- I'm Tony Fucile. - I'm Steven Hunter.
I'm Alan Barillaro. We're the supervising animators...
FUCILE: Of The Incredibles. HUNTER: Known as...
FUCILE: The Three...
BARILLARO: Caball... HUNTER: ...Eros.
(LAUGHING) Hi, I'm Gini. I'm an animator.
And I'm Dave. I'm also an animator.
I'm Kureha. I'm an animator.
- I am Dave Mullins, animator. - I'm John Kahrs, animator.
- Robert Russ, animator. - Angus MacLane, animator.
I'm Travis Hathaway.
I worked on a few sequences here in The Incredibles.
Doug Frankel. I worked on a few sequences on The Incredibles.
Peter Sohn. I'm proud to say I've worked on this film as an animator.
MacLANE: This is the best film we'll ever work on.
There is some amazing animation here by Mike Stocker.
MULLINS: "Here you go. First shot of the film.
"Have fun."
MacLANE: Adam Burke, his first shot, too. And CG.
that came on our picture,
including myself...
We're used to timing our drawings differently
than you would on the computer, where hand-drawn,
you time it. Every other frame, you do a drawing.
On the computer, it's on what we call "ones."
In every single frame, there's a different pose or move.
So, if you're thinking on twos, which is every other frame,
and you translate to ones, it looks a little watery.
Things get a little swishy and slow.
That happened to me and every 2D guy.
Their first scene got a little bit slushy and slow.
HUNTER: When you're doing a 2D, your brain fills in the gap.
FUCILE: Your brain fills in the gap, yeah.
BARILLARO: That's what Brad would always say, "Put it in the fridge."
We had to eventually take...
There's a certain point where you get to put away your shot for a while
and go on to other stuff and get your chops and reps in,
then go back to the shot, and it would be a lot easier to finish in between.
KAHRS: There are a couple of shots that are long enough
that animators spent the majority of the production working on them.
RUSS: They came back many times for little dialogue tweaks during production.
MacLANE: Brad's whole idea about having the interviews at the beginning
was a calm beginning to what would be an action opening.
He wanted people to go, "What movie did I say I was gonna see?"
FUCILE: The first scene I did was Mrs. Hogenson.
What does she say?
HUNTER: "Denied? Denying my claim?"
FUCILE: Two things I learned. For one thing,
timing on twos then going to ones doesn't work.
You need to re-space everything.
But, also, in hand-drawn stuff,
you're always looking for ways to make things feel pliable.
You squash and stretch everything, everything is changing shape.
With a 3D puppet, you do that,
and you feel like you're gonna hear the skull bones crack.
It doesn't look right. You've got to be subtle with it.
I remember I overdid that head squash and stretch.
I had to keep pulling it back.
Pretty soon I got rid of it and just used the facial stuff.
It's like you have the control that you have when you're doing hand drawing.
You can redo things until you get it the way you like it.
They're stop-motion puppets, and you don't have the control.
You're pretty much pushing the puppet one frame at a time,
- and you're stuck with what you have. - HUNTER: That's an interesting combination.
Just finding the right balance where you don't...
Doug Sweetland will hate me for saying this, but to feel it rather than see it.
Just feel it a little bit in the head.
FUCILE: There was a thing that John Kahrs, you know, told Peter Sohn.
Pete did a scene that was looking a little animation-y, flourish-y,
which you sometimes do when you're bored with a scene.
HUNTER: Too many gestures? FUCILE: You give him, you know...
The head does a little too much stuff, and you wag the hands around.
You're trying to come up with something. John said, "No fluff."
He wrote it down on a piece of paper and stuck it on his monitor.
- No fluff. - HUNTER: Nice.
FUCILE: And stuck to it.
CHRIS DiGIOVANNI: How do you think Brad fared,
changing from the medium 2D to 3D?
A learning process for him, too?
HUNTER: Yeah, for a long time, he kept referring to them as drawings.
FUCILE: Yeah, he would call them drawings,
and he started using some technical terms by the end.
HUNTER: By the end. T-Z. BARILLARO: It was difficult, too, that...
HUNTER: That was one of the 50-million controls.
BARILLARO: It was difficult, too, that...
In 2D, you'd rough out the person you animate.
The key poses would then be handed off to clean up.
That's the same person in computers.
You're gonna finish off the scene, and in-between it
and get everything in there. That was another thing.
FUCILE: Yeah, because in 2D you approve the rough scene.
Sometimes, maybe, some of the in-betweens aren't in there.
If you have a good assistant, if it's off-model, I let him...
It's done. It's done in rough animation.
But that was an adjustment for him. He finaled a scene before it was...
"That's good to go." But it wasn't finished.
HUNTER: He's thinking some guy down the road will take care of it.
Put it on a modeler who will do the in-betweens properly.
No, that's me. Same person.
I do them both.
FUCILE: I remember the first time we looked
at a scene, a test scene of Bob that Angus had done.
Angus animates where you see all the in-betweens on ones.
He blocks it out, but you're seeing it move. Brad and I were like, "Huh?"
We're used to seeing post-tests with single drawings
in each pose, and that's all you're seeing.
If it's a four-phrase scene, or four ideas, you see four drawings.
But we're seeing things kind of moving in and out,
and it was a little...
It was hard to make the call on that.
HUNTER: What about the character floating around in space
with just the legs, not even animated?
FUCILE: It was in the test, walking... HUNTER: It's bouncing up and down.
BARILLARO: That was nervous for us, too, I think.
Having Brad and everybody come here,
and you wanted to prove to them
that humans are the most difficult to animate in 2D and 3D.
We did prove we could do it.
HUNTER: It really was a different language.
He was bringing something new, making us pay attention to our poses
so much more than we ever did, you know, as a group.
FUCILE: That was another interesting thing too,
because we got the characters done fairly quickly, their geometry.
I didn't realize how intense the articulation phase was gonna be.
Getting all those controls would take such a long time.
It was so complex and so involving.
And that was Steve who did that.
- That was... - HUNTER: Me and who else?
Angus, John Kahrs, Dave Mullins.
FUCILE: Rob... Rob Russ.
HUNTER: How do we make them as loose as possible and make sense,
so it's not like you're overbuilding, putting too many controls in the car?
Pretty soon you can't drive it, there's so much stuff.
You're finding a balance between keeping it visual and simple,
but getting everything we wanted.
We haven't done muscles before. We have muscles in this film.
We have a ton of cloth.
Everybody is in clothes. Hair.
It's not only like, "Bob's got his tuxedo outfit that he wears the entire film."
He's got about eight or nine different outfits.
RUSS: Comparing it to Monsters, where Sulley was Sulley for the whole film.
They had to cover him in snow, but Mike didn't have anything.
Boo just had a shirt.
It was something like 40 or 50 costume changes throughout the whole film.
Maybe more than that.
But different hairstyles. Helen has two hairstyles.
Then they'd have to tweak the hair parameters per shot,
depending on what's going on in the shot.
It's an immense amount of work to get that to look right.
From our standpoint, the environment the animator would work in,
Tom Hahn and the animation tools group
did a lot of work to give us a whole new set of tools to work with.
In-camera controls to pose the character.
We had this new timing tool we called X-sheet,
inspired by the old traditional animator's X-sheet,
where we could time out shots with just images.
So we'd say, "Pose out five different poses."
You'd time those images, saving time in figuring out the acting in a shot.
In every character, we had a full set of constraints
where you could constrain a body part to another body part,
which sounds like, of course, you'd want to be able
to constrain the hand to the head, but we couldn't do that previously.
That was one thing we knew. This was such a physical film.
We were gonna have to be able to do that stuff.
KAHRS: Some of the stuff hasn't changed at all, though,
like some of the tools that we use, for about 10 years.
Even though it sounds boring,
some of the input tools that we use to animate have hardly changed at all.
It's a testament to how simple and effective they are.
RUSS: Absolutely. KAHRS: MDT is like a pencil to me now.
It's always the same.
MacLANE: MDT is one of the tools that we use, for the uninitiated.
MULLINS: In Monsters, there wasn't really a rig.
You'd set up the character from scratch.
The thing that let us get all these characters...
Bomb Perignon is Frozone.
HUNTER: We were going, "We've got to build background characters."
That included Bomb Voyage and everybody.
And we were like, "Okay, how are we gonna do that,
"because we need to build a universe of people?"
"Well, okay, I need six female models that I can pull around,
"and six male models I can pull around to get different shapes."
"Can't afford that." "Okay."
Johnny Walker says, "No, can't afford it."
"Well, I need three of each." "No, can't afford it."
Then, finally, we got down to one model.
We get one model, a quarter of the time that we did for most main characters,
but we had to build the universe out of them.
BARILLARO: This is Johnny Walker's here, too.
He's not that old, but he probably aged this much, though, on this film.
FUCILE: Did you wanna finish about the one guy?
HUNTER: (CLEARS THROAT) Just that it's one model we had to get
all our background characters out of.
Bomb Voyage wasn't one of those because we didn't have that model yet.
But he was Frozone and we pulled around to get that model.
Then the rest are, like...
The cops, all these people in the newsreel here,
all these people here, they're the same model.
We just put controls in to pull the noses around, and eyes
and ears and head sizes.
All kinds of weird stuff, like chins and cheeks.
It was just going through, making sure they look different enough
and not like the same model.
DiGIOVANNI: Do you think it was successful?
HUNTER: We learned a lot.
I think... I don't know.
BARILLARO: Never happy. All we're watching right now
is a lot of mistakes and pain.
Life is flashing by, watching this film. It's hard to talk about it.
It's like if someone put your life into an hour and a half.
You just sit there going, (GROANS) "Pain." And fun stuff, too.
That you feel like you didn't do anything,
even though you worked your ass off and did a lot of footage.
Even the people that did a lot of footage...
It goes by so fast, you're lucky to do a few seconds.
That's a lot of output, if you do a couple seconds worth.
Like, a minute worth would be a lot.
MULLINS: How many fixes were on this? 5,000 animation fixes?
MacLANE: The average show has 2-to-3,000.
There's 5,000 animation fixes on this show alone.
MULLINS: And there's 5,000. Brad just said, "Screw it."
(LAUGHING) "Can't get to them."
FUCILE: What does the average animator do on a film, 200 feet?
At Pixar? 100 feet?
So you're lucky to get a minute in.
- Wow. - BARILLARO: Yeah, they're working.
FUCILE: So if you get a minute done, that's pretty good.
DiGIOVANNI: One minute in four years. BARILLARO: Wow.
Thanks, man. That's really depressing.
(COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
HUNTER: Here's a scene, Tony, I remember,
when you did the Hogenson scene.
"Denied? You deny my claim?" You wanted to jiggle the earlobes.
You were like, "Can't do it. There's no control to jiggle them."
"I need them!"
You had to bitch about her for a while.
FUCILE: Well, it was such an extreme close-up.
They didn't look right. They had to move.
Just a simple little swing, that's all they needed.
So we just did it under the table.
HUNTER: Who did you pay off? FUCILE: I think Carmen did.
BARILLARO: You guys should talk about this
because this is the first sequence
in the film that was in production.
So this is the beginning of production for us.
FUCILE: Everyone was excited to start pushing stuff around.
HUNTER: Go nuts and extreme with it because we put all these controls in.
You could take it all over the place.
But Brad actually had to apologize. He's telling everybody to calm down.
"Hey, calm down. You'll get to do it again some other time."
FUCILE: If you freeze through some of those Angus scenes of Huph,
the little guy, you could see some of those controls.
You can see when the hands are scaled larger.
For a frame or two.
His head is scaled a couple times.
There's lots of stretch and squash going on.
MacLANE: I gotta give Mark Walsh credit for that idea
of doing "Sally sob story"
as this "la-la" thing.
Doug Dooley did a great animation of pencils here.
RUSS: Beautiful. MacLANE: I couldn't do it.
I said, "Dooley, can you do it?" and he kicked it out of the park.
It was great.
HUNTER: A little looseness we got to put into Bernie.
We got to do the pass on the bends on the arms.
FUCILE: Makes a huge difference. HUNTER: An amazing difference.
