received a 97% approval rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, based on 245 reviews, with an average rating of 8.35 out of 10. This, as of January 2018, makes it the 20th-highest-rated animated film of all time. The site's consensus reads "Bringing loads of wit and tons of fun to the animated superhero genre, The Incredibles easily lives up to its name." Metacritic, another review aggregator, indicates the film was met with "universal acclaim", with a score of 90 out of 100 based on reviews from 41 critics. Audiences polled for CinemaScore gave the film an "A+" on an "A+ to F" scale.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three-and-a-half out of four, writing that the film "alternates breakneck action with satire of suburban sitcom life" and is "another example of Pixar's mastery of popular animation." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone also gave the film three-and-a-half, calling it "one of the year's best" and saying that it "doesn't ring cartoonish, it rings true." Giving the film three-and-a-half as well, People magazine found that The Incredibles "boasts a strong, entertaining story and a truckload of savvy comic touches."

Eleanor Ringel Gillespie of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was bored by the film's "recurring pastiches of earlier action films", concluding that "the Pixar whizzes do what they do excellently; you just wish they were doing something else." Jessica Winter of The Village Voice criticised the film for "playing as a standard summer action film", despite being released in early November. Her review, titled as "Full Metal Racket," noted that The Incredibles "announces the studio's arrival in the vast yet overcrowded Hollywood lot of eardrum-bashing, metal-crunching action sludge."

Travers also named The Incredibles as #6 on his list of the decade's best films, writing "Of all the Pixar miracles studded through the decade, The Incredibles still delights me the most. It's not every toon that deals with midlife crisis, marital dysfunction, child neglect, impotence fears, fashion faux pas and existential angst." The National Review Online named The Incredibles no. 2 on its list of the 25 best conservative movies of the last 25 years, saying that it "celebrates marriage, courage, responsibility and high achievement." Entertainment Weekly named the film No. 25 on its list of the 25 greatest action films ever and no. 7 on its list of the 20 best animated movies ever. IGN ranked the film as the third favorite animated film of all time in a list published in 2010. In 2012, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz declared The Incredibles as the greatest superhero film he has ever seen: "That thing works as a James Bond spoof; a meditation on identities, secret and otherwise; a domestic comedy; a statement on exceptionalism vs. mediocrity, and the perils of the nanny state… And yet it all hangs together. No part feels perfunctory or stupid. It’s all deeply felt." He would also later name the film as the "greatest action movie of the aughts, with Hero and Kung Fu Hustle following close behind."

### Box Office

Despite concerns that the film would receive underwhelming results, the film's domestic gross was $70,467,623 in its opening weekend from 7,600 screens at 3,933 theaters, averaging $17,917 per theater or $9,272 per screen, the highest opening-weekend gross for a Pixar film (the record was later broken in 2010 by Toy Story 3, with $110,307,189), the highest November opening weekend for a Disney film (the record was broken in 2013 by Thor: The Dark World with $85.7 million), the highest opening weekend for a non-sequel animated feature (the record was broken in 2007 by The Simpsons Movie, with $74,036,787), and the highest opening weekend for a non-franchise-based film for just over five years when Avatar opened with $77,025,481. This opening was the second-highest for an animated film at the time. The film stayed at #1 in its second weekend, grossing another $50,251,359, dropping just 29 percent, and easily outgrossing new animated opener The Polar Express. The film ultimately grossed $261,441,092, making it the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2004. Worldwide, the film grossed $631,442,092, ranking fourth for 2004. It is also the second-highest-grossing 2004 animated film behind Shrek 2 ($919.8 million).

## Home Media

The film was first released on both VHS and a two-disc collector's edition DVD set on March 15, 2005. The DVD set included two newly commissioned Pixar short films, Jack-Jack Attack and Mr. Incredible and Pals, which were made specifically for this home-video release, and Boundin', a Pixar short film that premiered alongside the feature film in its original theatrical release. The VHS release only featured the short, Boundin'. It was the highest-selling DVD of 2005, with 17.38 million copies sold. The film was also released on UMD for the Sony PSP.

Disney released the film on Blu-ray in North America on April 12, 2011 and on 4K UHD Blu-ray on June 5, 2018; this marks Disney's first 4K Blu-ray reissue on the format.