This is Brad Bird, writer and director of The Incredibles.
- And John Walker, producer. - BIRD: Welcome.
And right away I would like to comment that we had different music
for the first time for the opening logos, the Disney and Pixar logo,
written by Michael Giacchino.
And we were concerned that if we had the usual Randy Newman music
coming out of Boundin', we were not changing the mood as we wanted to.
And Michael, I think, hit it right on the head.
WALKER: And how great to see such a wildly different short film in front,
both coming out of the same studio.
BIRD: Different sensibilities, one studio. WALKER: One brand name.
BIRD: This opening... I wanted to begin the film
with something that was unexpected.
Most superhero movies begin with the big "whammo-blammo" thing.
And I thought if we started in this kind of strange...
The film's beat up and old and we're looking at them
in some kind of personal documentary sense,
that would put the emphasis on them being people.
They're superheroes but you're seeing them being decidedly un-super here.
They're just sitting around talking about being super.
I thought that was already subverting the audience's expectations.
And the interesting thing, or the thing I was going for, anyway,
was the fact that they're talking about things
that they think their future will involve.
So, Frozone is the ladies man, even though we later see him married.
Bob is talking about settling down,
although later he has a problem with it.
And Helen can't imagine settling down
and she turns out to make the transition very well.
So, that's a little comment about what we think our future is gonna be
versus what it is.
WALKER: And at one time, we had Buddy Pine in there.
BIRD: That's right. We cut him because it felt like it was giving away something.
So, now we are into the "whammo-blammo."
The idea here was that once everybody had settled down
to this documentary thing, you hit them with a left
and launch them into outer space.
WALKER: The aspect ratio goes from 1:33 to 2:39.
BIRD: Suddenly the image clears up and the sound gets great.
WALKER: You don't have the sound coming out of one mono channel.
BIRD: This was showing the golden days.
So, Janet Lucroy, who directed the lighting photography
on all of this stuff, we talked about, with Lou Romano,
about having this be more saturated in color
and golden in hue to give the idea that everything was at its best in this time.
This is more comic book-y kind of staging,
bigger and everything's kind of broader.
The colors are broader and the poses are bigger
and everything's... The superheroes the way we're used to seeing them.
WALKER: We certainly labored over the design of the Incredi-bile
which you only see in this sequence.
BIRD: Right. They did a great job on it.
The amount of cheats to convert the car are relatively few,
- which is sort of amazing. - WALKER: Yeah.
BIRD: Because the car really does kind of change shape.
So, we do all this work and then... It goes by in two seconds.
You just kind of go, "Can we create another five sequences
"where the car converts? To get our money's worth?"
But I think that's the aspect of these films that is delightful,
is there is enough detail in them
that they can stand up to multiple viewings.
Certainly Pixar is well-known for going the extra mile for the amount of detail.
WALKER: That's right. BIRD: And nuance.
WALKER: We'd joked that it would be great to have the Incredi-bile scene
later in the movie with a baby seat in the back with Jack-Jack,
going to the grocery store.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
BIRD: Somehow he managed to hold on to that. Yeah.
WALKER: He had it in the back, just covered up.
BIRD: Yeah, in fact, Teddy Newton,
who did character design with Tony Fucile
for the film, did a fantastic drawing in the earliest days
of all the family in... Actually, they were flying.
WALKER: Right. BIRD: Everyone was...
In my earliest version of The Incredibles,
everyone could fly except Bob.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
It was kind of a sore point with him.
Teddy did this fantastic drawing of all the family flying
and then Bob, like, underneath them in a car, a station wagon.
WALKER: With his arm out the window, with the fist up, you know?
BIRD: "To the rescue," it said.
WALKER: I had that drawing
pasted to my door for the entire four years of the movie.
"To the rescue." I always felt like Bob in the station wagon,
with everybody flying above me.
BIRD: So, right here, we're watching some,
I think, extraordinarily good animation
by Dave Mullins and Kureha Yokoo
on Elastigirl and some wonderful stuff on Bob.
Everybody pitched into the stuff, so I'll never be able to keep up.
Beautiful ice effects by Mach Kobayashi here.
Under Sandy Karpman's supervision
and beautifully designed by Ralph Eggleston, the art director.
And here's some fantastic animation by Carlos Baena.
For some reason, the animators from Spain,
we have two of them on this film, and they shared a room,
they could do the most extraordinarily, fantastic physical stuff.
I mean, it's nuanced, it's caricatured,
it feels weighty and physical and it just...
I got to the point where if I had something that was really hard to do,
physically, I'd go, "We must go to Spain." You know?
"Go to the Spaniards."
Here's our character, Bomb Voyage,
who at one point was named "Bomb Pérignon."
But the Dom Pérignon people didn't think that was too good of an idea,
so we had to change it.
Dominique Louis, who is a wonderful production designer here at Pixar,
provided the voice for Bomb Voyage.
WALKER: And Jason Lee is doing the voice for Buddy Pine,
who also does the voice for Syndrome.
He's playing himself 15, 20 years younger.
BIRD: Yeah, we were worried that he wouldn't be...
We would have to use a kid.
And we thought it would be better if we could get Jason to sound like a kid
because oftentimes they sound like different people.
They don't sound like the same person.
So, we had to do some experimentation both with having Jason
raise his voice a little bit and change the speed and the way he says things,
and then also pitching it up slightly in Pro Tools.
And we found this blend of the two that worked very well.
There's a lot of wonderful animation here by Andrew Gordon and Travis
and all kinds of people getting in the flavor of this comic book moment
where everything is kind of, you know.
The guys face each other and they say
"Bomb Voyage" and "Monsieur Incroyable."
But it's all meant to be done broadly.
And yet, not in a way that mocks it.
It's a fine line we're trying to tread here,
but we don't want to do this in a campy way.
We want to say that we believe in this world,
but also kind of enjoy that it's really kind of absurd.
WALKER: Yeah.
BIRD: So, here I have this little shot
that I had in from the very first pitch.
It's the kind of thing you normally don't see in a superhero film.
There's a very quick shot... You'd have to go back, home viewers.
Bob kind of winces before the train hits him.
And it's him preparing for the fact that this is gonna hurt a little bit.
- It's not gonna kill him... - WALKER: But it's a train.
BIRD: It's a train. It's gonna hurt. WALKER: It's moving fast.
BIRD: So, I just thought, that's the kind of moment
that we tried to get in this movie a lot.
Part of my original feeling for this film was that we would always have
those moments where superheroes have feelings, too.
WALKER: That's right, and it hurts.
Check out the lighting. Isn't this great?
BIRD: Yeah, it's great.
Janet Lucroy and company did a fantastic job.
WALKER: There's a beautiful exterior of a church that you never see again.
BIRD: Yeah, you gotta realize that for John and I here, this has been, like,
a four-year journey and we're blasting through these four years.
Because things that we had meetings over and fought over...
- Here's the reverend. - WALKER: Excellently voiced by...
BIRD: By our producer, John Walker. WALKER: That's right.
Let's go back and listen to him again.
BIRD: There are nuances aplenty there. WALKER: Unbelievable.
BIRD: We watch these things and all of these battles and struggles
that we had go by in an instant.
And it's like watching your kids grow up, or something like that.
Before your eyes.
So, this is very sort of romantic lighting
and it's kind of meant to emphasize the harshness of what's coming now,
where the images are jittery and blown out
and very gritty and grainy.
And it's meant to be a sudden jolt.
But unlike the opening, we're in full aperture ratio.
So, it's like we're looking at 1 .33 old Academy footage,
but we've zoomed in on it so the grain is bigger
and it's got that old, overcooked, you know,
"dragged behind a car" feel.
WALKER: And I love this use of courtroom sketches in there,
as well as Teddy Newton, who's the fabulous narrator voice here.
BIRD: Oh, yeah. Our character designer
- and overall crazy genius. - WALKER: That's right.
BIRD: Teddy Newton does the narrator. For some reason, he has a knack
for doing these old movie voice guys.
WALKER: Sort of industrial film-esque.
BIRD: Yeah, kind of "News on the March" guy.
The courtroom sketches were done by Peter Sohn,
who's an excellent guy that worked with us, as did Teddy, on Iron Giant.
WALKER: And a shot that drove us crazy,
with all of these miscellaneous humans.
BIRD: And the thing is you won't even know
because if you do them right,
nobody notices them.
WALKER: It was just hard to do them so that no one would notice them.
BIRD: Here we cut to Bob's current life.
And I wanted to take a very different approach
on the way this stuff was presented.
I talked with Lou and Janet about de-saturating all the color here.
It's almost like we've dialed down all the color that we saw in the prologue.
It's kind of lost a lot of its life. It's kind of governed by Bob's feelings.
The home has a little more color than the Insuricare stuff.
And the other interesting thing that we did here that I think worked out well,
is I actually pushed the camera back in 3-D space
and zoomed in on this stuff so that it was flat.
If you pull the camera back in space and then zoom in on things
the dimension gets lost and everything compresses and feels claustrophobic.
So, all of these shots are compressed and they make the world feel tighter
and flatter and the idea is to not move the camera very much
when you get into Insuricare.
And have everything feel compressed and claustrophobic.
WALKER: And Jean Sincere was playing Mrs. Hogenson.
Here's Wally Shawn as Gilbert Huph. (LAUGHS)
BIRD: Yeah, kind of a strange thing on the movie
was the very first voices that we recorded were all writers.
Wally Shawn is a playwright, a really great playwright.
Sarah Vowell is a wonderful author and essayist.
They did our first voices.
Bernie, Dash's teacher, is voiced by Lou Romano
who is our production designer.
This was a sequence that was kind of in and out.
WALKER: In and out, in and out, 'cause the movie was 107 minutes,
the longest movie Pixar has ever made.
This was a sequence that we really talked about just not doing
to get the time down and to save money, essentially.
But we decided in the end that it was...