FUCILE: It's a control that keeps them from looking too marionette-like.
HUNTER: You put a rotate on an arm or something like that,
it always keeps its shape no matter where you move it.
But if you put a bend control in that, bend it between the wrist and elbow,
you can loosen it up by creating a nice arc
between the elbow through the hand.
And it really makes a difference, I think, through all this stuff.
When you didn't have it in, it looked really stiff.
BARILLARO: It's just trying to get to it all.
HUNTER: That's kind of a big head.
FUCILE: Those two are the same character.
HUNTER: That's right. That's Universal Man.
FUCILE: That's the most dramatic example
of different head shapes in the same character.
HUNTER: Until later in the movie.
- Frank and Ollie. - FUCILE: Oh, that's right.
BARILLARO: That also brings up that myth
that you can't go off-model in computers.
It's there for you. It's a puppet that you really can...
If you can stretch Frozone into Bomb Voyage,
you can really push the characters.
I think on this film, more than any, we had a lot of fixes.
We were really trying to keep it on-model and clean as possible.
I forget what we ended up with, something like 3,000?
FUCILE: 5,000. DiGIOVANNI: 6,000.
BARILLARO: Six? FUCILE: Jeez.
BARILLARO: Six thousand. FUCILE: That was just the last week.
(COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
BARILLARO: Four fixers cranking at all times.
HUNTER: You are cheating humans.
We're doing stuff here to cheat the daylights out of these things.
But we're doing it based on stuff we've learned in hand-drawn animation.
We're really trying to apply a lot of the same principles.
The shaping of eyelids, the way you would see that in a drawing.
- We would look at old Pinocchio, or... - FUCILE: Dalmatians was something.
HUNTER: Yeah, we talked about that a lot. That scene with Roger.
FUCILE: We really didn't want to fall into the trap,
which a lot of computer films do, where we could put pockmarks on here
and throw in all this detail on this flesh and get realistic.
It was something we didn't want to do. We wanted to stay caricatured
and not shy away from the fact that this is a puppet film
with 2D principles layered in.
BARILLARO: Caricature, sometimes, is more realistic.
You get the sense of the person when you distill it down to something,
rather than the dead zombie corpses of the realistic.
FUCILE: It's like Al Hirschfeld. You look at a drawing of anybody...
Carol Channing, if you take a photo of Carol Channing and trace it exact,
right away, your eye would go to the caricatures.
It's more her. It captures the essence.
HUNTER: It's how your mind remembers it.
FUCILE: Pick up all the little goodies and eliminate all the extra junk.
So it was resisting that.
MULLINS: One of the cool things that was a great tool for us
was the boards that Mark Andrews and his team did,
Andy Jimenez, Ricardo Curtis and Ted Mathot,
and a bunch of guys that I'm probably forgetting.
- Kevin O'Brien, Peter Sohn. - RUSS: Peter Sohn.
MULLINS: I mean, we had amazing boards to work from,
to the point where we were almost worried... Early on,
I remember talking to you, Rob, going, "Man, I don't know.
"They already got all the ideas there. What's gonna be left?"
RUSS: "We're just gonna in-between it."
MULLINS: And Brad's like, "No, man, trust me.
"There's gonna be plenty of work."
He couldn't have been more right.
MacLANE: Well, the previous sequence, with Bob picking up the car,
that's stealing directly from the boards.
It was Mark Andrews. I was trying to match them.
And you know what? I think they work better in the boards.
I don't think it ever got the starkness
and hilarity that Andrews had.
You try to match the boards.
FUCILE: Early on, Lou and I were looking at
Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, (LAUGHING) which are really
unbelievably charming-looking things.
They were done in Japan, this stop-motion studio in Japan.
I don't think people know a lot about who sculpted these characters.
But the ones that I was amazed with were the ones that were drawn
by Paul Coker, who's a MAD magazine artist.
And they were able to take those drawings
and turn them into these puppets that really look like his style,
no matter which way you turn them.
Same with Mad Monster Party, that was another one.
Jack Davis designed those characters.
So, whoever those artists were, I swear they're brilliant
and really able to capture the simple shapes.
We knew we weren't gonna go that caricature
because the tone of the story is not that broad.
It's not really right.
Hopefully, we've caught that sweet spot
between pushing it too far and too real.
HUNTER: The biggest thing that helped us when articulating these was
you had the sculpts done down at Disney by Kent Melton.
Just having those on our desk when we were articulating
was such a big help.
It was like your drawings were right there in 3D.
You could turn it around, look at it. It really would give you an idea of...
As you built a control that moves Helen's mouth,
you knew what it should look like from all angles.
- It was a big help. - FUCILE: Yeah, it's great.
That was fun because for most of his career in animation,
he was doing maquettes for 2D films for reference,
for the animators to draw from,
which was not as direct as this, where you pretty much did it.
We got those first batch of sculpts and we were pretty clear,
"This is what we want the film to look like."
Hopefully... I'll have to ask him what he thinks when he sees it.
HUNTER: He hasn't seen it?
FUCILE: He hasn't seen anything yet. I think he'll be happy.
RUSS: This is one of those sequences that epitomizes the whole film,
where it's the family doing family stuff.
KAHRS: With superpowers. RUSS: It's close-up acting,
it's superpowers, and at the end, it devolves into this big-action sequence.
I remember thinking in pre-production, figuring out how to do the film.
From here on it was, "Man, this is gonna be really difficult to do."
KAHRS: Shawn has the nicest arcs... RUSS: Awesome shot.
KAHRS: ...I think, of any of us.
When Bob is on the phone later on,
he's arcing, and it's a pleasing, satisfying motion.
BARILLARO: That shot was Frozone saying, "Good night, Helen."
FUCILE: That's a good story. HUNTER: Oh, jeez.
FUCILE: Brad was on vacation.
HUNTER: He left the bozos,
the inmates in charge of the asylum. Right?
BARILLARO: Shawn Krause animated Bob saying, "Good night, Helen."
We all thought it was awesome.
And it really worked. It was pretty funny.
Brad gave us a look like we were crazy.
It was really Frozone who was talking. Samuel I. Jackson.
HUNTER: You had to re-animate it?
BARILLARO: It happens when you go out of town.
FUCILE: He was nailing me for that.
I was gone, too. I'm like, "What are you talking about?"
- "Come on, man." - HUNTER: "Listen to that."
FUCILE: "Listen, does that sound like Greg to you?"
I'm like, "Don't hurt me."
HUNTER: "Please don't hurt me."
BARILLARO: "You're scaring me."
HUNTER: This is two guys sitting in a car.
We realized we should cast this out.
You try to cast animators.
They'll get a group of shots with a bunch of characters,
or we'll separate by character. We wanted to because it's so distinctive.
There's great lines of dialogue there.
We ended up casting out to Mike Venturini.
BARILLARO: And Mike Wu. Who are two friends.
Who sat in the car.
I remember Mike saying that as soon as he was cast,
he was like, "Man, this is awesome.
"In what film am I gonna be able to animate
"two guys just sitting in a car having a conversation?"
It's just one of those things. As an animator, you never...
To be given a chance to act out that kind of scene.
FUCILE: Venturini did Frozone.
And Mike Wu was Bob.
HUNTER: That goes to what I heard Brad saying.
He'd write scenes, because he as an animator wanted to animate that.
"I wanna animate two guys in a car talking.
"I wanna animate a husband and wife yelling at each other."
BARILLARO: There was a first time where... I remember being in dailies,
that's where we get together and look at our shots on a big screen,
and there would be a great shot.
Brad would still say, "Well, it's good, but it's something I've seen before.
"I've seen that gesture. I've written something that...
"I'm trying to make scenes for you guys that are new
"and bring something to the table that's you, that's new and fresh.
"Let's push the acting."
HATHAWAY: That's another thing they tried to do,
so that you can work within the continuity of the scene.
You don't have to do one big scene here
and worry about hooking it up to the scene before and after
that you didn't touch at all.
If you can get, like, 10 scenes in a row, like my Frozone stuff in the fire,
it's a lot easier to hook that stuff up
and really simulate a real performance in there.
This Frozone stuff was my favorite stuff that I did in the film.
Pushing hand poses and...
FRANKEL: I remember how excited you were
You had to imagine that when you were animating.
HATHAWAY: It's difficult.
There's so much stuff on top of these characters.
That it's difficult to imagine all that.
There's stuff I spent a lot of time on that you can't even see at all. (LAUGHS)
FRANKEL: Isn't that the way it always goes?
BARILLARO: Even the masks are cool.
Later on in the film when he...
When they're wearing their superhero masks.
HUNTER: Animation by Alan Barillaro.
FUCILE: That scene of him in the fire throwing the stuff, that Travis did,
there are amazing hand poses there.
HUNTER: A little flick. FUCILE: He just flicks it.
It's very comic book. Jack Kirby.
RUSS: There definitely was a lot of attention to facial detail.
That comes from Brad and Tony more than anything.
HATHAWAY: Hunter. RUSS: Hunter, too.
He pays attention to the facial stuff a lot.
HUNTER: I love this little Shatner move he does before he gets in the car.
He does this pull-up, trying to stop his weight.
Total Shatner.
Thank God. A little Shatner in this movie.
BARILLARO: You always try to get a little Shatner in.
HUNTER: You gotta have a little Shatner.
FUCILE: This is one of Ron Zorman's first scenes.
This one here, the cake-eating stuff.
BARILLARO: The actual cake eating disturbs me to watch,
because I saw that footage... Dave Mullins did the animation.
He actually sat down with a giant piece of cake.
- He bought a whole cake. - HUNTER: His wife made the cake.
BARILLARO: Is that what happened? HUNTER: His wife made it.
BARILLARO: He just showed me all this footage of him
scarfing back a giant piece of cake and delivering a line.
I mean, he ate the whole cake in about 20 minutes.
It was just disgusting.
HUNTER: You should put that footage on the DVD.
FUCILE: This is interesting.
This section is animated by four different people, this argument.
But it really feels unified.
Brad was really on top of this one.
HUNTER: It really does flow from one animator to the other.
Because this is a case where we casted it
in chunks of five or six shots in a row to four different people.
And each of them worked on Bob and Helen.
As it flowed through the sequence, it had this build to it.
I think it was just how we cast it, that it actually...
It just flowed nicely from one to the other.
And having Brad stay on top of it.
FUCILE: It's interesting, too, as we were going along,
if there wasn't what we call a "polish pass," where you guys
put in subtle squishes, and a little squash and stretch in the eyes,
little tiny things in the lids.
When we saw it in digital dailies, suddenly Mom, for example,
would turn into porcelain.
She looked fine on our computer screens,
- but if that little pass wasn't done... - HUNTER: With all the lighting.
FUCILE: ...it really stiffened things up.
It's amazing how you had to do it. There were no shortcuts with this stuff.
HUNTER: Mom was one that was really easy to take off-model quickly.
She was the most difficult, making sure people were on-model.
BARILLARO: The bigger the head and the thinner the neck, like Mom and Vi.
It was difficult to make that shoulder and neck relationship feel real
- and not too puppet-y. - HUNTER: Right.
Even if you move your head, it has to be reflected on the body.
BARILLARO: Somehow tied into the chest.
HUNTER: I think it's something we all wanted to see.
We really wanted to see a movie like this get made.
Brad drops down from the sky, and we're like, "Oh!"
FUCILE: Early on, before he even came on the picture,
we were just talking about what we wanted to see,
and that we hadn't seen.
We knew it wouldn't be easy.
BARILLARO: He wanted to prove something, too, as a department.
Brad definitely instills that, (LAUGHS)
that feeling in you that you're the underdog in the situation.
You really want to prove that we can do the best balance between 2D and 3D.
There is no difference.
Good animation is good animation, and this is the most difficult task,
doing good caricatured human animation.
It was something we hadn't nailed, so we're out to prove something.
- This was a perfect film to do it. - HUNTER: Hallelujah.
FUCILE: It was just a lot. A big bite.
It was just a lot to do.
The amount of stuff, in terms of this type of acting,
the number of characters and there was lots of action.
