Straight Hair is A Pain: The Challenges of Animating The Incredibles.

By: Josh Stephen.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The History and Production of Pixar Classics.

Today we're gonna talk about The Incredibles. Just like last time, I'll give you all a brief recap on the film before we dive into the challenges it took to make it happen.

The Incredibles is a 2004 Pixar animated film directed by Brad Bird, that follows the story of Robert "Bob" Parr (Formerly Mr. Incredible), a used-to-be superhero who was forced to give up superheroing 15 years ago due to lots of legal issues involving superheroes, realizing that his family is more important than recapturing the past, and his family, Helen (Formerly Elastagirl), Violet, and Dash trying to track Bob down.

The main challenges the team faced were figuring out how to animate humans and human hair correctly, animating different the different superpowers, the massive sets and many setpieces, and also improving the fire/lighting and water physics in Renderman, which is a lot of first's for a computer animated movie in 2003.

One of the main powers the animators had to focus on was Bob's super strength, especially in emphasizing what the weight of something he's moving is. They achieve this by choreographing his movements, usually by mock recording the scene. This is also how they did some of the choreography for scenes like Bob and Helen's argument, or Syndrome's (the main villain of the film) bragging scene.

The animators also struggled with animating the characters hair, especially Violet's, because it wasn't like other character's hair. Violet's hair is straight, unlike many of the other characters in the film, which means it has to behave differently, it needs to swing and sway with her motions, unlike Helen's, more firm hair. The large sets, and many different setpieces were also a lot of work to model and animate.

If you want to learn more in depth about these challenges, I recommend you read Great Risk, Great Reward: How ‘The Incredibles’ Achieved the Impossible by the amazing folks over at FilmSchoolRejects, and like before, Pixar also goes into more detail about this on their webpage for The Incredibles, which I've linked below.

But, that's all for today. 

Next time, we'll be talking about the film that started everything for this studio, Toy Story.

Until next time, stay frosty.

The Incredibles official website.

          Photo by Craig Russel.

Comments

  1. Timothy WhiteDecember 16, 2023 at 3:36 PM

    A frequent problem in recent superhero movies is the lack of impact during fights, so I feel like it says a lot about Pixar's attention to detail that they were thinking about that almost 20 years ago with Mr. Incredible.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jillian DrummondDecember 19, 2023 at 4:44 PM

    drawing, let alone animating hair is such a pain in the butt.

    ReplyDelete

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