BIRD: It never played as well without it. It was important to see
everybody's normal life before you started getting outrageous with it.
And seeing that it caused problems.
WALKER: It became too much of a story about Bob
and at the beginning of the movie
you didn't see the rest of the family enough if you cut this sequence
and the one following it, which is Violet's introduction.
- BIRD: Right. - That was a note from John Lasseter,
our executive producer. He said leave them in.
BIRD: John is very good about making decisions based on what works.
Even though we were running a little bit long,
he saw the value of keeping the sequence. He came to the defense of it.
- And I thought that was good. - WALKER: Absolutely.
It just meant a little more work.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
BIRD: I was glad to see it back. WALKER: Yeah.
BIRD: This is a very subdued sort of scene,
setting up that there's problems in the family
that go with having these powers and never being able to use them.
And the goal on this stuff was to show
that Helen's trying to be a good mom by sticking to the rule book.
But she, herself, doesn't really believe the stuff that she's saying.
These kind of scenes are challenging in their own way for an animator
because they're not particularly physical.
They're confined scenes and it's all about expressions and timing,
and keeping things animated but not making them too big.
- Here's our heartthrob. - WALKER: Tony Rydinger,
who's been through a few designs.
(WALKER CHUCKLES)
Tony almost made it into the film in a different incarnation.
But at the last moment we decided he wasn't heartthrobby enough,
and he got a last-minute redesign.
BIRD: Yeah, I think the problem was these characters are very hard to build.
They take a lot of time. They're like instruments
that the animators are going to play.
So, they have to be capable. It's like building a car for a race driver.
Or a Stradivarius for a musician.
And it takes a long time to build.
So, we put all our juice on our main characters and there was kind of a gulf
between our main characters and our secondary characters.
We kind of had to just bite our lip and be okay with it.
I was ready to be okay with it. And fortunately, again,
our executive producer, John Lasseter, pulled the little...
Stopped the train brake
very late in the film, almost at the last minute,
and said, "We gotta make these better."
Everybody was really happy that he did because if John says, "Fix it,"
then everybody can just go, "He says 'fix it."'
Of course, we all wanted to fix it, but we were running out of time and money
and it was wonderful that John made the choice to get that picked up.
It makes a huge difference and makes it feel like one world.
So, here's the family life
and Lou and Janet and I talked about warming things up a little bit
because even though it's in Bob's more claustrophobic part of the movie,
home is not a bad place, it's a nice place.
And he's just really not engaging as much as he needs to.
This has got a lot of wonderful opportunities for character stuff.
And it reminds me of a million dinners that I was in
when I was sort of Dash's age.
And we used to have these very sort of crazy dinners with my family.
Now that I'm a father, you know...
Dinner is still the place where you collect all the characters in the house
and let them bounce off each other around this little square.
And so, it's a wonderful opportunity to set up the family part of this film.
WALKER: One of the hardest things to do in this scene
was keeping track of all the stuff on the table.
- It was just a nightmare. - BIRD: And you have these meetings,
where they're going, like, "The broccoli has moved.
"The broccoli, there's no continuity on the broccoli."
Or "The gravy..." Yeah, it was this thing that Nigel said at one point.
Where everybody's at each other's throats,
everybody's sick of dealing with digital food, you know.
People are starting to yell a little bit at each other.
Nigel raises his voice and says, "Can we get back to the issue of the gravy?"
(BOTH LAUGHING)
So, I kept coming back to him with that one.
"Can we get back to the issue of the gravy?"
But there was meat, juice, and gravy,
and "What about the peas?" and "Where's the broccoli? It's moving."
WALKER: "It's gone, it was there. Where did it go?"
BIRD: "Clearly, the broccoli is next to Dad in this angle and..."
WALKER: Finally, it's just, forget it. BIRD: Nobody's gonna care.
WALKER: Throw it around, it doesn't matter.
BIRD: We worked somewhat to get it.
We got it to the point where you shouldn't notice
- if you're a normal human being. - WALKER: Right.
If you want to, you can probably find some inconsistencies.
BIRD: You can find food continuity problems in this film.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
You know, I would love to just stop at every instance and give each animator
who did these scenes their proper due.
In the first stuff that we did, and this is among the first stuff that we did,
the film was broken up a little more, to give everybody something to do.
So, it's changing from animator to animator somewhat quickly.
Eli Fucile also did the voice of Jack-Jack right there, did this laugh,
and we loved it so much, I wanted it to be in the movie.
He's the son of one of our supervisors, supervising animator Tony Fucile.
Anyway, I would love to stop at every instance and point out...
Right here is wonderful animation by Mike Venturini and Mike Wu.
WALKER: "Wu-Dog." BIRD: Mike Venturini did Frozone
and Wu-Dog did Bob in this scene.
And this is a very atypical scene for animation.
You don't get too many times, a scene of two guys sitting in a car talking.
If I were an animator, I would love to animate these.
I tried to write something that would be interesting to animate.
I think this is wonderfully contained animation.
I think they hit it out of the park. I love this stuff.
And beautiful lighting, too.
People think of animation only doing things
where people are dancing around
and doing a lot of histrionics, but animation is not a genre.
And people keep saying, "The animation genre."
It's not a genre. A western is a genre.
Animation is an art form, and it can do any genre.
You know, it can do a detective film, a cowboy film, a horror film,
an R-rated film or a kids' fairy tale. But it doesn't do one thing.
And, next time I hear, "What's it like working in the animation genre?"
I'm going to punch that person.
WALKER: You're using depth of field, which you use all through the movie,
moving, you know, foreground characters out of focus...
BIRD: Yeah, you know, a lot of people, when they do CG,
want to take advantage of the fact that there's no light issues in CG,
in terms of depth of field. You can make everything deep focus,
like Citizen Kane. A lot of people go,
"You can have infinite depth of field, why would you want it otherwise?"
Well, I could see that for certain projects.
Certainly, it works fantastically well in Citizen Kane.
But in this film, I wanted to use the focal length
to focus you on what to look at.
Other Pixar films have varied the focal length, too.
So, it's not like I'm saying that we're inventing it on this.
I'm just saying that oftentimes it makes things a little trickier to do,
because you're having to constantly pull the focus around,
like an action-filled live action film.
But to me, when you're dealing out this much information and the film
has got a lot of fast-moving scenes in it,
it's one more tool you can use to direct the audience's eye.
And so, I wanted it in a lot of scenes.
WALKER: And you used it a lot. We did a lot.
BIRD: I did. And it was a pain in the butt.
You were having to send scenes back, to get the focal length right.
- Here is one, you know? - WALKER: Yeah, sure.
BIRD: We pulled the focal length on Frozone there.
WALKER: There's a great effect on there.
BIRD: Yeah. Mark Andrews supervised all the storyboarding of the film.
This was an idea that they had, that they kind of had to sell me on.
You know, I was like, "Come on. A bullet's not gonna freeze in space.
"Come on, the amount of..." They were like, "It'll be cool."
And they saw that I was kind of, you know,
there was a crack definitely open in the door, and I folded.
WALKER: So you made the copsicle. BIRD: Yeah, the copsicle. Yes.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
No, no, I had the idea of freezing the cop.
I just didn't have the idea of the bullet frozen in space.
And that was the one they had to sell me on.
WALKER: I love that he hums his own theme music here, as he comes in.
BIRD: Craig did a great job on that, too.
This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
WALKER: Mine, too. BIRD: I think that Holly and Craig
did a great job on the voices. I think that it's extraordinarily well animated.
It starts out as Ron Zorman, eating the cake.
And then, it turns into Dave Mullins, for Helen busting Bob.
Then it's Andy Schmidt, when they start to really argue.
And then it's John Kahrs.
Each one of them were given pretty long runs, once the argument starts,
so they could control both characters, throughout the scene.
WALKER: That's a great scene. BIRD: And this was a little bit,
in the early days, a tough sell to Pixar,
because this was one of the first scenes we did in storyboarding.
And I think Pixar thought that, you know, we were intending to make
an hour and a half long Bergman movie, showing marital conflict.
But to everyone's credit, when they saw how it fit in with everything else,
they came right around and went with this scene.
This was an interesting scene to write, because when people argue,
what they're fighting about is not what they say they're fighting about.
To communicate one thing while saying another is a challenge.
I just think that it's really wonderful stuff.
It is animated, it doesn't feel like it's simply reproducing live action.
But it feels real, believable.
WALKER: She didn't stretch for a long time, at the end of the fight.
He was too threatening to her.
BIRD: People were uncomfortable with that moment.
And then, when she says, "This is not about you,"
because Bob is bigger than Elastigirl.
And it felt almost like, you know, spousal abuse or something like that.
And I thought, well, wait a minute. I don't have to change the scene.
I just have to make Mom... Mom is his equal.
And so, if she just uses her stretching to become physically,
you know, to kind of say, "I will stand up to you," then...
WALKER: And can tower over you, should I choose to.
BIRD: Once I did that, everyone was okay with the scene,
- and I didn't have to change a word. - WALKER: It really is an excellent...
Because Mom doesn't like to use her powers,
and she does it there for great effect.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
WALKER: Poor Bob. BIRD: Yeah.
WALKER: He's the only guy whose cube is filled with a giant pillar.
BIRD: Right. WALKER: He can't fit through the door.
BIRD: That was an early idea that somebody came up with.
It might have been Ted Blackman. I don't know whether it was Lou or...
But the idea was that his cube is the only one
with a support structure on it, to make it even more confining.
So there's a little cactus over Bob's shoulder there,
that is in the shape of Huph.
There's great art direction things here, with Lou Romano and company,
where the chair kind of looks like it's frowning.
The desk is kind of pointing out at Bob.
All the little pencil things are pointed in Bob's direction.
WALKER: Can you imagine a more uncomfortable chair
than the one he's sitting in?
BIRD: Right. And I've been in that chair many times.
I was fired out of two of my first three jobs.