HUNTER: Even locations. FUCILE: Locations.
BARILLARO: If it was a regular, live-action film,
instead of being shot on three locations, it's shot on about 80 locations.
- So, it was a lot. - FUCILE: And it was long.
It was 10 minutes longer than a typical film?
That's a lot of extra work.
is we got chunks of shots.
Usually, you get two or three shots at a time.
On this film, we got 10 shots at a time, 15 shots.
I think Angus got, like, 200 shots at a time. (LAUGHS)
RUSS: He animated a minute and a half straight
in the Bob vs. Omnibot part.
MacLANE: Yeah, it's a minute and a half.
MULLINS: It's really cool because we had five guys do the scene,
and we all just hooked up with one another.
It made it so easy.
It could've been 20 animators animating the scene.
RUSS: In the past, it would've been. We'd usually get one or two shots.
MULLINS: And it just wouldn't feel
as continuous as a single idea.
RUSS: From an artistic standpoint, too, you can say, "I animated this piece."
A sort of ownership of that.
To get the looseness in there, we had to first build it.
That was with a small group arguing over and over again,
then getting that group to re-learn how we do things.
Then we had to take on a group of 50 people,
and teach them again how to re-learn their stuff.
It was quite a learning curve at the beginning.
We taught them all the controls, and all the new tools,
and then let them go.
A lot of people did an admirable job.
It was just a lot to take in early on.
And that was when they got tired.
There was a point early on where people were like,
"Oh, my God. This is huge."
BARILLARO: But the most rewarding. This is why you're here.
Brad always reminded you why you wanted to be an animator to begin with.
It takes you right back to when you were a kid,
seeing an old Disney movie, Jungle Book or something like that.
There was a lot of work that was put into that
to get it to that level.
You eventually find out for yourself that it's a tremendous amount of work.
So you really have to...
Everybody dug their heels in and helped each other.
He really bred that, "Go talk to that person, that young animator.
"That young animator should talk to that senior..."
That we're all in this together
and that we can only do it as one big group.
HUNTER: His story at the beginning was like,
"None of us is the best animator in this room, but together we could be.
"We can build that bird!" It's was like Braveheart.
(HUNTER EXCLAIMS)
It was such a great talk.
BARILLARO: How many speeches? Dailies was always...
HUNTER: It was either a speech or a rant.
BARILLARO: A rant.
- Usually, a lot of rants. - FUCILE: Which are like speeches.
HUNTER: He would always polish off a rant with "Go team!"
BARILLARO: He could've taken the road of telling us what he wanted,
"Here it is. Just do this and you're fine."
But instead, he wanted us to understand where he was coming from,
where, at this moment, this character was, why he wrote it.
He made it so personal that you couldn't help
but get emotionally involved when you're animating these shots.
To the point where he'd be talking about the shot, and all of a sudden,
"Look. All right, stop. Turn up the lights."
He'd run to the front and go on for 20 minutes.
We never had those 20 minutes. He had to move on to another review.
He'd go into this real big story about why it's important,
why it's important that we see Bob get cut,
that the audience believe that he can get hurt.
This isn't a cartoon where he runs off a cliff
and falls and turns into a pancake and walks off.
For the story. This is a story point.
It has to be believable.
You have to worry about the characters. That's a difficult thing in animation.
The level of skill that has to be put into the animation and the physics
is really difficult.
It has to be...
That balance, I guess, is really difficult for us.
FUCILE: I remember him talking about that years ago.
It requires some work to do that.
In the first scene of the film, if you see your main character
jumping off roofs and sliding down, I'm not gonna name a film,
you see someone doing these superhuman things, dodging things,
you're not gonna be worried for him or her later
when there's supposedly this danger.
HUNTER: You gotta feel like they can get hurt.
BARILLARO: It opens up the door
for telling real stories about all sorts of different topics.
FUCILE: It's tricky with a superhero movie.
One of the problems with Superman is this guy's invincible, you know?
What's there to worry about? You gotta introduce Kryptonite.
You wanted these characters to... They could die.
They're superhuman, but they can be killed.
BARILLARO: The prologue, Brad said, "This is a sucker punch to the audience.
"They think this is gonna be a superhero movie."
We can be hammy or more pose-y,
anything to contrast the next sequence, which was Bob in the office
30 years later just to really drive that home.
FRANKEL: In 2D, you know what you're creating.
It's in front of you as you create it.
You know what it's gonna look like.
You can do cel setups where your drawing is done,
and you know it's not gonna change much.
You'll have a cleanup artist go over it,
but it's supposed to stay the way you do it.
In CG, there's this incredible growth and change
from this crude blocking, where the models were moving around
and the characters were primitive shapes of what they're going to be,
with no color and shading.
Sometimes it's almost unrecognizable when you finally see the shots.
We're stunned at what we're seeing when we see it.
And we animated it.
SOHN: The stuff that frustrated me the most
was trying to take out what I had learned in 2D.
You know, the bouncy-bouncy, fluffy kind of stuff.
Like, swoopy cartoon-y arcs, and trying to take that out.
I'd get reprimanded a lot about putting stuff like that in there.
They're just like, "No fluff! No fluff!"
FRANKEL: Brad's style also is more...
There's more of a live-action sensibility to it.
SOHN: Even in Iron Giant, there's stuff you could get away with in 2D
that in 3D, because of how real it looks, it'll look weird.
MacLANE: The animator would try to communicate to the audience
different beats that the character is having.
And if we can do that, then we've done our job, I guess.
SOHN: The quality of 2D animation that can be really bouncy and jumpy,
well, this is totally on the other side of that spectrum.
It's pretty serious acting. Brad is pushing for that subtlety,
which, with computers, is so much easier to do
than in my experience in 2D.
I could never do the stuff that we could do on the computer.
FRANKEL: Supposedly, the Rankin/Bass thing
was actually a little bit of a sell,
because at first, when Tony Fucile had mentioned
we should capture the Rankin/Bass thing, Brad was skeptical.
He said, "I don't want this to be clunky."
And Tony said, "I don't mean clunky.
"I mean, grab the charm from Rankin/Bass,
"and then put that into what's gonna be a lot more sophisticated."
Then Brad was like, "Okay, you think you can do that? Let's see."
HATHAWAY: I think that's absolutely one of the reasons why
this succeeds as one of Pixar's first films with humans,
is that charm.
There are so many CG films that get caught up in the details of humans.
We all know what we look like as humans.
Everybody is like, "We need this detail and this detail."
Tear ducts, freckles, acne, whatever.
It ends up looking a little grotesque because it's so detailed.
You're still animating.
It's still cartoon-y animation.
With that level of realism to the models, it ends up not really meshing.
I think that's one area where this definitely succeeds.
FRANKEL: Tony is not into copying and morphing reality.
He's into distilling it, which is a whole different approach.
It's really about, sort of, simplifying,
so that you get the essence of what's appealing about something
and not jamming in all these extra details that aren't gonna add to it.
SOHN: I don't know if I have any favorite,
but I know I'm most proud of the kiss animation
with Bob and Helen.
It was difficult.
Brad was like, "It works, it works."
That's satisfying, just to know that it worked.
FRANKEL: And because it was a hot kiss.
SOHN: That was real.
I was kissing myself in the mirror...
FRANKEL: We were getting worried about him.
SOHN ...and listening to music.
(COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
DiGIOVANNI: It was almost like you guys
BARILLARO: People were coming from all sorts of backgrounds, too.
You had guys from Spain and Paris,
all over the place, from various levels of...
HUNTER: Kids fresh out of school to guys who've run their own studios.
It was amazing what people brought to it.
BARILLARO: Brad was a great coach.
It's a sports analogy, but he was a great coach
in knowing what we were capable of and when to call on that person.
I mean, Cameron Miyasaki was right out school, a pup.
It was Brad's call to give him that shot,
that whole sequence in the cave where Violet is saying bye to Mom,
which is total tearjerker. But that animation is awesome.
FUCILE: That's one thing I really...
He doesn't discriminate against a kid who's on his first film.
If he's giving him what he wants, he's gonna get better scenes.
That's just how it is.
BARILLARO: Everybody can push each other in a good way.
FUCILE: Mmm-hmm.
BARILLARO: When he gave that sequence
to Cameron, he asked afterwards,
"Was he scared?" I'm like, "Yeah, he was scared."
- "Great." - HUNTER: "Good, he's hungry."
BARILLARO: "You're hungry and out to prove something."
He tried to always keep that feeling in us.
He'd always get us riled up. "Come on, man.
"Your work's looking a little... That's all you got? A little weak."
HUNTER: "Come on, man."
SANTOS: The first time we saw Incredibles as an animation department,
we just saw the reels to the storyboards,
we were all quite stunned.
We all have to agree that this is an animator's movie.
Every shot in this film was like animation heaven.
In other films we worked on,
there were always the sweet shots, "Man, I'd love to do this."
But every shot in this film
is so satisfying, animation-wise, to work on.
HUNTER: We lost a few people, I have to say.
I don't know if this will end up...
We realized early on that it was a lot of work.
Some people just went, "I don't know if I could do this."
But a lot of people stood up and said, "I wanna do this. We're there for you."
We got work out of people that
you had never seen it in them before this movie.
It was just what the movie was, and who Brad was.
Everybody just stepped up. Some of the work was just amazing.
BARILLARO: This is physical stuff we're watching.
I remember when we first started, we had all those tough acting moments.
We're like, "Okay, so this is the tough stuff.
"Thank God we have action. We'll blow right through it."
Then there's Brad, frame by framing every pose.
All of a sudden, the physical stuff is just as hard, if not harder.
That was definitely a challenge.
FUCILE: Remember how we'd look at the small screen
on our little playback thing?
It looked fine. We'd show it on the big screen, everything looked like toys.
How many times did he say, "20% slower?"
HUNTER: This sequence is probably 20% slower than what we animated it at.
FUCILE: Because they started looking like figurines that were 12-inches tall.
- Especially the Omnibot. - HUNTER: Get too zippy.
HATHAWAY: Many times you see this stuff, I've seen this 20-plus times...
FRANKEL: It's like seeing it the first time.
...in various stages of completion.
You see this final lighting, rendering, sound effects, music,
and it's completely new.
that Brad would draw over whatever frame.
In dailies, he'd be viewing our work and step through, stop on a frame,
and then draw over the top of it.
We're all very visual, and it was such a clear explanation
of what he wanted, to change a pose.
He'd always grab other people.
He'd try to get Tony to get up there and draw,
which was always funny.
So reluctant to do it. (LAUGHS)
FUCILE: I couldn't get used to that thing.
And the glass was too thick.
You press it on the glass, and there was an inch
- between the image... - HUNTER: And the pencil.
FUCILE: That's my excuse. HUNTER: Well, all right.
BARILLARO: I'm not buying it. HUNTER: I'm not buying it.
BARILLARO: This movie was so huge, there was no room for error.
We couldn't have a sequence go on too long
or make huge, sweeping changes afterwards.
It was your one shot. So, the pressure on all of us...
"Here's your shot. Try to knock it out of the park
"and match it up with the amazing shot next to it."
It was a difficult thing.
HUNTER: Knock it out of the park, talking about this.
BARILLARO: Never knew he could be so sexy.
HUNTER: He got in touch with his inner girl.
giving one to one person and one to another.
FUCILE: This is Mike Wu again. HUNTER: On Bob.
FUCILE: And Wendell Lee on Mirage.
HUNTER: It's a sexy scene.
BARILLARO: The first time he showed this in dailies, everybody was silent.
"Damn!"
HUNTER: "You had me at hello." FUCILE: It was a little...
HUNTER: Got a little sweaty in there. FUCILE: It's great stuff.
It's really rich.
You don't get an opportunity to do that too much.
You're dealing with stuff like marital strife in the house,
and the way kids feel about their parents.
MacLANE: Butt-pinching shots.
MULLINS: Which is huge. MacLANE: Really huge.
MULLINS: I've been waiting for that.
MacLANE: So there are two separate models
So we just swapped out the fat Bob for the fit Bob.
then Bill Sheffler reworked controls to make it look clean.
