Pixar has been building up to this breakthrough for the last decade. Indeed since the debut of “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar has consistently set the standard and pushed the envelope of computer animation with each of their subsequent films. “A Bug’s Life” introduced organic environments and characters that squashed and stretched; “Monsters, Inc.” ventured further into the world of round organic shapes and successfully tackled the previously unthinkable realm of photo-realistic hair and fur; and “Finding Nemo” convincingly portrayed a wide variety of aquatic life and settings on a fantastic journey under the sea.
But THE INCREDIBLES would require everything Pixar had learned from these films and much, much more to tell its wide-ranging story of a family facing its greatest adventure. Rick Sayre, who served as the film’s supervising technical director explains, “This film had every conceivable technical challenge you can imagine. It could have been completely daunting for us technically, but our attitude was always, ‘It’s impossible—so it just has to happen.’ We took our cues as to what we had to invent directly from the story. This is how it has always been done in animation. The way we approached it is that you can’t go back and say, ‘What if Violet doesn’t have long hair?’ or ‘What if Bob isn’t a muscular guy?’ We loved the story and we weren’t going to let any perceived limitations of the medium stop us from telling it.”
Faced with the challenge of moving the characters in a realistic fashion, Sayre and the technical team decided to literally get physical. Copies of the classic medical school book, Gray’s Anatomy, were handed out to all the digital sculptors (modelers who design and build the characters in the computer) and the rigging team to help them better understand how the body moves during specific actions. Live-action footage of people flexing, walking and moving also came in handy as the team began to tackle the animation taboos of muscles, skin, hair and clothes.
Rick Sayre knew that the first key to realistic articulation was to be found deep inside the body, at the level of the skeleton and its surrounding musculature. This is where all human motion begins and so it was with the characters of THE INCREDIBLES. It all started with the body of Bob Parr—AKA “Mr. Incredible”—who was literally created from the inside out.
“Bob was definitely the toughest character for us to model and rig because he is such a muscular guy,” says Sayre. “As we began to create him, we developed a completely new and different approach for his skeleton and the way muscle, skin, bones, and fat would attach to it. We used a fantastic new technology called ‘goo,’ which allows the skin to react to the muscles sliding and sticking underneath in a very true fashion.”
This changed the entire animating process. Animators are not so much technicians as they are artists—actors or puppeteers of a sort who creatively choreograph the characters’ movements and expressions through specially programmed computer controls. Now, the animators had greater, and deeper, control of the characters than ever before.
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