So, I relate to this stuff, you know, where this very small guy
is trying to tell you about life, and...
(BOTH LAUGHING)
WALKER: And how you don't deserve to be in it.
(BOTH LAUGHING LOUDLY)
BIRD: Yeah. So, this is an abstraction of all the tiny-thinking people in the world,
and there are a lot of them, and we've all run into them.
And, unfortunately, you know, they're often in positions of medium power.
They're never in the top positions. They're always in middle management.
But I like the idea of this big superhero
having to listen to this little blowhard.
And being powerless when every instinct in his body
tells him to get out there and mix it up.
WALKER: Right.
BIRD: This is some wonderful animation by Tim Hittle.
Again, I apologize to all the animators I'm not mentioning.
But everyone did an extraordinary job.
This is interesting, at this point I wanted to go to wide-angle lenses.
The minute that Bob started to move and be active again,
I got the lenses away from being flat, and started moving the camera a bit,
because I wanted to get just a taste of Mr. Incredible, again.
Then we're back into the flat lenses, and the symmetrical compositions.
I like the way the little files bounce when he hits them.
WALKER: There's a little Tony Fucile animation there.
BIRD: Yeah. Of Bob grabbing Huph. Tony, "I want that scene."
I think Tony was working out some past issues in that scene.
So here is another kind of, not typical scene, I think, for animation.
It's just two guys walking down a hallway, talking about problems.
There's some good animation on the orderlies there,
that you don't normally notice. Rick Dicker, here,
our poor government worker, is voiced by Bud Luckey,
who's an old-time Pixar guy.
I think was one of the principal designers of Woody in Toy Story,
and directed Boundin', that is also on this DVD.
He did a wonderful temp voice, and everybody liked it so much
we just thought, "Well, let's use it in the film."
So, it's Bud Luckey and Craig here, voicing this thing.
WALKER: We always wanted Rick Dicker to introduce Boundin'.
BIRD: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we had this whole really abstract opening
of Rick Dicker coming into his office late at night,
- pulling out a bottle of booze and... - WALKER: A banjo.
- Starting in on Boundin'. - BIRD: Starting in on Boundin'.
- I don't know why it wasn't done, yeah. - WALKER: I think it...
BIRD: Kind of a weird idea. WALKER: Yeah.
BIRD: At this point in the story, Bob is feeling like the world
is tightening around him. He's a very defeated guy, so...
WALKER: And boy, talk about Pixar detail, in this sequence.
BIRD: There's a ton of it. This was our first sequence, really.
WALKER: All of the different posters and newspaper clippings...
BIRD: Mr. Incredible memorabilia.
WALKER: My favorite is Mr. Incredible Sings.
BIRD: That's his William Shatner album. WALKER: Right.
Up on the wall, someplace.
BIRD: There's a really good graphic there.
But yeah, the walls, you could definitely linger this camera around,
and catch a lot of details about Bob's life.
There are shots of him and Frozone at some benefit or something,
you know, and they're in their superhero outfits.
There's a wonderful, subtle, little effect right here.
You know, I wanted to imply that this was a 3-D lenticular sort of image.
So, Rick Sayre and a bunch of geniuses here at Pixar,
figured out how to simulate sort of a lenticular effect.
And I almost wish we used it a little more.
I wish the camera angles showed you it a little more. It is there.
But the camera has to move in order for you to see it.
So, here, I wanted the filmmaking to be jumpy and busy,
and kind of moving around a lot, because I wanted it
to reflect the fragmentary absorption of Bob,
constantly trying to pay attention to this thing, get the details down,
and being pulled out of it by Helen,
who's wondering what's going on in there.
And again, it's that juxtaposition which...
It was so important in so many scenes in this,
of the mundane and the fantastic.
I mean, he's being given a chance to return to his old days,
with this fantastic mission, and at the same time,
Mom's outside the door, you know, telling him that dinner's ready.
WALKER: Here's this glorious music cue
by Michael Giacchino, coming around,
and Bob being able to see the possibilities
- of returning to his great life. - BIRD: Right.
And we wanted to light this with this golden light,
and have him really connecting with all the things that he loved
about his old days, and feeling like it's within his grasp again.
Again, we have the mundane and the fantastic here.
This thing self-destructs, and starts all the sprinklers in the house.
Of course, the family gets the sprinklers, too,
and he has to deal with it.
And then the aftermath of that is
- you got to dry everything out. - WALKER: With a pink hair dryer.
BIRD: Well, yeah. Because that would be Helen.
This is a wonderful sustained piece of character animation by Kureha.
She did both characters in this incredibly long shot, without a cut.
And if you can follow each individual character
all the way through the shot,
and they are absolutely as in the moment
as any good live action performance, I think.
You can feel them questioning things, and hearing things,
and Bob's kind of tightening when he feels like Helen's getting suspicious.
And he's not sure if ideas are gonna fly.
It's a wonderful piece of sustained character animation.
Very difficult because it's so long. She was on it for months.
And had to stay concentrating, from...
For months.
WALKER: The ride is really starting now.
We're going to the island, he's suited up again, it's, you know...
The movie starts to go down rails at this point.
BIRD: Some great graphics here, designed by Mark Holmes,
and put it up on-screen by Andy Jimenez,
who's one of our directors of photography,
who did a lot of the pre-vis planning for the film.
I like it because this screen is kind of between the two guys,
and yet we're not highlighting it.
So, here we are, Bob's feeling very heroic.
And once again, the mundane is raising its head.
And he's got to deal with stuff all of us middle-aged guys got to deal with.
WALKER: Here's Elizabeth Peña as Mirage. Fantastic performance.
BIRD: Yeah. She has a really great voice.
And she was absolutely the first person I thought of,
when we were looking for somebody to do this character.
One of the biggest problems on this film was the problem of scale.
For some reason the computer, it seems to me,
wants to make everything look small. And so we had to think things through,
to get things to look as big as they were supposed to be on-screen.
I often felt that the computer had an agenda,
almost like HAL 9000 in 2001, you know.
And the agenda was, it wanted everything to be small,
weightless, plastic, rigid and clean.
And we had a whole movie, where we needed things to be big,
heavy, lots of textures, pliable and dirty.
So we were fighting it every step of the way.
- And it was like, "Dave, Dave..." - WALKER: "I like it clean."
BIRD: "I want things to be small and weightless, Dave.
"You're endangering the mission, Dave.
"I don't think you know how to direct this movie, Dave."
Nigel and everybody did a fantastic job dressing all this jungle stuff.
WALKER: Yeah, Tom Miller did a lot of that.
BIRD: Tom Miller was our King of the Jungle.
And, you know, we had all this incredible amount of detail here,
and all these leaves and things were designed.
I mean, they didn't just happen.
The idea is to show that this thing is threatening here,
but that Bob has actually still got a lot of his chops.
And it sets up that this world is threatening,
and he can get hurt a little bit.
- We're doing a lot of stuff quickly. - WALKER: Right.
BIRD: And there's a lot of really terrific animation.
WALKER: And I remember you talking about Bob sneaking around,
in this and in the subsequent scene, when he sneaks into the base.
Movies don't have people sneaking around in them anymore.
I want some sneaking around in my movie.
BIRD: Yeah. I think that people are in such a rush
to get the action sequences going fast
that they forget that there's pleasure to be had in the sneaking around part.
WALKER: Taking a look at where you are.
BIRD: So, I have a few sneaking around sequences in here.
And I don't think they're a waste of time.
Once he jumps off the cliff there,
at the, you know, about 20 seconds before this,
it goes to Angus MacLane, who animated both the Omnidroid and Bob,
for this whole section.
And there is some wonderful effects animation.
But this is really kind of a big, long, involved piece of animation,
and Angus took it all on himself, which was pretty amazing,
because it's a lot of stuff.
WALKER: And you get your classic fantastic and mundane.
In the middle of the big action fight, he blows his back out.
BIRD: Yeah, right. WALKER: And the climax is,
the chiropractic move that puts it back together, you know.
BIRD: Yeah, I had that gag in from as long as I was pitching the movie.
I pitched that gag as part of my original pitch.
And the reason I would stop for a detail like that,
is to try to keep reinforcing the idea that it's the mundane and the fantastic.
There are a few of them that were all part of the original pitch,
that showed up in the movie. And normally in a pitch,
you're only doing the broad strokes.
But every once in a while I would stop to point out a detail
because I felt like it was important to know the tone that I was going for.
There also, I think, is wonderful lighting in all of this stuff.
And Lou did a wonderful job of orchestrating it
going from sunlight down into the lava, you know,
and into this dining room.
And Lou and Janet and I really talked about
how the color moves from one thing to another.
WALKER: Holy smokes, we go to a lot of different places in this movie.
It's just one new set after another, and some of them you just never see again.
And it was really challenging to get all of those things made.
BIRD: When we were first talking about it, people were freaking out.
People were saying... There were some people
that were saying that it was impossible.
Fortunately for us, there was also a number of people who said,
"We can do that, but it ain't gonna be easy."
And I think that we were able to pull it off without breaking the bank,
simply by preplanning the daylights out of it,
and then not deviating very much from our plans.
Because a lot of these sets don't really work
if you're not in exactly the positions that we preplanned.
WALKER: There's a lot of virtual stagehands
just off the edge of the frame,
holding something up, you know.
BIRD: Yeah. It's literally like one of those back lots
where just one foot to the right of the edge of the frame, it goes into...
WALKER: It falls apart. BIRD: Some cement block or something.
A lot of it was just trickery and being very specific.
WALKER: And this is great music here, this is just fantastic.
BIRD: Michael Giacchino did a wonderful job with the score.
Again, back in my earliest pitches of the movie,
I played this kind of early '60s music.
I had a number of little bits of things that I played while I pitched,
so that people could get the flavor.
I wanted it to have the sound that I connect with a lot
of action movies from the early '60s.