DeVAN: Early on, coming into dailies, our manager, Maddog,
I remember him saying, "This is like grad school for animators."
We were already animators. We're professional animators.
But going into dailies on this film was like, you're scared again.
- It's like grad school. - YOKOO: I think the stakes were high.
And things like that. A lot of people here do.
SANTOS: She's a natural.
YOKOO: Going to CalArts, that kind of thing.
So when I got here,
I had to learn how to animate looking at other people's stuff.
This is the first director I really had where he's drawing on your work.
What I imagined how the traditional animators learned to work,
and that was daunting.
BARILLARO: It's funny. Each animator has their own thing that drives them nuts
that they can't let go of.
You see it every time, and you just can't stand to watch it.
Then when you show it to somebody else they're like, "Doesn't bother me."
FUCILE: That's Frozone, again, in a guest role as E's security guard.
BARILLARO: A.J. the security guard.
Remember how big those glasses were at the beginning?
They were like when you go to SeaWorld
and kids have giant sunglasses.
It was just one of those model problems.
- Finally, Kori Rae was like... - HUNTER: "Please fix those glasses."
BARILLARO: "It's funny. People are laughing at him."
"It's not supposed to be funny."
HUNTER: He looks hot.
It's a good shirt. It looks good on him.
BARILLARO: Tight-fitting.
RUSS: We tried to pay attention with E, on her face,
to create this graphic shape with her eyes.
A straight line across the top when she's got that lidded expression.
She's really a fun character, too, because she's got such a range.
She's cartoon-y one moment and then quiet and subtle in others,
and very droll.
This was a difficult shot for the simulation team,
getting her hand to go through that hole in the cloth.
So kudos to them for pulling that off.
BARILLARO: This is where simulation and animation had to work together
at the same time,
rather than passing it after animation and handing it off to simulation.
They had to work together,
because it was so difficult to deal with that sim shirt,
to make sure we weren't painted into a corner.
HUNTER: For them to simulate clothes on the character was hard enough.
And then she has to grab it from him, pull on it, stick her hand through it,
then toss it into the garbage can.
It was shocking.
FUCILE: In 2D, that would be an easy scene.
You don't have to see the hand until the very end.
All that little stuff is simple.
Yet it's a miracle on a computer.
HUNTER: It's a total miracle that they can make that work.
MacLANE: It's moments like that where this idea that, if you capture one thing
that is definitely human, and real, and true,
if you can throw that into a shot, an audience will connect with it and go,
"I know what that's like," and subconsciously be into it.
BARILLARO: How many times did we have to change all these guys' names
and reanimate because of legal reasons?
Because every superhero name has been taken somewhere.
(LAUGHING) Brad was always... I think that almost killed Walker.
Just having to deal with all that.
FUCILE: That's gotta hurt.
BARILLARO: You make up a superhero name,
chances are someone has already made it up back in the '20s.
HUNTER: The Incredibles is such a great name.
How has no one ever used that before?
MacLANE: Rob Russ. RUSS: Rob Russ.
MacLANE: Nice work. RUSS: Yes.
MacLANE: I love this shot.
- Nice flicker. - RUSS: Thanks.
MacLANE: When you take the suits off the characters, they're much larger.
They're like, "What are we gonna do, it'll be twice the size of E!"
"Just shrink it down 50%. It'll look like it really stretches."
Look how big his shirt is.
That really is the size of his shirt.
- She can barely... - RUSS: Some Doug Dooley here.
MacLANE: ...drag it off the ground there.
The hair.
HUNTER: Craig T. is perfect.
Craig T. Nelson is just perfect for Bob.
It's frightening.
We did tests with George Clooney, Harrison Ford early on.
Just some test dialogue pieces we did.
They were cool, but Craig is Bob.
BARILLARO: That was great about Brad, picking voices that fit the characters,
rather than just a celebrity who has a very weak voice
and doesn't have anything for an animator to sink his teeth into.
FUCILE: I remember back in '92 when it was just a germ of an idea, he said,
"The dad's kind of like a Craig T. type."
So even back then, that was his first...
HUNTER: You sketched him with him in mind, right?
FUCILE: Yeah, in the original drawings.
Same with Lou. Lou came up with this.
DiGIOVANNI: So using big-time celebrity voices is not the way to go?
FUCILE: Well, a lot of big-time celebrities are great actors,
but not necessarily voice talent.
You strip the visual performance away,
and sometimes you just have this boring voice.
A lot of times they're...
They don't have to necessarily have such an amazing voice
because they're film actors.
There's a lot of subtlety going on in the facial stuff, the physical stuff.
It's not like the stage, where you need a booming voice.
HUNTER: Like Mirage's character, getting Elizabeth Peña to do it.
She's fantastic as Mirage. That's Mirage.
- She's amazing. - FUCILE: She's great.
BARILLARO: As an animator, you have to sit there
and listen to the soundtrack over and over again for a day
before you even start sinking your teeth into the shot.
So if the voice is weak, you don't have anything to draw from.
It's just this bland reading.
It's a real struggle to put the performance in
that is required for the scene if the voice isn't there.
MULLINS: It's funny, when you look at a lot of the facial animation here,
one thing that Tony and Brad really wanted us to look at
and really study carefully
was the Disney animation from back in the day.
Particularly, Jungle Book and 101 Dalmatians.
Most of what we were trying for was a lot of that style of animation.
FUCILE: There was a nice surprise in that scene of Bob and the door opens
when he sees his room.
It's one of those things a good animator can bring
to a scene that didn't really have...
Maybe Brad wasn't even thinking, but Rodrigo had him going...
HUNTER: "Ooh. Yeah, man. That's cool."
FUCILE: Making an "ooh" face without sound and just shaking his head.
It always gets a laugh.
HUNTER: Totally plussed it, and it wasn't in the boards.
MacLANE: It's interesting how all of us here
both like working on acting and also physical stuff.
I could definitely think of
a bunch of physical stuff that everyone has done and acting.
RUSS: That was one of the more fun things about this film.
Within every shot, you pretty much had a little bit of both.
HUNTER: That was some of the best vacuum-cleaner animation
I've ever seen.
FUCILE: Karen Kiser shot herself on video.
HUNTER: And just animated the hell out of it.
FUCILE: Did a good job.
HUNTER: It looks just like my mom vacuuming the house.
(FUCILE CHUCKLES)
BARILLARO: You don't vacuum? HUNTER: Not me. I never vacuumed.
(SCOFFS) Only moms vacuum.
BARILLARO: It takes a while to get used to each character.
That's the frustrating thing about this.
You work so hard in establishing all these rules for every character,
what they would do and what they wouldn't do,
how broad a mouth shape would be, or an expression,
who they really are as people.
Once you get all that down, the movie's over. (LAUGHS)
That's really frustrating.
HUNTER: (LAUGHING) Everybody gets their head around it.
BARILLARO: Finally really know who Bob is, inside and out,
and now you're done.
DiGIOVANNI: I like what you did with Helen.
Taking the way Holly Hunter speaks
and incorporating that into her mouth shapes.
HUNTER: A lot of it goes to the animators to do the work,
to look at the dialogue tapes of Holly talking
and actually examining how she talks
and then putting it into the scene.
It just came down to those specific animators that did the work.
It plusses it like crazy.
MacLANE: One thing that's interesting to mention is that for most of these films,
the core animation crew has been the same.
It's this weird, dysfunctional family
where everyone knows each other so well
that there's a lot of camaraderie, and a lot of...
- KAHRS: Esprit de corps? - (COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
MacLANE: A lot of everything you might expect in a Brady Bunch-type scenario.
KAHRS: It's more like an army barracks to me.
(MacLANE LAUGHING)
MULLINS: And enter John Kahrs!
John Kahrs is Syndrome.
RUSS: The role he was born to play.
MULLINS: Matching hair, matching physique.
MacLANE: Brad was into us getting into the characters,
so John was required to wear this outfit.
FUCILE: This is always a little strange
because the animator actually looks like Syndrome. John Kahrs.
- Totally. - HUNTER: (LAUGHS) It's freakish.
FUCILE: A little disturbing to see him animating himself.
BARILLARO: It was a little bit like that. You're watching people's...
When you know the people working on it,
you can see their mannerisms (LAUGHS)
and their way of talking creep through.
I love that flashback.
HUNTER: If you go back to that scene with Helen,
where she's looking at the thread,
she sees the thread that E's done, turns and goes, "Edna."
That scene looked so much like Karen Kiser.
It was really well animated, really well analyzed.
But it was looking too much like Karen.
We had to go in to make it look more like Helen a little bit.
But the heart's still there. It had to stay on-model.
It was so funny, though, that it looked like Karen.
FUCILE: There was that one scene that John did, you acted it out for him,
and it looks like you doing one of your psycho faces.
- "Baby's sleeping." - (HUNTER LAUGHING)
Then he laughs. (LAUGHS)
BARILLARO: Even that walk is very much like the way you...
- That kind of cocky walk. - HUNTER: What are you talking about?
FUCILE: That was a walk he got from the video.
We videotaped you on the treadmill.
He picked it up from that.
HUNTER: I was trying to figure out that arm flick.
I keep trying to figure out what the hell that is.
Then one day I was walking through the atrium and caught myself doing it.
I realized it was because my T-shirt was getting caught in my armpit.
So I had to, like, flick my arm to get it out.
That kind of thing. "That's what Syndrome is doing.
"His costume is getting bunched up in his armpit."
Wow. That waterfall is so beautiful.
FUCILE: I remember when we came here, I asked you,
"Do we animate our own hair?" And you're like, "No, it's simulated."
I thought, "Wait a minute, you can't...
"You gotta animate the hair and the clothes and stuff."
Now I think, "If we had to do that, can you imagine?"
- (HUNTER GROANS) - We'd be all hospitalized by now
if we had to do the capes, and the hair, and things.
BARILLARO: We'd still be on the first scene.
But you do want that control. You want that graphic element
where you get exactly what you want.
FUCILE: It looks pretty good. HUNTER: But that was the case, too.
Because of the drawing tool, when they'd show simulation,
Brad would say, "Can you push the simulation so we get this shape,
"so it reads clearer?"
He would draw what he wanted it to look like.
God bless the sim guys.
They would actually go and push that thing right out, somehow.
There's certain points where it just feels like it's drawn.
The simulation works on top of the animation we do.
You're animating the body of the character.
The clothes hang off the body, and the hair hangs off the body
and reacts to what the body's doing.
So all we're worrying about is the form of the character.
We'd run the simulation to make sure that it works,
that the pose works with the simulation on top of it.
That was where a lot of the iteration came.
If I didn't pull the arm out of the body enough,
the simulation would fill in the gaps.
"Damn, I don't have as nice a silhouette as I'd want."
So we would go in and repose a character, re-run the simulation.
There was a lot of pushback from animation and Brad.
Because there was a lot of times when simulation would just...
I think at any other studio, they'd cry bloody murder.
And our guys did.
Mark Henne, who headed up the simulation,
he made a little chart with an arrow on it, saying,
"This is really easy. This is insanely difficult to do."
And for shots, he would stand up before...
He'd stand up while we looked at a shot and be like,
"I want my character to push the hair out from behind her ear."
He'd get up with his little chart and be like,
"This is the state of this shot. It's very difficult."
BARILLARO: It was always the smallest things that were the hardest.
FUCILE: Touching yourself.
BARILLARO: Any physical contact with anybody was a nightmare.
But you could have them thrown out of airplanes.
"Sure. No problem. We'll get that out in a day."
HUNTER: So there was that negotiation that took place in dailies,
where Mark would be, "I'm just saying, it's difficult.
"If you want it for the scene, we can do it, but it's gonna take more time."
So Brad would have to weigh whether it was important enough.
Like in Cameron's scenes where Helen pushes the hair up
behind Violet's ears, outside the cave,
that is such a sensitive moment. He needed to have that.
BARILLARO: It's the first time Violet starts to open up.
Then, eventually, she herself pulls her hair back.
She has it back. She's starting to gain a lot of self-confidence.
MULLINS: Brad's voice, it's so funny.