Michael catches that flavor without being limited by it.
It reminds you of those kind of scores.
- But, it's brand-new. - WALKER: Yeah. It's just great.
BIRD: And I think that the musicians had a wonderful time playing it.
I got to mention this. This is the hardest stuff for a computer guy to do.
And I know you're sitting there going, "What?
"What's so great about that?" But that fabric thing,
where he works his hand through there, is like, one guy took
- two, three months on it. - WALKER: And could it be done at all?
BIRD: And, "I don't know," and, "We'll have to put our best men on it."
WALKER: "You got to put your hand through it?"
BIRD: And then, "Is there any way he can just kind of hold it,
- "and describe it?" - WALKER: "There's a hole in it?"
- "Look, there's a hole." - BIRD: "Can we do it with..."
WALKER: "That'll work." BIRD: "Can we just cut to his face,
"and hear a sound of him moving his hand through it?"
They so wanted to avoid that shot. And I said, "No,
"the point of the story is he's torn his old suit,
"and he wants to fix it."
WALKER: I guarantee you, there are about 15 people who,
during this sequence,
all they do is watch that suit that Bob is carrying in his hand.
Because the simulation on that has been so difficult that it's like...
"Look at that thing move, man."
BIRD: Now, and toward the end of the film,
when this stuff had been figured out,
it was a no-brainer to approve these scenes.
But all this stuff of hair and fabric,
not just the stuff in his hand, but the stuff he's wearing.
E's hair. The fact that her lenses are slightly blowing up her eyes,
and making them slightly larger, there's some magnification there.
All that stuff has to be engineered and figured out,
and this is another big scene.
WALKER: "Oh, my God, did you see that?"
(BOTH LAUGHING)
BIRD: But it's really good. And it's so good
that hopefully no one will notice it.
From your side of the fence, being a producer that has to pay for this stuff,
- it's a no-win situation. - WALKER: That's right.
- BIRD: Because if we do a fantastic job... - A fantastic job, nobody notices.
(BOTH LAUGH)
BIRD: I think we're overriding a lot of good work here,
and we're not talking about these great sets that Lou Romano designed,
along with a lot of members of the art team.
This big frieze, taking up that whole wall, was painted by Paul Topolos.
A beautiful job. And then it was displaced to look dimensional.
E's place is a big elaborate set.
It's tasteful, it's Bauhaus-y in its elements,
but it also aggrandizes heroes.
The frieze and the big sculpture outside with the waterfall,
is all about the heroes and the gods,
that she wishes she was still designing for.
It's wonderful that everything's big, too, because she's small,
and yet her personality is big, so of course her place would be big.
WALKER: I love the way the sound changes
when they walk into this giant room.
It sounds cavernous.
BIRD: Wonderful animation by Andrew Gordon on E,
for a lot of that stuff.
And Rob Russ did some animation, and there's some good Bob stuff in there.
Listen, I could spend the entire commentary praising people.
So I beg my crew's forgiveness if you're not mentioned.
It's impossible to... You're going from one group of talented people
to the next, every moment.
All of you did a great job.
So, I'll just say all of you and get myself off the hook.
(BIRD LAUGHS)
WALKER: Hundreds of people worked on this film, you know. So, it's...
BIRD: Yeah. WALKER: Check the credits.
BIRD: I thank you all. We thank you all.
I think the animators, we really set a challenge for them
in doing this stuff.
Humans are notoriously difficult to animate,
because everyone knows how they move.
You don't simply want to reproduce reality,
because there's nothing specific or interesting about that.
But you want everything to be believable.
You want to believe that these are living things
that have feelings and pasts.
Some wonderful animation by Dave DeVan in there,
of Mom talking to Dad and you can see all this regret on her face.
The feeling is very different this time in the Manta jet.
It's all about the sort of, "High roller, welcome back to Vegas" Bob.
"Please take our excellent presidential suite here,
"and feel free to order up anything you want."
So, it's all about selling the sex and allure
of this island paradise.
WALKER: We have some of our most beautiful shots in this sequence,
I mean, just gorgeous stuff.
BIRD: The effects guys, again, Sandy and her team,
did a wonderful job on the jungle waterfall here,
and that underwater shot where the Manta jet comes into the bay,
another one that was incredibly difficult to execute.
Water is a very tricky thing to do in CG,
and again, when we showed the number of things to people,
"Yes, we're doing water, and we're in outer space,
- "we're underwater..." - WALKER: "There's explosions."
BIRD: "There's explosions and fabric underwater and..."
WALKER: "Hair underwater." BIRD: "Simulate hair, please."
Just the volume of stuff just knocked people over.
But the proof is in the pudding.
WALKER: Here's another set you see just once.
BIRD: So, here's Helen coming to the door.
And she's just trying to vacuum the hallway.
And she kind of lets her vacuum probe into the room a little bit.
WALKER: Big mistake. BIRD: Yeah.
You hear all the schmutz and things going in there.
And she goes... (EXCLAIMS) Because she's got to do the whole room now.
Like where you see some dishes in the sink,
you come down thinking you're gonna be good,
it's 11:00 at night, everybody's asleep.
You wash two or three things and open the dishwasher,
and the dishwasher is filled with clean stuff,
that you now know you must unpack. And it's just... (EXCLAIMS)
So, it's that "no good deed goes unpunished" bit.
This is some of the first animation of the women in the film that we did.
The Helen stuff is animated by Dave Mullins
and the E stuff is animated by John Kahrs.
They're both great scenes. What I like about Helen's scene
is that, you know, she's completely thrown off by E.
She's used to being in charge and E throws her off completely.
So now, Bob's back in the boardroom here and is surprised
to find that the agenda has been changed.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
WALKER: "Guess I didn't get the memo."
BIRD: This is the official entrance of our Syndrome character.
We wanted to give him an entrance where he's in control,
and Bob is kind of wondering, "What the heck is going on?
"Who is this guy? Why is he wearing this costume?"
He gets a hint here, and is not made comfortable by the memory.
The idea here is to have our villain be a little bit sympathetic.
The roots of this problem go back.
Bob made a mistake back then, not treating the kid a little more...
With a little more grace.
And the idea that I was trying to go for here was that,
we don't often know how simple things,
how big of an effect they can have.
This is an idea that was... Of the zero-point energy,
that I originally wrote for an opening that we didn't use,
that you'll find on this DVD. And I was...
WALKER: I just love that he loses him. BIRD: It's again, the mundane, yeah.
So, there's a fantastic water simulation here, by Martin Nguyen.
What I was gonna say about the zero-point energy is,
I had some kind of corny name for
the Immoba-ray, or something, that would have worked fine.
But when I was researching it on the Internet,
I found that there was actually a thing called zero-point energy,
that essentially does, in many respects, what is represented here.
It makes heavy things weightless.
It's something they're actually working on, which bends my mind.
WALKER: That was a very difficult thing to get right, that Kronos shot.
BIRD: That Kronos shot. Yeah.
The idea is that you can only read it from one angle.
WALKER: And we tried to resurrect some crabs from Nemo to crawl all over.
- BIRD: Right. - But they... We couldn't get them.
BIRD: The idea of Gazerbeam's skeleton being in the cave was...
One of our story guys, Max Brace, suggested that.
I had some other thing in there, and he suggested it.
I thought that was a really great idea.
We incorporated it into the film, and it ended up being
a great little condensing thought.
Okay, here's another, I think, great two-person scene
that Victor Navone animated, between Helen and E.
We kind of had to send some of this stuff around a little bit.
There's some great Dave DeVan animation right here.
But, I feel like we all lined up in terms of how these characters move.
We came to an agreement, what kind of walks they should have
and how they carry themselves.
And I think it's seamless, in terms of everyone always feeling consistent,
even when they move from animator to animator.
There's some wonderful design in this lab, too, I think.
And very specific to E. And it's a nice contrast with the rest of her house.
There's amazing shading in here, by Bryn Imagire,
and fabulous lighting by Janet Lucroy and the lighting crew.
It has a lot of different surfaces
and we're trying to have kind of a hushed mood in there.
Again, it's slowing the film down, to take in this location,
because it says something that E has this art gallery up top,
- but down below it's all... - WALKER: Like a UL lab, down below.
BIRD: I think it looks really cool.
The character of E was an amalgam of a lot of different things.
Fashion designers and equipment guys that you always saw in adventure films,
who were geeks who were designing this stuff for the hero.
And so, I thought, if you combine those two things,
of the equipment guy and the design person.
This little half-Japanese, half-German character.
I thought... I always had a blast writing this character.
WALKER: Well, and you do a pretty good job voicing her, too.
(BOTH LAUGH)
We couldn't find anybody else who could do this
German-Japanese accent that you dreamed up.
So it was... You could do it, and you did it pretty well.
BIRD: I was available, too. WALKER: Yeah.
You work at reasonable amounts of money.
BIRD: My rates were cheap. WALKER: Rates were good.
BIRD: We needed to save some... No, it's funny.
It works out here at Pixar, a lot of times we do temp tracks of these voices.
All the characters. And I did, you know, three or four characters
in the temp track. I did Bob and Syndrome.
The idea is to get something that's a good placeholder,
so everybody kind of knows what we're going for.
But some of the time, people like the voices that are in the temp reel,
as finished voices. And...
WALKER: There's a number of people at Pixar that are in the movie.
- It's great. - BIRD: Kari's voice is Bret Parker,
who's one of our animators.
WALKER: The Pixar Players are all over this.
BIRD: The filmmakers I most admire recognize the value of teasing moments
and milking moments. Think about a good storyteller,
who tells good stories in a bar,
they don't blast through a story. They stop and savor moments.
And they know which moments they can milk.
And all of my favorite filmmakers have the confidence to slow down.
Versus, I won't name names, but a lot of successful hacks,
who by having rapid-fire editing all the way through,
never have to deal with the issue of,
is anybody paying attention,
because they keep throwing stuff at you.