We'd be in dailies, and Brad would be making comments.
(LAUGHING) He'd be making comments in Edna's voice.
- "Darling, I think it's wonderful!" - RUSS: They tried to get different
voice actors for E.
MULLINS: Lily Tomlin. RUSS: They wouldn't do it.
Lily came in and was like, "What do you need me for?
"You've got it." And he's like, "Okay."
KAHRS: The nice thing about having the writer and the voice of E
in dailies with you is that...
Brad would give you the analogy for a particular beat.
Like when Frankel does this scene coming up
where she's like,
(IN EDNA'S VOICE) "Well, darling, what do you think?"
(IN NORMAL VOICE) The way Helen reacts, and the way...
He would just explain the demeanor that E would have,
where she's like, "This is not the required response!"
Then he'd start saying all these comments.
Like in this shot. Her response to Helen's response.
She's like, "You're not responding the way this presentation..."
RUSS: Right. "This isn't how it was scripted, darling."
KAHRS: But also the idea that E,
really, is far, far ahead of Helen's thinking process.
(KAHRS CLEARS THROAT)
She's kind of speaking...
MULLINS: She's like the dungeon master.
KAHRS: The mock innocence about it.
MULLINS: Don't try and bait me. KAHRS: What?
HUNTER: Here's a case too, in all this stuff with the jungle.
We had simulation for hair and cloth,
but we didn't have simulation to do plant keep-alive or movement.
So we had a guy who had to go through and hand-animate
all the trees moving around and swaying.
In some ways, we can do cloth, but we can't do plants blowing in the breeze.
where everything is all hitting the fan at the same time.
It's just a question of who can grab it and get it done.
A lot of the stuff that's in there is just thrown in.
"I'll do it before I go home tonight."
Everyone picking up something and trying to get it in the film.
Or else it's cut.
It really comes down to that.
If you have the extra day to come in, or evening,
you animate a little plant keep-alive, and it makes it feel more real.
On this film more than any, everyone from every department was,
"I'll try to do that in my spare time.
"I'll try to find a way to give your earlobe the swing that Tony wants."
It makes a difference. It makes it feel believable.
Early on, we really noticed when you strung 20 shots together,
and they're all with that high-level polish,
you really believed that Bob was this person.
His face was really pliable.
And then you come across a shot where that stopped,
it really jumped out at you.
It was a lot of work that we had to maintain
throughout the production.
MULLINS: Holly is amazing.
We used so much of her in this film.
You can see it in her face,
the way she talks out of the side of her mouth.
MacLANE: Bob was the hardest one.
I think they really got the best voice that they could.
- Craig T. is amazing. - MULLINS: It was awesome, yeah.
MacLANE: He turned out so well.
MULLINS: I love animating to his voice.
MacLANE: He actually came to Pixar and was really...
He was actually pretty amazed by... (LAUGHS)
He was friendly. It was nice to meet him.
It's easier when the animators can meet the voice talent
and see them in three dimensions, rather than just in movies.
MULLINS: He fits this role so well, too.
We've seen him in Poltergeist playing this sort of dad,
a similar dad character.
DiGIOVANNI: How come the Spaniards are so good with physics?
- Is it something in the water? - HUNTER: I don't know what it is.
BARILLARO: In Spain, they understand physics to a ridiculous level.
(CHUCKLES) Rodrigo and Carlos.
HUNTER: There's nothing to say about this.
It's just unbelievable how heavy this thing looks.
BARILLARO: Maybe we can all go to Spain after this and learn physics.
HUNTER: It might be a good idea to
send the whole department over to Spain.
BARILLARO: Something happens over there. I don't know what it is.
HUNTER: I love the way he skitters to the side there.
It's such a great touch.
MULLINS: This scene coming up is
actually really interesting, how it was done.
When Bob is exiting from here, and he's getting goo-balled,
the whole thing was basically animated
just straight ahead, right on the platform there.
They set up a bunch of different cameras
and cut it all together with the same animation,
then went in and finished the animation for each shot, per camera.
It just turned out so awesome.
BARILLARO: I love this stuff here.
This is Bolhem Bouchiba's first sequence in computers.
It's quite amazing
because he hand-drew the whole thing out first,
keyed it out, broke it down and showed it to Brad.
Brad approved the drawings, just the same as you would
in traditional animation.
Then he went and used that as a blueprint in the scene.
They're pretty identical.
That's amazing.
A lot of people work that way at a variety of levels.
For us, there is no difference between the two mediums.
If you looked at that sequence hand-drawn
and you look at it in computers, both are pretty awesome.
You're arguing between mediums of, like...
"Is watercolor better than oil painting? I don't know."
Both are paintings, and they're excellent.
The majority of the animators at least came from 2D in school.
Or if not, were professionals for a while.
You're always trying to push it, as far as the models...
Driving the technical people crazy, asking for controls
that don't really make sense.
HUNTER: The insanity of this next sequence, with the goo-balls...
Bob being nailed by the goo-balls.
BARILLARO: This was done in one shot first.
All these camera moves were added after Dylan
had blocked out this entire run of Bob getting hit by these goo-balls.
Then Steve and Brad went into editorial
and picked the angles they wanted.
Dylan went back at it and polished it up.
Polishing back and forth with editorial makes it so awesome.
HUNTER: It's crazy how that goo... (LAUGHS)
If you had to do that in separate shots, you'd go insane, you know?
Dylan really took this one. We were gonna give it to him.
He came in and we showed it to him, and he was like, "I don't know."
FUCILE: "It got him scared. That is good."
HUNTER: "I'm scared."
FUCILE: "It's good that I'm scared, right?"
HUNTER: "All right, I can do it."
BARILLARO: Every time I saw Brad and Steve in editorials,
it was like, "Awesome, it's done."
Then you'd see Brad walk out, "Great, see you in an hour.
"We'll take another pass at it. It's not done.
"I wanna have the goo-balls eventually win out over Bob."
So it goes two frames, one frame, one frame, one frame,
until you feel like you really got the best of them.
MacLANE: She doesn't have Kleenex and has to use toilet paper.
Brad explained that she would not have Kleenex.
E would have to improvise because there's no crying at E's house.
KAHRS: E sums up the best in Brad.
That "Fight, win!" encapsulates
a lot of his cheerleader/coach mentality
of, like, the SWAT team approach to getting everything done.
BARILLARO: He's like a miniature Brad Bird yelling at Helen.
- This is pretty much him. - HUNTER: That was dailies every day.
Smacking us around with a newspaper, yelling at us.
BARILLARO: The voice of E. HUNTER: Getting up and ranting.
BARILLARO: "Come on!"
This is a case where simulation actually...
We forgot that...
We usually animated Vi without her hair.
Once we put the hair on, the simulation was there.
That first chunk of that shot,
Adam Burke animated the face beautifully.
It's all missing because of the hair.
HUNTER: We had to decide where we wanted the part.
And we had to move throughout the sequence.
BARILLARO: We could switch it shot to shot, cheat it here and there, but...
FUCILE: We really wanted to go through and say,
"The part's now on the other side. Now it's on the left side.
"That's amazing. Hopefully, nobody caught it."
BARILLARO: I love this jog that Zorman does here.
HUNTER: Another hard sequence.
The character is grabbing the same costume from hand to hand.
Crazy.
BARILLARO: That takes about a month, right?
I think that took Zorman a month to do,
working steadily, hard, with working dinners.
FUCILE: That's fast for that scene. It was complicated.
KAHRS: I really like this whole little sequence here.
Because they're all using their powers, all at the same time,
but in this domestic situation to get their way.
Each of the characters.
BARILLARO: This shot in the movie, we have to talk about this.
Brad hates this shot.
It's not the animation, so much as Snug not existing,
never seeing a shot with Snug.
Never seeing a shot with Snug.
DiGIOVANNI: This is a classic example
of Brad coming from a 2D world, where it's,
"What's the big idea? Get us a design and draw it.
- "Add another character." - FUCILE: We couldn't build a hangar.
We couldn't build his office.
BARILLARO: We couldn't build Snug.
FUCILE: We had him built, the geometry,
but we couldn't articulate him.
BARILLARO: Every department had to do something to him,
so it was too much work.
He'd need shading, love, and hair, and clothes.
So there's no Snug.
MacLANE: Snug was a character that originally existed.
He actually flew the plane originally.
MULLINS: Then he died.
In one version...
MacLANE: Originally he died in the explosion.
The kids were like, "What happened to Snug?"
You saw his hat. That was it. That was the first sequence I saw. Brad's like,
"It's just to show them we're not messing around.
"You see people die in this film."
RUSS: It works better having Helen fly the plane anyway.
MacLANE: They always have the woman fly the plane,
but it's nice that she gets to kick some butt, too.
MULLINS: The first time we saw the film, only the first two acts were finished,
people came out of the screening frothing, just crazy.
(MULLINS IMITATING SCREAMS OF ANNOYANCE)
That energy continued throughout the entire film.
It's amazing.
e
not even supposed to be animating.
BARILLARO: We'd just make fun of them.
Tell them to bring golf clubs to the dailies.
HUNTER: "Go steal some beer from the beer bash
"and bring it back to animation."
You know, that kind of thing.
FUCILE: Their tests were so advanced.
The stuff that they did in there, I was like, "Wow, they're ready."
The stuff was blocked by Sweetland.
It was very rough blocking, and they took it and used it,
animated it.
HUNTER: All the Syndrome stuff was our interns.
Amazing stuff.
BARILLARO: That was Bolhem doing Bob there. Some awesome physics.
Again, hand-drawn first to get exactly what he wants.
The reason so many people draw before they get to the computer is
there's a lot less searching.
You know what you want before you go in.
Once you get on the computer, there's endless controls and reasons...
FUCILE: (CLEARS THROAT) I also notice when you animate
on a computer, you talk to yourself.
"I gotta go in here and open this." I mean, me.
"I'm gonna open that first."
When you're drawing something,
the internal dialogue is just (GRUNTING) for me.
Lots of grunts.
(FUCILE GRUNTING)
This is all sort of intuitive.
When you're animating on the computer,
it's like, "Open this box, get that, I need this tool, and I need that."
BARILLARO: You just wanna get it down, visually,
and you have all this technical stuff to do.
It's stuff you've hated to do.
That's why we went into art, to get away from math class.
You're sitting there going, "Times two, this and that."
I like that you have your peg bar taped to your computer.
(LAUGHS) That's awesome. You can draw on the screen.
FUCILE: I'd rough the scene out first,
but then, eventually, you're like... (SCOFFS)
"I'll start right into it." If you're in a pinch for time...
DiGIOVANNI: That's the total convergence of the two mediums.
You got your screen, and you're doing flip drawings.
HUNTER: Over the top. FUCILE: I think I was just...
It was a comfort zone. It still is.
And it's a habit.
I can't imagine animating without drawing first.
I tape a peg bar up against the screen.
I have the layout up
and trace the background, and a couple basic poses.
I rough it out first, on paper, and finish it off on the computer.
BARILLARO: There's something about flipping.
It calms you down.
(BARILLARO LAUGHING)
FUCILE: There's nothing between you
and your idea you're trying to get across.
BARILLARO: Right.
FUCILE: It's the most direct way of thinking about what you're trying to do.
That's a huge challenge with the computers,
to maintain that spontaneity while dealing with hundreds of controls.
BARILLARO: It's like working with the worst assistant ever,
who's gonna take everything you do
and try to make it dull and boring all the way through.
So you're constantly trying to control him,
and not have him ruin your initial ideas
and try to keep some life into what you're doing.
All it wants to do is make it plastic-y and dead.
These are all insert shots of Violet that were added afterwards
to add a little more intensity. It's really cool.
Love flash-frame too that Brad does.
He was so adamant about that.
HUNTER: How it hit that.
BARILLARO: Even in boards, he had that.
That's so Brad. Even in boards, he had that white flash on negative
when the explosion happens.
In his mind, he had the explosion already set exactly how he wanted it.
By the time he gets to animation, it's no surprise that he knows
where the hand should be on frame 12,
and where the leg should be on frame 37. (LAUGHS)
HUNTER: This shot was by Rodrigo. Back to the Spaniards again.