And, to me, there's an edge of desperation about that.
The kind of filmmaking I most admire takes a moment to savor things,
because there are so many things a movie can offer.
Particularly when you have a really talented crew
that works on getting sets to look great,
and is putting things up. You want a moment to take them in.
It's like a good comic pauses, you know.
I think that a good filmmaker slows down.
Oh, and this is one of my favorite pieces of animation, too.
WALKER: We had all sorts of stuff in there, where they were...
One of the guards was crying over his buddy, who was down.
It got way, way out of hand.
BIRD: Jim Murphy did Bob there,
and Victor Navone did the guard who gets clocked.
And Victor loved the assignment so much
that he did seven different versions of the guard getting hit.
And it's really, I think it will be on the DVD.
But, it's like, variations of a theme,
it's like a painter doing "Number seven, number eight."
WALKER: He collapses in grief. BIRD: And they're all hysterical.
When that particular dailies session came up, he just kept presenting.
And I had my choice, you know. And I just said,
"We got to go with three, although number four has fine qualities."
This sequence features some wonderful animation by Carlos Baena.
And again, you know, any kind of really hard bit of physical business,
you know, "You go to the Spaniards."
Go to the Spaniards if you have an impossible thing to put on-screen.
And it's just really physical and this rock feels really heavy,
and yet Bob feels really strong.
And that's a very difficult problem for an animator.
And this is one of my... I love this set.
It's so simple, and feels like a big movie.
Randy Thom, our sound designer,
did some wonderful, spacious computer sounds here,
and the reverberant quality of the sound is amazing.
Bolhem Bouchiba did both characters here.
He was a hand-drawn animator who... This is his CG debut,
and did wonderful animation of E and Helen,
in these contained scenes.
WALKER: These still shots of all of these superheroes
were really quite difficult to do, because they're completely modeled,
shaded characters, and so you have to create a still for each one.
So, it was very difficult to get all of these things done.
"How many are there?
"Well, there's Gamma Jack." Their names are kind of fun, too.
BIRD: Here I wanted to give the feeling that Helen was being drawn in
closer to E.
So I did a technique that Hitchcock invented for Vertigo
and a lot of filmmakers have used.
Moving the camera in one direction,
and countering it with the zoom lens attachment.
This sequence, where we're cutting back and forth between Helen and E,
and Bob in the computer room,
is something that I did in Iron Giant as well,
which is connecting two seemingly disparate things, with a single event.
There's a part in Iron Giant where he gets caught in the power lines,
and you keep cutting to Mom in the house.
"How are these connected?"
Then he trips in and the power goes out.
Well, here Helen presses this little button to find out where Bob is,
and she inadvertently exposes him to this computer system.
WALKER: To the goo-balls. BIRD: To the goo-balls,
which was Kevin O'Brien's idea. We knew we had to stop Bob,
but Kevin came up with this wild idea of these goo-balls,
which makes perfect sense,
if you think of stopping somebody who has strength.
But this was all animated by Dylan Brown,
who did Bob getting hit with goo-balls.
And it was done as one long piece of animation,
and then we put in multiple cameras all over the place,
to get the rapid cutting. And I think it worked out really well.
So, now we're back to our mundane reality here,
and E is tolerating watching one of her superheroes crying,
just suffering through it.
WALKER: (LAUGHS) And I love her little incinerating garbage can there.
BIRD: The fact that she has toilet paper. I wanted her to have toilet paper
because she's someone who would not have Kleenex.
WALKER: There's no crying at E's house.
BIRD: "No, no crying at E's place."
And there's some wonderful animation here by Doug Frankel.
I also love the design of E's kitchen here.
A weird contradiction of E's character is she's very tiny,
but she dominates these superheroes.
The only time you see Helen really flustered is when she's dealing with E.
And it's capturing the essence of somebody who's so confident,
that they blow over everybody.
This is about taking care of the last-minute details.
It has some more animation that I really enjoy.
Bryn Imagire did a wonderful design of all these textures
and things that are on the wall.
The painting behind Helen is something that Bryn did.
All the bedsheets, their design.
And in CG, you actually have to pick out the quality of the fabric.
Ron Zorman did an extraordinary job on this scene, which goes on.
And Patrick Lin and I worked out this very long involved scene,
where the camera keeps moving around.
It has to keep catching different pieces of the action,
because everybody's talking at once, and kind of feel seamless.
And I think it's a wonderful piece of animation,
and a nice piece of camerawork as well.
WALKER: It's great, the kids really start to come in their own
in this part of the film.
We're back to them and their powers
and what they can do and what they can't.
BIRD: I love this music here... WALKER: Yeah.
- ...that Michael did. - WALKER: Helen's flying the plane,
- which she didn't originally. - BIRD: Originally, yeah.
I had this guy named Snug. You'll be able to see that on the DVD
if you go elsewhere.
I originally wanted there to be a price paid, you know.
I wanted someone to die, and it took me a while to come around to this.
Early on, we were looking for things to streamline,
and John Lasseter suggested that Helen fly the plane.
And I didn't want to do it, because I wanted there to be a price paid.
I wanted someone to die on the... You know.
And Lasseter was cool, you know. He'd go, "Okay, it's your film.
"But, you know, I really think it would be cool if she were the pilot."
Finally, I just, you know, "Yeah, it would be better. Dang it!"
(BOTH LAUGHING)
WALKER: It is cool that she flies. BIRD: It is great that she flies.
And now I can't imagine it any other way.
Right here is some just fantastic Syndrome animation,
started by Doug Sweetland, who laid the whole thing out,
and nicely finished off by Dan Nguyen and Michal Makarewicz,
who are two young guys. And we threw them in the deep end.
Doug wasn't able to finish off the scenes, and we said to these guys,
"Can you bring the stuff home?" Doug is such an awesome animator,
they were frightened and intimidated.
But they did it anyway, which is the true meaning of courage.
(WALKER CHUCKLES)
BIRD: Yeah, and they really did a fantastic job.
So all three of them, kudos. It's exactly what I was going for here.
I wanted it to be fun to watch, and also threatening.
And I think you can find a villain funny,
but you should not find a good villain, anyway, to be non-threatening.
And I think Syndrome walks that tightrope between being fun to watch,
but also being a force to be reckoned with.
WALKER: Bob's got his special beaten hairdo on, too.
That was a lot of work to get his hair simulation
to fall down like that on his head.
BIRD: Mark and his team did such an amazing job with simulation.
Some people in animation think that because it's called simulation,
there's no work that has to be done on it. You simply plug in a hair,
and whatever the animated character does, the hair reacts.
Well, a lot of times the hair does not react how you need it to react,
and you can't animate it.
So, basically, these guys have to change
the virtual universe that the hair exists in.
They have to effect gravity, or give a little puff of wind at the right moment.
And that is its own art form. And these guys are geniuses.
And they did a fantastic job on this film.
WALKER: They have to translate the direction. I mean, the director says,
"I'd like the hair to move over here." They hear that,
but what they have to say to themselves is,
"That equals Mars gravity and high barometric pressure,
"and a 40-mile-an-hour gale wind, blowing north-northeast."
BIRD: Blowing in from the north, a nor'easter.
(BOTH LAUGH)
But this nor'easter can only last for .02 seconds.
WALKER: Press go, and we'll hope it works. You know.
Wait for a half hour, and get it back, and go,
"Too much barometric pressure."
BIRD: I really had a blast working out this sequence
with Mark Andrews and Kevin O'Brien,
and all the storyboard guys who did this.
We really went in, and I wanted to make this a nail-biter.
And, you know, Andy Jimenez and Patrick Lin
did some great jobs with planning all these bouncy camera moves,
and making it feel like it's really happening at the moment.
Holly Hunter did a great job learning the brevity,
you know, the pilot lingo that they use in military situations.
Mark Andrews was, of course, our guy to go to for that.
But she wanted to know what every single thing meant,
before she recorded it.
And, you know, we explained it to her, and man,
she invested herself 400% in it.
The animators had a tremendous challenge to match her intensity,
because she was so into it.
There's some wonderful animation by John Kahrs here of Helen and Violet.
When you need intensity, nobody can do it better than John Kahrs.
I love that the plane is rocking,
and that they're reacting to the rocking plane here.
WALKER: I love this great addition of Violet actually trying to do the force field.
That wasn't in for the longest time. She was just, you know,
this shot where she's trying to make it, trying to help out, but she just can't.
And it really pays off in some subsequent scenes with her.
BIRD: This shot was one of the hardest to do in the movie.
We had a million different elements,
and we wanted to make it feel like it was happening.
Simultaneously, we had Helen stretching, hair simulation...
WALKER: Things blowing up, 3-D clouds, you know, wind, and...
And here she becomes a chute. Oh, let's see, that took a while.
BIRD: Rob Russ did some amazing animation
of Helen converting into the parachute.
This is all hard.
(BOTH LAUGH)
WALKER: Now the parachute goes into the water.
BIRD: Water, which is tough.
WALKER: So, now you got... BIRD: It's got to intersect the water.
WALKER: ...that's wet now. And people are just ready to give up.
By the way, wanted to crash the plane, and had to do it again.
BIRD: The fuselage,
and this is animation Rodrigo did.
Again, tough physical stuff, go to Spain.
I feel like we're just devolving into this litany of, "This is hard."
WALKER: We'll stop doing that. BIRD: Yeah.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
Because the whole movie was really hard.
It's just a laundry list of hard to do stuff.
Ultimately, you know what?
The audience shouldn't even think about it.
We're just sitting here going over it, going, "Remember that?
"Remember that?"
I think if anybody has any thoughts that Pixar is sitting back
after the success it's had,
I can tell you, as a relative newcomer here,
that this is the hardest working group of people on the planet.
And they do not ever take these films for granted.
They are always trying to do, you know, 150%.
And I am so impressed with this crew.
They took this thing that was seemingly too big and too complicated,
and they just went directly into it.
It's like flying into the eye of the hurricane.
And I'm very proud of everyone that worked on this movie.
And I'm proud of the company that John, and Ed Catmull, and Steve Jobs,
and Sarah, and everybody have made here. Because it's a...
- WALKER: It's amazing. - ...great place to make a movie.
WALKER: I love this shot. And the music that goes with it.
And you get to see Mom as the boat. What fun this is. I just love this.
BIRD: I also like that Vi is just... WALKER: Sitting there.
BIRD: Grousing, you know. She's like the sullen teen, you know.
She's not gonna be doing anything here.
But the idea, too, is to plant the idea
that she's haunted by the fact that she didn't come through
for Mom on the plane, is sticking in her craw.
I even had a shot, and I don't know why I didn't put it in.
I kind of feel like I should have had it in.
At one time, I had a little shot at the end of this,
after Mom praises Dash. It kind of showed Vi, looking back,
kind of, you know, regretfully.
And I think probably it would have been a good idea.
But anyway, somehow it got dropped, and I forgot about it.
Again, I credit the effects guys, the lighting,
and the animators here.
Gini Santos did a lot of this animation.
Getting it to feel like a real ensemble scene.
Part of the reason I wanted to write this little speech
for Helen to tell the kids here,
was that there's expectations for animation.
You make this connection with animation and superheroes,
you think Saturday morning.
And Saturday morning, they have these very strange shows,
completely designed around conflict, and yet no one ever dies
or gets really injured, or there's no consequence to it.
I think that came out of, you know, a team of psychologists
determined that it was bad for children. And I think just the opposite.
I think that it's better if kids realize that there's a cost,
and that if the hero gets injured and still has to fight,
it's more dramatic, and it's closer to life, you know.
I wanted to say that this was a different realm.
This is not one of those films
where we put a pillow around every experience.
Here's some fantastic animation by Cameron Miyasaki
that is incredibly subtle stuff, very difficult to do.
Holly and Sarah did a great job vocally here,
and Cameron just absolutely nailed it.
These very subtle little expressions,
eye darts and little hesitant blinks.
You can really see stuff going on in the heads of these characters.
WALKER: And she gets her hair behind her ear, getting ready to take on her role.
BIRD: And we wouldn't say we would talk about how hard everything is.
WALKER: No, I'm just saying it's a great thing to see her face.
BIRD: The simulation guys, you know, killed themselves.
This is one of my favorite cues that Michael Giacchino did. I just love it.
It's Syndrome's theme, and it's used in a couple of different ways.
I also think this is a fantastic set.
Scott Caple had a lot to do with building this.
Again, you know, I keep going back to the animators.
They're always the unsung heroes of these films, though.
Victor Navone did a wonderful scene here between Mirage and Syndrome.
And it touches on kind of the creepy side of Syndrome.
This sequence has Helen going back to her Elastigirl mode.
And I was always really intrigued with this idea
of someone who had embraced motherhood
really having to call on some old skills, and being great at it.
Mark Andrews and I collaborated with each other
on figuring out all these ways she could get caught.
And he ended up boarding the entire sequence and did a fantastic job.
I mean, it is what you see now, only in board form.
This is a great shot design
that was done by Mark Andrews and Andy Jimenez.
A beautiful piece of animation here by Dave Mullins, of her.
Then, right here, Rob Russ did this.
WALKER: She flattens out. It's amazing.
- Her hair stays out, it's just great. - BIRD: Yeah.
And very difficult to switch Helen around into the model
that can do all the stretchy things, and keep it seamless.
But I love all the sets in this stuff, the size of this stuff.
This gag was in my original pitch. That was part of my original pitch.
I always see women being hypercritical of their own bodies.
Most men are just, "Hey, you look great."
You know what I mean? You're a woman.
So, I see that as, you know, I had three sisters, and I just see that women
are way too critical of their own bodies.
Men are just grateful that they're around.
Trust me. This whole sequence of her stretching becoming a problem,
was something that Mark Andrews and I worked out.
The first stuff of her being in the base,
a storyboard artist did it, and it was very plain.
And I said, "No, you don't understand.
"This stretching has got to be a problem.
"What if she gets caught between doors?"
So, at that point, Mark and I just grabbed it.
And this is very much the way Mark boarded it.
Some of my fondest memories on this film is sitting down with Mark
and figuring out how many ways she could get...
WALKER: Get screwed up. BIRD: (LAUGHS) Get screwed up.
It's wonderful animation by Shawn Krause there, her getting all trapped.
WALKER: Here's Violet practicing. This is not gonna happen again,
what happened on the plane.
BIRD: I wanted to show that she was obsessed about not failing now.
And so it's really kind of a character change for her.
Wonderful lighting in this section by Janet Lucroy and company.
And wonderful animation by Dave DeVan.
WALKER: It's great that Violet's got her hair behind both her ears.
- She's ready for action. - BIRD: That was the visual idea,
and why having her hair work was such an issue.
As a filmmaker, you're always looking for ways to say things visually.
And having her hair start out in front of her face,
like something she's hiding behind, then gradually get pushed back,
and even having Mom push it back in the Cameron Miyasaki scenes,
was key to showing what's going on with her.
I really believe in giving young talent a chance.
If you believe in the talent, you don't have to baby-step everybody.
In my first animation job, I had the misfortune
of working under a director who really underestimated a lot of people,
and constantly was hobbling them with low expectations.
And very patronizingly telling people, you know,
"You're not ready for this," and "You're not ready for that."
And I think that it really put a fire in me, that once I got to be a director,
that I would be exactly the opposite.
And I would give people,
talented people, who were inexperienced, challenging scenes.
It's become a personal cause of mine, to take inexperienced animators
and throw them in the deep end, and see if they can swim.
And this film was no exception.
I gave some very challenging scenes to some very inexperienced animators,
who just happened to be very talented.
And it scared the bejesus out of them.
But they went for it and they completely delivered.
And I've only been disappointed, you know, maybe a couple of times,
and I've done this a lot of times.
And almost every time, the people deliver in spades.
And I think that it's a wonderful thing
for experienced animators to see, too, is that the game is on.
And there are some great people coming up,
and I'm gonna give them their shot. And if they deliver,
then, you know, sky's the limit.
WALKER: We did it through the film, and in the production side.
People rise to the occasion. Especially people at Pixar,
which is, you know, they're just a huge group of overachievers,
and they're just waiting to go.
BIRD: The resources here are phenomenal.
The bird being a sentry was Mike Cachuela's idea,
who worked on the story early on.
And I thought it was a great idea.
This scene, right here, was a real challenge to write.
I wrote it, like, four different ways.
And the goal was,
how do you justify Mirage letting this guy go?
And how would he react after he's had time to think about it?
There was some disagreement whether or not he would
threaten her at this point.
But I felt like he had been stewing in his own juices here,
and that he would truly be not knowing
whether he was gonna choke her or not.
- You know, he lost everything. - WALKER: Right.
BIRD: The goal was to get to this point. WALKER: For the gag.
BIRD: Yeah. It's great animation here by Andy Schmidt,
which is one of the great falls of all time.
WALKER: That was always a big issue. Why does... The Mirage turn.
- Why does she turn, what is... - BIRD: Right.
WALKER: How are you gonna set that up?
BIRD: And it fell into place when...
The idea of Mirage pushing Syndrome out of the way.
- And then having him risk her life... - WALKER: Her life, yes.
- ...after that. - WALKER: Which is great.
BIRD: It was showing the blatant disregard Syndrome has for life.
And I feel like a lot of our villains in real life have, for life.
Oftentimes it's decorated as a higher calling, but it isn't.
Now we're into the full-on...
A sequence we call the "100-mile Dash."
And this was something that I pitched in my first pitch.
And unlike some sequences, where I kind of had the bones figured out,
but I wanted to flesh them out
with the board guys, like the last sequence in the city,
this one I was ultra-specific with.
I wrote every single thing in here,
because this was one of the reasons I wanted to do this movie.
This was, like, if the movie were a meal,
this is the cobbler afterwards, you know.
Or whatever. But this was one of the things
that I just desperately wanted to see as a moviegoer.
I wanted to see what would happen if you could run,
and that's your only power, but that in itself is a tremendous gift,
if very fast people are trying to kill you. So...
WALKER: And what's so great about the sequence is he discovers through it,
what he can do. He doesn't know what he can do.
BIRD: That's the point of the sequence. WALKER: Yeah, yeah.
BIRD: That it's not just a chase sequence.
It's a kid discovering that he can do a lot more than he thought he could do.
Again, this was one of those things where in the first version
that was boarded, it was just boarded as a straight action sequence.
And all the moments where he has revelations about,
"Hey, I can do this," were taken out. And I had to say,
"Hey, no, man. He just punched a guy in the face and got away with it."
WALKER: Yeah. BIRD: You know?
This whole sequence goes between terror and exhilaration.
Because he's absolutely afraid for his life, and full of adrenaline.
But he also just marvels at what he himself can do.
So, it's... He's constantly going back and forth between,
"Man." And I just love doing this kind of stuff.
Ted Mathot, working with Mark Andrews,
boarded this beautifully. Andy Jimenez did great shot planning.
Patrick really brought it home. The effects are great.
Michael has just kicked down the door on the music cue.
And this was one of the most fun things,
in a movie full of fun things. And the idea was, having this sequence
where he's basically screwed until the last second.
And then the fact that he stops actually saves him.
I think that you can get a grasp of the number of different locations we had.
WALKER: I hope you can get a grasp of the number of locations.
Because Lord knows, at the beginning we wouldn't let anybody count.
It was like, "They got a lot of sets.
"We should count and figure out how we're gonna do it."
BIRD: "Just put down a large number of sets."
WALKER: "Put down a large number."
I don't think we want to look too closely at this.
BIRD: You were afraid everybody would run.