Some of the most amazing underwater animation I've seen.
FUCILE: Beautiful use of bends and bows on these legs too,
to give the sensation that she's got resistance with the water.
HUNTER: You should freeze-frame and see some of the poses he's done
on the legs as Violet's kicking, how pliable they are.
BARILLARO: Even the breaks and stuff.
It's not bending the proper way, but it feels so loose.
FUCILE: Completely breaking the elbows and knees.
BARILLARO: Great cheats. FUCILE: Amazing.
We could've pushed it farther.
You could argue that we could've pushed the bend bows at certain points.
But if we had pushed it that far anywhere else,
- it wouldn't have looked right. - BARILLARO: No one's happy.
It seems like the shot's taken away from you
more than it's actually finaled.
Johnny Walker says, "Give me that shot,"
not so much, "Are you done with it?"
Because the animator keeps...
As it goes through, and simulation gets added,
you keep seeing little things.
You're like, "Can I go back and fix that pinkie finger?
"Someone's gonna notice."
HUNTER: You'll never hear an animator say with pride, "This shot is done!"
- You know? - BARILLARO: I've never heard that.
HUNTER: "Take it from me. There's no more I can do with this."
BARILLARO: "Please, can I go into it one more time?"
HUNTER: (MOCK CRYING) "No, don't take it. Please don't take it."
(HUNTER LAUGHING)
BARILLARO: Then they get angry when you don't...
"Come on!"
DiGIOVANNI: That dials back to Brad again,
this notion that it can always be better.
He instilled that in our entire team,
which has been a huge benefit to us, and we'll take it to future shows.
The bar in our department from this movie...
Everyone basically went back to animation grad school.
BARILLARO: And the fact that he's an animator...
When a director is an animator,
it's like an actor directing actors. They know what makes you tick.
They know what it is that...
How to motivate you.
And he appreciates every little bit that you're doing.
These little things are not going unnoticed with him.
He knows that it has an impact.
Even if the audience isn't seeing it
or able to pinpoint it, they feel it. They know why...
They just go, "That character is really believable. I like that."
Brad knows how hard that stuff is to get on the screen.
When someone notices you've done a little bit to the nose or a sneer...
He'd always say, "That's really nice, that little thing you did with the lid."
It was a lot of extra work,
but you wanted to do it for him because you knew it had a reason.
MULLINS: You always do the crazy shots. I have no idea how that's done.
RUSS: There's that stretchy Helen rig.
I was a pile of goo on my couch at the end of that shot.
MULLINS: Just like Dash. RUSS: Just like Helen.
"We can't find them in the ocean." It was really cool. Too bad that's gone.
Brad said, "Apocalypse Now, man!
"You gotta do that thing where Marlon Brando
"does that hand nod to Martin Sheen, when he asks him,
"'What do they think about me?' Sheen goes, 'They say you're crazy.'
"He acknowledged it with this little hand move."
It was my tribute to Marlon Brando, before he died, thanks to Brad.
(COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
But that was a painful shot in itself, too.
I went back and forth with Brad on that.
That was another example of him
having a specific idea on an acting scene.
In animation, we work from the inside.
It's what we feel what we would do naturally.
He asked me to do something I felt like, "I don't know if I'd do it that way."
But it worked,
and I broke out of my mode of doing cliché stuff.
MULLINS: One of the hardest things was getting the masks to look good.
RUSS: You couldn't see those in our animation environment.
We were involved in this early on.
I'm amazed that none of us said, "It'd be nice to see the masks."
MacLANE: They didn't exist back then. RUSS: That's true. Right, right.
MULLINS: There's a list of 5,000 things, and that was on the list.
BARILLARO: Brad had a lot of faith.
It's not like if Cameron didn't knock it out of the park,
we had time to have a senior guy come back and re-animate.
He was taking these chances with all of us.
We all knew that,
so you wanted to put your best work in there.
Everybody pushed themselves.
KAHRS: It was a combination of Gini and Cameron Miyasaki.
He would just show up in dailies and show the blocking.
Brad would be like, "Keep going."
He has really nice, sensitive instincts towards those quiet acting moments.
You really feel that he makes the character think
from the inside out.
MULLINS: A little Victor Navone.
Victor was particularly skilled
at making all the creepy Syndrome shots. (SNICKERS)
He had a knack for just making him seem like such a slimeball. (LAUGHS)
MacLANE: He's the only animator with an Internet following.
MULLINS: This is true. MacLANE: He really has a presence.
HUNTER: Here's another example. Just him walking up.
The squash and stretch we put in the body,
and layering a bit in, really makes him feel loose.
FRANKEL: When Syndrome went... (GROANS)
...everybody was very weirded out.
Victor's job was to make Syndrome sort of gross and intimidating.
(LAUGHS) He got so gross and intimidating,
that we were all a little skeevied.
But that was a plus because Brad was like,
"That's even better than I thought!"
HATHAWAY: He actually had one iteration
where Syndrome licked her face.
FRANKEL: It was that over the top.
HATHAWAY: That evoked a certain reaction from the audience.
BARILLARO: This was awesome from the boards.
and he broke down the story reel and they showed it to us.
There are shots in this movie, like, "We have no clue how we'd do that."
From all departments, it was like, "We've never seen that before."
But sure enough,
somehow he manages to get you to do it. (LAUGHS)
When it comes down to it, it gets done.
- Like Mullins' shot here. - HUNTER: This shot, the parachute.
BARILLARO: That's frame-by-frame animation. That's not easy stuff.
FUCILE: It's phenomenal.
HUNTER: That was a rough rig for those guys to work with, too.
It was a hard rig to figure out, on the technical side,
and it was a hard rig to work with.
But they made it work.
Frame by frame, they made it work.
MULLINS: The first time I showed Brad some of these tests,
some of the early swinging tests,
and just her in the stretchy mode, the way her arms would behave.
I did the first test, and it was very floppy Fleischer-brothers style.
He's like, "No, man!
"You gotta get it so when the arm comes back
"away from whatever it's doing, it's got to be strong and straight."
He wanted the contrast between her stretching
and her actual physical being of...
KAHRS: Having joints in a skeleton?
RUSS: When I was seeing the reels, this was one of my favorite sequences,
because you get to see a superhero...
She gets into a position with her superpowers
where she's got to work her way out of it.
KAHRS: It's embarrassing. RUSS: Totally embarrassing.
MacLANE: So you basically broke this up
You split the sequence.
RUSS: This is all Shawn Krause here. MacLANE: The beginning.
RUSS: Great stuff here. MacLANE: Reaching for the iPod.
(RUSS LAUGHING)
MacLANE: I love how she gets deeper into trouble.
RUSS: Exactly. It escalates.
You think, "She's in trouble now," then...
MacLANE: I remember whole conversations about,
"First she smacks him with the gun.
"Then she smacks the other guy with her fist."
It took a lot of choreography, figuring this out.
We built one rig we could put into all the different characters.
We did a lot of discussions, and had a lot of arguments
about how it should work.
The nice thing is even though you're using different models,
the base of them is the same. You're adding stuff on top of it.
It wasn't as confusing as it could have been,
or has been in the past.
FUCILE: There's a Dave DeVan shot coming up that is so much like Brad.
Brad probably acted it out for him, and he nailed it.
The one where he walks up... What does he say?
OTHER COMMENTATORS: "I'm not gonna leave the cave."
FUCILE: It sounds like Brad.
The behavior's like Brad. It's amazing.
BARILLARO: They spent whole walk-throughs
laying on the floor in the office.
Getting up and rubbing their bellies.
HUNTER: We all had a turn at it.
BARILLARO: How does he get that acting in there,
if you just listen to the sound,
but also hit the beats of getting up in time and picking up a torch?
That was a story point, I did walk out of that room with a torch.
Which hand does he grab it with?
There's some logistics that took some figuring out.
It was really funny to see him and Dave going at it,
trying to figure out what the exact way they should...
Execute the scene.
All this stuff slowed down by 60%,
and another 20% by the time it got to the big screen.
It probably could be slowed down more.
MULLINS: The sense of scale in the film was something we struggled with a lot.
Some of the larger vehicles, like the Omnibot, and stuff like that,
we would animate it and look at it in dailies,
and it would feel about the right size.
When you'd see it on film, it was moving way too quick.
We slowed down so many of our shots.
The speed just wasn't right. It just didn't feel heavy enough.
That was one of things we really fought against on the film.
BARILLARO: We should talk about the masks too,
once we got into production.
HUNTER: We couldn't see them in animation.
DiGIOVANNI: What was the initial plan from development?
Was it that they tied behind their head? Over their ears?
Did you move through a bunch of iterations?
FUCILE: I think the masks came later. I'm not sure.
They didn't have them when it was a story point.
HUNTER: It became an issue as we got more into it.
They had to have something to hide their identity.
Clark Kent had his glasses,
but we didn't want Bob wearing glasses.
FUCILE: A lot of masks, in comic books, didn't necessarily have strings.
They just stick to the face.
BARILLARO: We couldn't even do it anyway.
Tying it over hair, and making it look right without cheating,
would have been impossible.
It wouldn't have looked cool.
We could've done it, but it would've looked weird.
Then a lot of our brow expressions,
because we couldn't see it while animating, got a little messed up.
We'd have to make passes to clean up and keep the shapes simplified.
FUCILE: Sometimes we'd lose the expression.
Or, if we had the brows too high,
it would look like someone painted black over their eyebrows.
MacLANE: There was a huge argument in the story
about having the guards have robotic power armor
- that Mark Andrews... - RUSS: Battle armor.
MacLANE: Which I always thought was a really cool idea.
But Brad's argument was, you didn't want it to seem
like they were invincible.
He wanted this storm trooper stooge,
expendable,
subcontractor, that worked for Syndrome.
Brad had this idea about lighting here,
where the highlights of all the characters in this room,
this location,
would all be blown out, similar to overexposed
Gordon Willis lighting in The Godfather.
This is a Bolhem again, here.
So this is as dark as Bob gets here.
RUSS: It's pretty creepy.
FUCILE: This is another case where in 2D, in the boards, they were drawn.
He grabs her by the neck and you can get away with it, for some reason.
But you start seeing real flesh,
and wrap those hands around that tiny neck,
it didn't look right. It looked really disturbing.
So we had to have him
grab her cheek with a couple fingers, and a couple around her neck.
MULLINS: Andy Schmidt did that shot.
I smacked him about four times before he was like,
"No, man, I really want you to hit me." I was like, "Okay."
We were recording and I hauled off and hit him in the face. (LAUGHING)
RUSS: Really? MULLINS: "That's perfect!"
He went back and used it for that scene.
RUSS: Wow. That's dedication.
FUCILE: How many kisses did Andy Schmidt do?
Almost every time he gets a kiss.
HUNTER: Five kisses?
FUCILE: "One more time."
BARILLARO: It was a running joke after a while.
"Here, do another kiss."
HUNTER: I worried about that early on.
I had never seen a kiss in CG that I felt any warmth about.
It was always like... (EXCLAIMS IN DISGUST)
FUCILE: In that scene, the contact helped a lot.
Then when we had one where you do see the lips meet,
it was fine-tuned.
HUNTER: Oh, yeah, you had the one at the end.
FUCILE: Very careful.
BARILLARO: Bob, design-wise, you get to the moment where they have to kiss,
and you realize his nose is too big for his lips to meet Helen's.
They're five inches away, their lips, in reality. That's an entire cheat.
If you rotated the camera around to the other side,
- their faces... - HUNTER: They're not even touching.
FUCILE: For the final battle kiss,
I remember Brad using that tool all the time.
HUNTER: Mmm-hmm. His drawing on top.
FUCILE: It was ultra specific,
where he wanted the shape and Bob's lip to be squared off.
It was really pretty clear.
HUNTER: Oh, boy, 100-mile Dash.
FUCILE: This thing they blasted out in a week.
(COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
HUNTER: A lot of it was trying to figure out how Dash runs at super speeds.
BARILLARO: Jim Murphy was awesome.