WALKER: I knew they would run.
We don't want to do that. Some of these scenes are in flux...
BIRD: Changing notions.
WALKER: There may not be many sequences.
We'll probably cut a lot, the movie's long.
Let's not do too close an analysis.
BIRD: We'll probably lose some ambition.
WALKER: That's right.
- You start to see the... - BIRD: The bickering has stopped.
...brother and sister working together.
BIRD: Now, they're defending each other.
WALKER: They don't...
She's never done this before. She's figured, oh, my gosh.
BIRD: Well, because she put the force field on, while she was in middle air,
and not, you know, touching the ground, she finds that
a strange byproduct is she is suspended in this thing.
And that she's hit some kind of weird anti-gravity moment.
And then, again, mundane and fantastic, you know,
what if you ran into Mom and Dad here?
So, it was an entertaining way to get them back together.
And here their moment of togetherness is interrupted.
And this is the first time that the kids have really seen Mom and Dad just,
- you know... - WALKER: Do what they do.
BIRD: Do what they do. And this is, you know, this is the kind of feeling
where you are surprised by your parents.
You're not used to seeing them as young people that are physical.
And now the family sort of makes its stand for the first time as a unit.
And the idea was to give the audience just a taste of this.
- Then stop it. Shut it down before... - WALKER: Yeah.
- ...they get to really watch it. - WALKER: Yeah.
BIRD: So, Syndrome, he's like... He's not put this together, you know.
He's just realized that he's got a whole bunch of them here.
And it delights both the evil guy and the geek in him.
WALKER: Right. BIRD: You know?
WALKER: He's got four great trading cards.
BIRD: Yes, exactly.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
Some wonderful John Kahrs animation there. And then Rodrigo did this stuff.
Again, I'm picking out certain animators
because I just happened to mention their scenes.
But the entire crew really delivered on this stuff.
And Mark Henne and all his team did magnificent simulation.
Look at how the cape moves and the hair.
WALKER: Syndrome's hair, yeah. BIRD: It's fantastic stuff.
And I love the way this room is lit.
It's got this really creepy lighting,
sort of technical gleaming feeling, too.
- It's got that shiny technology feel. - WALKER: It's cool-looking, too.
BIRD: This is a funny bit of animation that Victor Navone did,
- based on Steve Hunter's walk. - WALKER: Steve Hunter.
BIRD: One of our animation supervisors.
And he totally nailed Steve Hunter's walk.
And the little shake that Steve Hunter sometimes does
to kind of loosen up his neck.
And a lot of these great little physical things
are things that people are pulling from their own lives.
People think animators film the people doing the voices,
and just mimic their movements.
And although we do run a camera during our recording sessions,
it's only one component, and the animator may look at it or not.
I think if there's a problem in animation,
it's that too many animators study only other animation.
I was trained to look elsewhere.
If your job is to do a kid, then you go to an elementary school,
or the playground, or someplace where kids are,
and make your own observations. Think about your little brother,
or somebody that you know.
The best animators end up drawing from their lives.
They use a little bit of this, little bit of that.
They look in the mirror and make an expression they're trying to capture.
It frustrates me when people think of animators as technicians,
because they're artists.
And when they pull off a great moment, they're doing something artistic.
WALKER: They combine, in a really unique way,
all the skills and artistry of an actor and a visual artist.
That's why there are very few people in the world that can do it...
- BIRD: Well. - ...at the level we require at Pixar.
BIRD: Right.
Even bad guys get to screw around a little bit.
WALKER: But not for long.
BIRD: Enjoy their success. But if they enjoy it too early, yeah.
You got to shut them down.
WALKER: One thing I was thinking is,
I've been watching a lot of commentaries lately.
And the ones that I've been watching are done by people
who have seen what their films have done out in the big world.
And we're just... This is before we've released the film...
- We like it. - BIRD: We like it. But we have no idea
if the Pixar string of successes...
WALKER: That's right, are we gonna be the ones that break it?
It's like, "Please, no."
BIRD: That'll teach them to let in these outside guys.
No, we had a blast making it,
and it is absolutely the film that I wanted to make.
Mike Venturini did this animation of Frozone here, that I just love.
And Sam Jackson really did a funny performance here,
a great performance, I think. I love Sam Jackson.
But yeah, so we have no idea how this will be received.
We're hoping... We certainly couldn't have tried any harder than we tried.
We absolutely killed ourselves on this. So, we hope everybody likes it.
(WALKER LAUGHS)
BIRD: This is another fantastic musical cue.
Michael does a heroic version of the villain theme,
which I think is really great.
Because that is what Syndrome is at this moment.
And the fact that he's enjoying being a superhero
and endangering people at the same time.
WALKER: He saves a bunch of people,
then throws this tanker mindlessly behind him.
BIRD: (LAUGHS) Kind of forgetting the fact that there's people around.
Which is the great schizophrenia of the character,
the obliviousness of the character.
WALKER: Coming up is one of the most inspired ideas, I think, in the film.
BIRD: Yeah. I knew I had to get the family back to the city,
and I always had that stuff in there. But one of the...
I didn't know quite how to get them back in the city.
We talked about a lot of things.
One of our storyboard artists I worked with
on The Simpsons and Iron Giant, he's a great guy, Kevin O'Brien,
said, "Hey, let me try something. I got an idea, let me try something."
And he pitched this idea of them suspending a van, you know,
with Helen holding it on. And it was so off the wall,
at first, I went, "Let me think about this, this is so weird."
And I took a couple of hours, and I just went,
"How can it not be this?"
It's such a weird idea, and so great.
WALKER: A Winnebago, strapped to a rocket, landing in the city.
Yeah.
BIRD: So, one of my challenges as a director
is I'm always trying to keep things efficient,
because I appreciate that money and resources are going to me.
So, I, very quickly, wanted to get them landed and resolved.
And again, another fine moment for our executive producer, John Lasseter.
John said, "Wait a minute. We need something, we need comedy.
"Maybe they should have an argument."
I said, "Don't say a word. I know what to do."
Because, again, when John says it, you are given permission.
So I was not being the irresponsible director.
You know, he created a little opening for me there.
And I think the idea of having Bob and Helen argue over directions was great.
And I wrote that scene, and I think that it's the perfect thing to have there.
This scene starts out with some wonderful animation
by Doug Frankel here. And right at a key point here,
this is some of the most important dramatic animation in the film.
It switches to Pete Sohn, right here.
And this is incredibly hard stuff to do, to make it seem sincere and real.
And the idea is that he's exposing, Bob is exposing, where he feels weak.
And it's so unexpected to Helen
that she's incredibly touched by it.
And this sweet moment, of course,
is interrupted by a giant robot.
WALKER: Right, of course. BIRD: Of course. It's The Incredibles.
So, now we're full-on into this sequence.
And this is the kind of sequence that I write loosely.
I write what needs to happen.
We need to see Violet get knocked out.
We need to see Dad come to the rescue,
because Dad has been the negligent guy up to this point.
We need to see him defend his kids.
I had a few of these things laid out, the things that we must do.
We must see this, we must have each character have their moment.
But, beyond those parameters, I just had in, you know,
it's a big action scene, all the characters and Frozone are involved.
WALKER: It went through, you know, how many different...
BIRD: A million iterations. WALKER: It wasn't till near the very end
- that it solidified. - BIRD: Well, yeah. We got this idea,
Mark and I, of the remote being a thing.
And what we needed was the mundane.
We had all these fantastic versions of the end sequence,
but it didn't feel like the movie, because it was only fantastic.
And once we got this idea of them fighting over the remote,
which is something that everybody relates to, I think.
Then that was all that we needed. All the previous versions were useful,
because we knew what we didn't want to do. But there were elements.
We wanted to reprise him running on water,
and we wanted to show the throwing the ball thing had a place,
and stuff like that. But really, this end thing was, again,
a collaboration between our fabulous Mark Andrews and...
- I think it turned out terrific. - WALKER: Right.
You don't, you know, you know where you are.
You're not getting lost, but you're moving all over the place. It's great.
BIRD: Those are the things I love as a director, because they're challenging.
When you have a lot of information to get across in a short period of time.
I am very actively involved in shot planning.
I really love it.
And when I'm writing things, I imagine shots.
So I am very active in the storyboarding part.
It's not something that is just sort of sent to me.
And I take pleasure out of working stuff like this out,
because I find it's very easy to lose the audience
in this kind of stuff.
A lot of action movies aren't well done, where you just see close-ups.
You don't know if somebody's 10 feet from somebody or 100.
The great action directors, you know,
James Cameron and Spielberg and George Miller and those guys...
You always know where you are every second.
And that's the kind of sequence that I wanted to see on-screen.
People ask me what an animation director does, and it frustrates me.
Because most of the important job a director does in animation
is exactly the same as a director in live action.
Do we understand the characters? Are their motivations believable?
Do we feel something? Can we follow the plot?
Is anything dragging? Do we clearly understand the spatial relationships
when they're important? What is the timing of an edit?
What is the composition of shots?
When does music come into play? What kind of music is necessary here?
All of these questions are
exactly the same that any other filmmaker faces.
And there seems to be a feeling that animated films just sort of happen.
That there's some technicians somewhere
that just move things around,
and press buttons and...
WALKER: Yeah, press the button that says, "Make movie."
BIRD: It's so not that way. These things take a tremendous amount of thought.
For me, the bottom line is, storytelling is storytelling.
You either engage people or you don't.
And you either get them to feel something,
whether it be feeling scared or laughing at something, or feeling sad,
or you don't.
You kill him dead.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
Here is an absolutely fantastic piece of effects work.
This is Martin Nguyen again,
and explosion sim done by Gary Bruins.
Just really spectacular.
So, our heroes have saved the day.
Our villain is gone, and Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston...
WALKER: Make an appearance. BIRD: Make an appearance.
And as we record this,
Frank passed away last night,
at the age of 92,
leaving behind an unbelievable amount of great work.
And he was one of my mentors.
And he and Ollie and Eric Larson,
and Milt Kahl, and all those Disney guys, I just...
Anyone in the field of feature animation
owes them a huge debt of gratitude.
And it's just an amazing body of work. And, here's to you, Frank.
- They also made an appearance... - WALKER: Appeared in Iron Giant.
BIRD: And I was really happy to get them both in this movie,
because I'm such an admirer of both their work.
And all of those guys, any chance I get to tip my hat to those guys, I do.
WALKER: And here's a great performance by Spencer Fox.
- BIRD: Yeah. - Really great readings of these lines.
BIRD: And Ron Zorman did that animation.
WALKER: Animation, just really terrific.
BIRD: Yeah. Spencer had quirky line readings, that were...
They were one of a kind.
And very quickly it became obvious he was our guy.
I've gone this whole time without mentioning
our animation supervisors, the Three Caballeros,
Tony Fucile, Steve Hunter and Alan Barillaro.
They have done an awesome job. They're everywhere.
There's no specific scene they animated,
but they're all over the movie.
WALKER: They just lift everyone else's work up. It's really quite remarkable.
BIRD: Thank you, Caballeros. WALKER: You bet.
BIRD: Here's a fantastic bit of animation from John Kahrs.
And the idea that he's now violating the home,
which is more connected
to the original opening that we did with Syndrome
which is also on this DVD. Kind of violating the home.
WALKER: The opening, the old opening scene in the movie,
was him coming in to grab the baby. And now it's the last.
BIRD: Well, and this was always a part of my original pitch.
I didn't have that scene in the city worked out.
But I knew I wanted this scene.
And part of the problem with a lot of the superhero movies for me,
is that they're always involving huge throngs of people at the end,
because you want it to be spectacular.
But it's hard for the audience to care about a throng.
You know? They can care about a person, though.
I always knew that I wanted to have the last action sequence
in the movie be around the baby.
Because we care about the baby.
WALKER: Of course, Mom and Dad don't know, in this section,
that Jack-Jack has done all that transforming.
BIRD: They still think he's just Jack-Jack.
WALKER: Just Jack-Jack. And he had one more
- thing he was gonna go through. - BIRD: He turned gooey.
We couldn't get it to work in time.
So, here Syndrome is done in by, what?
WALKER: His cape.
BIRD: "No capes."
(BOTH LAUGHING)
BIRD: And I really like this shot,
where Mom is trying to reassure her kid while debris is raining down on her.
And this shot to me is also emblematic of the movie.
You have suburbia, but one house is detonating.
WALKER: No sequence left unexploded.
BIRD: Slogan copyright, John Walker, 2004.
Again, Sandy Karpman and Mach Kobayashi
did a great job on that force field, which I think is a beautiful effect.
Here's a little guest appearance by my son Nick,
who was also the voice of Squirt in Finding Nemo.
And here we have the track meet.
Which was, again, something that was in the early pitch.
And Tony Rydinger making his reappearance.
And Violet's hair is back,
and she's feeling very different about herself. She's standing there.
WALKER: At one point, one version, you had Violet kissing him.
BIRD: Yeah. She was getting a little...
WALKER: Too forward, we thought. BIRD: A little forward there.
WALKER: "Maybe she wouldn't do that." I was like, "Well, she is a superhero."
She's not too scared of Tony anymore.
(BOTH LAUGH)
BIRD: My oldest boy Michael does the voice for Tony Rydinger there.
And my middle boy, Jack, was the inspiration for Jack-Jack.
So, nepotism is alive and well on The Incredibles.
I'm leaving out my wife. She has amazing superpowers,
which were the inspiration for this film.
This is them clicking back into fitting-in mode.
- It's much easier. - WALKER: Second!
BIRD: Holly and Craig did a... Sarah did a wonderful job in that.
You have to listen for them, but they're doing funny stuff in there.
You know, there's a Pixar tradition,
which I originally didn't want to observe,
of having John Ratzenberger in there.
I thought, why, you know... I thought, why does every movie have to have it?
Then I thought, jeez, every movie's been successful.
This is not a tradition I want to break.
And then I thought, hey, he's perfect for the Underminer.
And he did a great job as the Underminer.
So, the joke here is that he's the last voice in the movie.
And here is the end title sequence, that was designed by Teddy Newton.
WALKER: Andy Jimenez.
BIRD: Andy Jimenez, yeah, did a lot of that.
Mark Holmes and Lou Romano did a lot of the color.
The idea was to stay with our retro '60s thing.
In the late '50s and early '60s,
movies used to have these really elaborate, great graphic
title sequences done by, you know,
guys like Saul Bass and Maurice Binder.
And I thought it would be a great way to send people out,
is to have one of these very graphic end title sequences,
that remind people of things in the movie.
And I think it's also a nice way to frame all these wonderful people
who did such a fantastic job on the film.
And, you know, one of the hardest things about doing commentaries is,
that for every person you can mention,
there are 10 or 15 that you're not mentioning
who also did incredible work.
And you're seeing all their names right now.
WALKER: Hundreds of people worked on the film.
It's been just a joyous experience.
I mean, Pixar is an amazing place to make movies.
The caliber of the talent here is just off the charts.
BIRD: We were just blessed to be able to come and work with these people.
WALKER: Coming up here was like walking into Yankee Stadium.
This is the place where they hit nothing but home runs.
This is the place that is the top of the heap
for animation studios, movie studios.
And, to walk into that, it was challenging.
(LAUGHS) I was like, what are we going to do up here
that hasn't been done before?
And yet you can't walk into a place like this, and act scared.
Nobody wants shrinking violet directors and producers.
They want people that are gonna come in and take over.
You know, do what they do. Add to the party, make it better.
So, we turned up the bravado pretty loud in those first few months,
to make sure that, you know, we made an impression.
I don't know if it was a good impression,
but we were gonna make an impression.
We weren't gonna act scared. And frankly, I was scared.
It's so great to work at a company where it's...
The only thing that...
BIRD: You have to worry about is the movie.
WALKER: It's got to be great. Make it great, make it great, make it great.
You're really challenged by that, and it's...
You've got the wherewithal to do it and the talent here.
BIRD: They support you every step of the way.
Speaking generally, a lot of movie making is shielding the movie
- from all the forces of, you know... - WALKER: Trying to hurt it.
BIRD: Here is just this incredibly protective place.
Stories are protected.
At the same time, they're challenged and nurtured,
and, you know, given all their vitamins and iron, and a good night's sleep.
WALKER: You might not get a good night's sleep but the movie does.
BIRD: The movie does, yeah. Yeah, in fact, I'm just
trying to catch up on some sleep now.
But anyway, one of the things that startled me about the CG process,
is it seemed like we were just making decisions for years.
Complicated, tiny, nuanced, ultra-detailed decisions,
about an unbelievably wide variety of stuff.
And, all these decisions
were just going into this bottomless black pit.
And it's like one of those pits where you drop something,
and you never hear it hitting anything. It's just...
Each day, you would chuck another thousand decisions into this pit,
and you wouldn't see the film ever seem to move forward.
And every once in a while, I'd go,
"This movie is getting made, right? I mean, we are going to complete it?
"These decisions, they're..." "Yes, yes, we've got the decisions.
"They've successfully landed at the bottom of the pit.
"It took several days for it to actually reach the bottom of the pit.
"But they're there, and we've got them,
"and they're catalogued, and duly noted."
Pretty soon I'd forget about them,
and it would just seem like I was going to be on this film my entire life.
Just as long as I give them a thousand decisions
to throw into the pit, you know, everything will move forward.
The funny thing is, is that by the time I started forgetting about it,
the film would start coming back, and it would be complete, you know.
And all these things actually did go somewhere.
And it was almost like, "When did this get done?"
"That's the thousand, four hundred billion decisions.
"That's what they look like, all together."
So, it seemed like nothing happened.
And then it seemed like overnight, everything happened,
and the film suddenly appeared.
We are incredibly grateful to all the people that you see here.
Please look at some of the other features on the DVD
where all these people are singled out and highlighted.
Because, you know, Bill Wise...
WALKER: Rick Sayre. BIRD: Rick Sayre and Bryn Imagire
and Ralph Eggleston came in just coming off of Nemo
when we were in deep trouble, and really saved our hide.
And Nigel...
And just Janet, and Patrick, and, on and on, over and over...
WALKER: Kori Rae is just... BIRD: Katherine Sarafian,
Mark Henne, leading simulation, all those great guys in sim.
We can't forget our esteemed editor Steve Schaffer.
WALKER: He's right on the other side of the glass.
BIRD: Staring at us, going... WALKER: Staring at us.
"Hey, what about me?"
BIRD: "I was only on it for the whole ride."
Yeah. Anyway, it's a collection of brilliant people,
really trying their absolute hardest.
And John and I are incredibly grateful
to every single name you see here, even the production babies.
We're grateful to you, production babies.
For being born during this film.
WALKER: And giving your parents another reason to go back to work.
BIRD: The funny thing is, you know, there was actually,
one of our animators, Dave Mullins,
was over-thinking some of his first scenes on the film.
And the minute he had his kid,
because there was suddenly this huge demand on his energy,
he had to focus down his scenes,
and his scenes became three times more, you know, right on the money.
Because he had limited energy, and he had to focus all of it on...
He couldn't over think anything.
So thank you, Mullins production baby.
WALKER: For focusing your father.
BIRD: No, really, every single name you see here is just...
We thank you.
And we thank you, valued home viewer,
for watching this film,
and listening to us blather about it.
WALKER: There's lots of features on the DVD.
- There's many places to wander. - BIRD: Check them out.
Wander all over the DVD. You'll find some quite wonderful
and sometimes disturbing things, on this DVD.
So please do check all of these things out.
- Thanks a lot. We'll see you again. - WALKER: Take care.