HUNTER: He went and did a really great run cycle.
BARILLARO: There's a special motion blur that's happening here.
Brad always said it's like a hummingbird feel,
once he got to a certain speed.
HUNTER: It's a... How many frame run cycle?
Like an eight-frame run cycle, or something,
that's extended two frames.
FUCILE: Didn't they use frames in-between frames?
In-between frames or whatever they're called.
HUNTER: It's literally a two-frame run cycle,
with about eight poses on the subframes,
within the frames, so that the blur can work properly.
Nice debris animation by Maddog there.
BARILLARO: Our manager.
That's what we mean by everybody picking up a bit.
Even our manager was animating.
That's what Brad does to you.
He gives you these puppy dog eyes, like,
"Please don't ruin my movie."
(COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
"Can you just put that little piece of debris in there?"
"All right."
HUNTER: How many times have we reanimated this shot?
BARILLARO: I think everyone took a stab at it. It was one of those.
DiGIOVANNI: What's the story about Angus, Brad's story about the dance? e
HUNTER: The guard that slams into the cliff?
(CLEARS THROAT) Angus had animated him. He gets him knocked off.
Brad wanted a "Yeah!" quality to the guy before he hits the cliff.
Angus animated him doing a dance at one point.
FUCILE: A butter churning kind of a thing?
HUNTER: Yeah, butter churning.
"I'm churning the butter. Churning the butter."
And all kinds of other funny takes.
Brad just went off. We thought it was the funniest thing.
He's like, "It's funny, but it doesn't work for the movie!"
We're like, "Come on!"
(LAUGHS) He got up and ranted. He put up another rant.
He goes down to the front of the theater,
"It's gonna take you out of the context of the movie!"
FUCILE: It's just amazing.
HUNTER: "You're laughing at him, not..."
BARILLARO: You're always trying to push things, even in the trailer.
That's a case where Brad, again, being Brad,
gave us the premise and said,
"Come back to me in a week,
"and pitch me all the ideas you're thinking
"that Bob could practice putting on his belt."
We all sat down and...
I think it got to a Chris Farley level, where he basically...
HUNTER: Rolling around on his desk.
BARILLARO: He destroyed the whole office,
which we thought was hysterical.
- And Brad, you know, "Come on." - HUNTER: "He's not a buffoon."
BARILLARO: "He's not an idiot." HUNTER: "Don't make him into that."
BARILLARO: We'd always go a little farther and he'd try to contain us.
FUCILE: He liked that.
He'd rather us go far and pull back
than the other way around, which is tougher.
Prodding someone to go farther is much trickier.
BARILLARO: I love that shot. That's when her superpower really kicks in,
when she jumps in front of her brother to save him.
MULLINS: It's cool, the way that they're using all their powers together.
It really comes together in the end of the film,
but they're starting to learn that here.
"Wow, we can all work together."
DiGIOVANNI: Here come the Spaniards again.
HUNTER: Here we go.
FUCILE: We've got an Israeli in there, too.
HUNTER: Yeah. FUCILE: That's right.
HUNTER: Multicultural animation department, aren't we?
BARILLARO: Here they are.
HUNTER: Yeah, that punch.
When Bob punches that thing, I was just like...
BARILLARO: We have to talk more Mark Andrews with this.
DiGIOVANNI: I think only non-Americans
worked on that sequence.
(COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
- Spanish and Dutch. - FUCILE: Right.
That's right. Spanish and Dutch.
BARILLARO: I remember being in layout reviews
with Mark Andrews, head of story,
and this is just him and Brad, their relationship.
They just start riffing off how Syndrome could make an entrance here.
This is something Mark came up with, off the top of his head.
"How about when Violet puts the force field on the Velocipod,
"the bullet shells fill up the Velocipod force fields until it's entirely full?
"Then when Syndrome steps in and freezes it,
"all the shells pour off all over the ground,
"and you cut to Syndrome's feet walking through the shells,
"revealing everything about it."
There were so many moments where they would pitch great ideas.
It was just how many of the ideas could we shove in the film in time.
If they could keep going, it would be that much better.
They always had something to plus it.
MacLANE: I like, in the superhero mythos, how in this film,
just as in a story like Batman,
the superhero creates the supervillain, inadvertently.
I thought that Brad's take on combining that idea
with the sidekick, the great history of sidekicks,
like Robin and Bucky of Captain America,
was really a nice idea.
HUNTER: I like this laugh on the way out.
The way the chest comes up.
He's laughing, he's rising up, then he leans into the walk to storm out.
- I love that. - FUCILE: It's good stuff.
- I really like that walk. - BARILLARO: Wu-Dog.
- Everybody has... There's that... - FUCILE: The Jesus symbol.
BARILLARO: Slash Steve Hunter.
MacLANE: So, Bill Sheffler
built this little blazer.
We agonized for days on how that would work.
How the Omnibot opens was this thing we nerded out about for months.
The different stages of its arms opening.
That's the only shot you see it.
CAMILLE LEGANZA: What was it like animating the final battle?
BARILLARO: It came at the perfect time
because it was the last sequence in the movie.
So it really was the final battle for us.
(COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
HUNTER: It really was.
BARILLARO: Every department was involved,
and we had daily meetings with every department,
trying not to step on each other's toes because we were all in it together.
We inevitably stepped on each other's toes.
HUNTER: Set dressing was trying to work around us, as we're animating,
to try to figure out where to put the footprints knocked in concrete.
They were constantly on us about that.
"Can you animate it now?" "No." "Can you animate it now?" "No."
BARILLARO: I'm sure they'd say the same about us.
HUNTER: Exactly. (LAUGHS)
BARILLARO: "Could you let us set dress it?"
HUNTER: "No."
BARILLARO: In fact, when everybody's tired, and you're trying to get it done,
and you look at it,
you could keep going back and have more damage,
more ground exploding, more army men and more...
Just destruction.
DiGIOVANNI: So here's an example where originally...
This whole scene with the van was added.
I think it's awesome,
but that was all just to draw attention to this RV.
Originally it was sitting in the hangar. We were supposed to notice.
FUCILE: They had to point it out to people.
DiGIOVANNI: It was a great mistake,
because you get this great scene out of it.
BARILLARO: That's where Brad would take a note, "We need an RV,"
not just throw it into the story.
"Okay, we got a story point," and they'll deliver the line,
"Look, there's an RV!"
- He ties it into the story. - HUNTER: And makes it entertaining.
He makes it entertaining.
MacLANE: Brad had the idea that
what was really successful in superhero movies
was the becoming of something. Once you were the character,
it wasn't as exciting as becoming the superhero.
So Dash, on the Velocipod, is him discovering his powers.
HUNTER: Yay, Mirage!
BARILLARO: Brad was the first director to actually write the film himself,
to be the sole writer on it.
You get these great lines and you'd be animating to them,
and often, an animator would go, "Who wrote that line?"
You got to a point where it became a joke because Brad would be insulted.
"You don't think I could write that line?
"'Who wrote that line?' You don't think I could write it?"
"You don't think I'm good enough?"
FUCILE: "Sam Jackson came up with that?"
BARILLARO: "No, I wrote it, man."
This is a great way to get him all fired up.
Just say, "Who wrote that, by the way, Brad?"
MacLANE: Before the film came out, we got all this heat off the Internet.
These people on this website that will remain nameless,
were complaining about the lip sync.
Brad was like, "They don't know what they're talking about."
This is some of the best stuff in the movie.
MULLINS: One of the hardest things in CG is to get that tactileness,
people touching other people or other things.
It's rough, really hard to do.
MacLANE: This is Victor, doing Syndrome.
MULLINS: A really cool effect.
BARILLARO: All the tie-in of the colors and effects
being the same color as the Omnibot,
shooting out.
It's coming from the same creator, right through design.
HUNTER: "It's a very technical model.
"You see, what it entails is that each arm has 30 points along its length,
"in which you can manipulate space and time."
What the hell can I say about it?
BARILLARO: No one wants to hear about this technical nightmare.
MacLANE: So this Omnibot has six arms, as opposed to five.
The other two Omnibots, that's the only difference. And it has a laser.
The eyes are different in color, but basically the same.
MULLINS: It's funny, in these simple shots,
trying to get the lip sync and expressions right.
Just trying to keep it subtle and not over the top.
I probably spent most of my time on this show just trying to get the faces right.
Working on all the subtlety we could get in with these rigs.
- It was amazing. - KAHRS: It was never enough.
MULLINS: It was never done. Your work was never done.
I never felt like there was a shot where I got it right.
KAHRS: I think Helen would look the most doll-like,
because of the way her face is built.
You could sink a lot of work into trying to get it to look soft and alive.
It always seemed like an uphill battle.
MULLINS: Well, with Helen too, it's like I was saying, she's not caricatured,
and her features are somewhat plain.
They sort of float inside the surface of her face.
She can go off-model like that. (SNAPS FINGERS) Like, super-quick.
That was a big struggle for me, working with her,
trying to keep her on-model, figuring out what's on-model with her.
Everybody was struggling with that.
HUNTER: I just love the fact that they're doing superhero stuff,
but they're doing it as a family, and they're like...
Driving the van, just family things.
They're arguing over directions. It's amazing.
HUNTER: They were too quick.
It was looking like a toy.
Then we had to slow it way down again.
FUCILE: It wasn't till we saw it on a big screen.
HUNTER: The monitor at your desk really fools you.
DeVAN: Everyone's worked on the whole movie, now the action stuff comes up.
You all know the characters, you know what to do.
You get this scene, you have a short time to do it.
It's a very active scene
and you feel more comfortable throwing the character around.
You can get it out faster because of how well you know the character by then.
MULLINS: Angus, on the Omnibot...
RUSS: You pretty much animated the Omnibot
through this whole sequence, didn't you?
BARILLARO: It's just great, the relationship between J.W. and B. Bird.
The fact that they could have it out over things.
HUNTER: But still respect each other.
BARILLARO: In the morning. HUNTER: In the morning.
MULLINS: Pete Sohn's kiss coming up here.
MacLANE: A kiss is probably the hardest thing to animate I can think of,
as far as believability.
You have to believe these are two people kissing, not robot automatons.
I've seen other CG movies with kisses that don't work so well.
MULLINS: There you go. Now that's a pretty sexy kiss.
Peter Sohn.
So, on the Bot here,
you did a whole first pass on this thing,
and then went back through and redid a lot of it,
because of the weight.
MacLANE: I still don't think it's heavy enough. We'd get shots from layout,
and they would do the best guess they could about how long a shot should be,
but we had no idea how long it would actually be.
So we'd get 40 frames, but needed 80.
KAHRS: The task of animating this... MULLINS: A thankless task.
MacLANE: John, you did a great job with that.
Bob flying through a building.
KAHRS: I have this guilty pleasure of animating debris.
(COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
MacLANE: Somebody animated that debris. It's amazing.
MULLINS: A lot of that debris you see is from this one shot that John did
with Bob getting smashed.
I took the debris after that and added it in my shots.
It spread like wildfire.
People were like, "You gotta sweeten your shot!"
Everybody started putting in debris because of that shot.
MacLANE: Really nice debris. It really adds so much to the animation.
The robot is animated, I did that, but the debris I didn't do.
- I think it really adds the most. - RUSS: This shot!
It was the first debris shot where we were like, "Oh, my God."
MacLANE: I remember saying to John, "Know what? You're wasting your time."
John's like, "No, this'll be worth it."
You were so right. It looks so great.
MULLINS: The shot with the arm falling
was another one where the weight is perfect.
We spent so much time in this sequence.
Everybody attacked this sequence, all together.
It was like, "All hands on deck." Everybody was just doing everything.
"Do some cars here, some debris here.
"Take a shot here, do Helen here. Do this here, do whatever."
It's crazy.
MacLANE: Nice work. That was Dave Mullins there.
This is Gini, animating the speed skating Frozone,
which is so well animated.
RUSS: She had several versions of that,
and Brad kept asking her to make it faster.
MULLINS: She's like, "You're nuts!"
She's like, "He's crazy. What are you talking about?"
RUSS: He's right. MULLINS: Always right.
MacLANE: So there's the Mazinger Z, flying fist shot,
and then Mullins animated him trying to reach the bracelet.
BARILLARO: A good hockey-style shot. MULLINS: There you go.
MacLANE: See him looking at Bobby Orr?
MULLINS: He was.
MacLANE: Inside his neck there is actually the Underminer's claw,
because he had no interior of his robot existing.
I Frankensteined the Underminer inside the robot for that one shot.
SOHN: You know what? It was really fun to work on this.
- Is it luck? We're lucky. - HATHAWAY: Yeah, absolutely.
Some of the guys were working on Iron Giant.
Pete, I think, was a senior when I was a freshman.
Just seeing pieces of that and finally seeing the completed movie,
and hearing that Brad was gonna be at Pixar,
I was just like, "I must work on Brad's next film."
BARILLARO: I love the fact that their superpowers match.
I'm sure Brad will talk about this, their character.
Helen is this overextended mom, and she's Elastigirl as a superhero.
Violet's insecurities,
and the fact that her ability is to turn invisible.
Again, as an animator,
you really have a lot to draw from.
HUNTER: Mmm-hmm.
e
- HUNTER: Yeah, exactly! - (COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
DiGIOVANNI: It was in there for seven frames.
HUNTER: Okay, the thing was, he wanted the skates in there.
"The ski model, where are the skis? When are we gonna see them?"
We're like, "Brad, skis aren't cool anymore."
It's funny that he was arguing about whether skis were cool.
BARILLARO: "It was cool in the '60s, man. Now everybody snowboards."
HUNTER: "What's snowboarding?"
Finally, that's what it came down to. "All right, we'll put them in."
For six frames, and then it turns into the disk.
(HUNTER LAUGHING)
But the arguments over that were so much fun.
BARILLARO: That was Mike Venturini. He was so reluctant to put in the skis.
He would act out slaloming.
"How is this cool, me wiggling my butt? That's not cool.
"Frozone's cool. He's a snowboarder."
FUCILE: Uh-oh.
The old boys.
BARILLARO: What do you say about that?
FUCILE: There's nothing to say.
HUNTER: If you don't know who they are, we're not gonna tell you.
Nothing to say.
BARILLARO: Bud Luckey, right, doing the voice?
HUNTER: Yeah, who did Boundin'.
FUCILE: It was funny, with that dialogue,
we kept having to reduce it. Reduce it. Remember that?
The more phonetic it got, it just didn't work.
HUNTER: It didn't fit his character. FUCILE: Almost like a puppet.
BARILLARO: I love this.
HUNTER: This cute Violet look, right there.
It's such a cute smile.
BARILLARO: That's Patty. HUNTER: It's really sweet.
BARILLARO: That was Patty Kihm.
That's the great thing about the versatility of the department.
The fact that that was done by a female animator.
The appeal and charm of her playing with her hair
and smiling at her dad, I don't think...
It's awesome that they had a female animator do that.
I don't know if a guy would have really nailed it as well.
FUCILE: He would've done...
What he thinks a girl would...
HUNTER: We cast her because we knew she did the last shot in Toy Story 2
of Bullseye when he's got "Andy" written on the bottom of his feet,
then he spins around and spells it right.
- That was cute. - FUCILE: Yeah, really charming stuff.
HUNTER: Here we go.
FUCILE: Here's John Kahrs, animating Hunter.
Oh, jeez.
There's this thing here that is just John Kahrs.
HUNTER: That is so John Kahrs. I've gotten that look numerous times.
FUCILE: That was kind of like Hopper, from A Bug's Life.
BARILLARO: Aw.
HUNTER: This is, again, back to where we're like, "How are we gonna do this?
"Stretch-arm Helen was hard enough,
"but how are we gonna get this little monster to transform?"
And again, it took a Spaniard.
Again it took a Spaniard.
He just went to town on this one.
DiGIOVANNI: Rodrigo Blaas, kicking it out of the park.
BARILLARO: This is two models they had just merged into one.
Technically, a mess and a nightmare,
but cheating things as much as possible
to get the look that he wants, graphically.
Scaling up hands and shrinking them, the eyes and mouth, just going crazy.
HUNTER: It's actually one model with a control that changes it from Jack-Jack
into the Jack-Jack monster.
He just lurped it on. I think we did a lot to, like,
scale the body up and scale the head down,
so the head stayed the same size.
There's a lot of things we did there. (GROANS)
SOHN: I know it's a movie, it's pretty commercial.
But it doesn't feel like that when you're working with Brad.
It really feels like it's an experience...
...that I'll keep with me for a long time.
Whether or not it's a popcorn movie,
or a drama, or comedy, or action-adventure, whatever,
Brad really cared about it being pretty honest.
I think that made it fun for all of us to work on,
because we had to think about our own lives as we were doing it.
Brad was thinking about his life and everybody's life.
So, in the end, you felt like you worked on something that was about life.
That made it feel like it mattered.
HUNTER: Here's our sexier Tony Rydinger.
I wonder if they're gonna have what he used to look like on DVD.
BARILLARO: One of the many versions of Tony.
Tony's got some issues with his teeth.
HUNTER: We had to go in and stud-ify him. He was a little bit...
Too geeky for a lot of people.
BARILLARO: There's a certain point where you can only push one model,
one Universal Man, so far.
We had made principals, teachers,
all sorts of people of different ages, Frank and Ollie, kids,
and there's a certain subtlety,
especially to softer-featured kids or females,
that it just couldn't hold up all the way.
- So we had to make a second pass. - HUNTER: Give him a little extra love.
BARILLARO: Yeah. HUNTER: So that we could
animate him better.
BARILLARO: But it bothers us.
You wanna be able to nail this stuff and make it perfect in every shot.
We can go through this and wince at certain characters,
but Brad was always good at holding us back
and prioritizing what's important in the shot,
what the audience is really watching,
- and trying to hit that first. - HUNTER: Right.
(CLEARS THROAT) That's how we did a lot of the background, throwing it in.
- "Okay, that one stands out." - BARILLARO: Exactly.
HUNTER: "Go on and tweak it."
BARILLARO: So we could spend some time
on the hero characters, the main guys.
- Tony's last... - HUNTER: Tony's last scene.
- BARILLARO: Tony finishing off. - (HUNTER EXCLAIMING)
SANTOS: Come on, Kureha, you got more stuff to say about it.
YOKOO: What? SANTOS: About Brad.
YOKOO: He really was like a slap in the face.
For the first couple of months, when we were all on Monsters,
we were like, "Who is this guy?"
He brought in his own crew, and we don't know who he is.
For the most part, Pixar cultivated their own talent from the inside.
So, to have this guy come in... They hadn't introduced us at all.
Until he actively brought animation in and showed us his work,
we'd had no contact with him.
SANTOS: But then we realized
the people he brought in were amazingly talented.
Even the animators.
I have learned a lot from the animators he brought in.
It was nice to see a difference.
Every day, I go into dailies not only to show my shots,
but because you're always looking for that one thing that inspires you.
That's what it's about.
Our department's always been collaborative.
I think we're our worst critics,
but that's why we always raise the bar on ourselves.
There's always something better.
YOKOO: When you went into dailies, almost every shot you saw
- was an inspiration. Right? - SANTOS: Especially on Incredibles.
YOKOO: It would make you work harder.
DeVAN: I wanted to say about when Brad came,
we were all working on Finding Nemo.
He was gearing up. They were in story for Incredibles.
They were starting up and we were still hiring people for Incredibles.
It was amazing and so inspiring, how much Brad would...
He would come down into our department
and he would talk to different animators.
Whenever you saw him, he would be like, "I love your stuff!
"We gotta get you on Incredibles.
"We got great stuff for you. You'll do great stuff!"
So already on Nemo,
you were already getting fired up for the next thing you're going to do.
You couldn't wait to get on Incredibles.
MULLINS: I remember in dailies, hashing the stuff out, too.
One thing that's so cool about this place
is everybody pitches in and makes a great film.
MacLANE: It's like a family. MULLINS: A big dysfunctional family.
MacLANE: It's like the movie. It's the animation dysfunctional family.
MULLINS: We're all closer now.
MacLANE: I really had a great time working with you guys.
RUSS: Yeah, it was amazing.
MULLINS: I liked working with everybody but John.
RUSS: Kahrs. MULLINS: He's just too talkative.
MacLANE: I don't know if he said enough.
- MULLINS: He'd never shut up. - (COMMENTATORS LAUGHING)
MacLANE: We'll hear about it later.
You'd see the reels and it was so amazing.
From the first time, you're like, "This'll be outstanding."
MacLANE: I was fortunate to get to work on this film,
- and getting to work with you, Dave. - MULLINS: It was okay.
- We'll do it right next time. - MacLANE: Yeah, next time.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
MacLANE: When the Incredibles battle the robotic pirates.
RUSS: It was like animation school every day in the dailies.
MULLINS: He always fostered this attitude of,
"Everybody pitches in. Everybody's idea is valid.
"Everybody support everybody, and we'll make a great film.
"Put your egos away, and just concentrate on the work.
"Let it be about that."
For the most part, that's what ended up happening in the film.
Everybody was so into the film,
that everybody put aside whatever petty differences that anybody had
and just did the film.
The whole company, the whole studio, is closer now.
We're closer with modeling than ever. It brought a lot of people together.
MacLANE: It's a big love fest. MULLINS: It is.
MacLANE: The whole idea about everybody loved the film
so they wanted it to be better, and every step of the way...
The way the old Disney films were made
was that at every stage of production, people would add to it.
I felt that everyone in this production gave a bit more than they could
because they loved the story.
Brad basically shows you what it could be,
or gives you a glimpse of what it could be,
so you push yourself to be more.
I know that emotionally, this film was difficult for the animators,
- because they wanted it to be so good. - MULLINS: Mmm-hmm.
MacLANE: People worked so hard because they wanted to do more work.
They wanted... When the film was done, I think it had more ownership.
RUSS: You wanted to be proud of what you had put into the film,
that you knew you had put everything you had into it.
MacLANE: It was pretty stressful, too.
MULLINS: It wasn't rosy in the beginning. We were battling.
We were battling with modeling, we were battling with articulation.
It was because we all wanted the same thing, which was cool.
RUSS: I think we became... MULLINS: Everybody just...
We all got thrown into a big cement mixer,
and feeling like, "All right, hash it out."
We came up with so much stuff.
RUSS: It was always about making the film as good as it could be.
MULLINS: It wasn't about, "I'm better than you."
It was like, (EXCLAIMS) "How are we gonna do that?"
RUSS: There were a lot of debates, like in the articulation reviews.
We were saying, "We need two weeks for Helen's face.
"We've got this huge film to make. Where is the money?"
They had this Popsicle-stick board.
MacLANE: "If you spend two more weeks on Helen,
"you don't get Squeaker the cat."
MULLINS: Exactly! MacLANE: There was a huge argument.
We almost didn't get Squeaker the cat.
MULLINS: Didn't Dooley go in and like...
MacLANE: I think someone else built it again.
I pitched the idea of not having Squeaker.
You just see him off-screen, like... (MEOWS)
That didn't fly. But it would have been cheaper.
MULLINS: That was probably one of the most stressful days for me,
that final review for Helen.
I was dying.
I hadn't really done a lot of articulation before, especially here.
I had some, but it was a challenge just sitting there like,
"We don't have any more time!" It's like, "But we need more time!"
RUSS: We never felt like there was enough time.
But they did an amazing job.
They spent less time on these characters than on previous films.
I think they got, easily,
so much more out of these guys than on characters previously.
HUNTER: All I can say is thanks to Brad Bird
for coming here and making this movie.
BARILLARO: It was a great experience. FUCILE: Thanks for getting him up here.
HUNTER: Amen.
FUCILE: Thanks for buying the DVD.
BARILLARO: We really appreciate it. It's very nice of you.
Sorry about all that talking and stuff.
Press the other button to listen to the movie.
HUNTER: You can press "stop" now. BARILLARO: I'd rather listen to that.
HUNTER: I think they should press "stop" now.