INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

The latest masterpiece from Pixar takes computer animation to a whole new level. Hugh Linehan meets Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles

I don't know about you, but I'm getting a bit sick of Pixar's success. The laws of moviemaking thermodynamics have always dictated that what goes up must come down. No winning streak lasts forever. Every Spielberg has his 1941.

Not Pixar. Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc, Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo. . . you may like some of them more than others, but you'd have to acknowledge there isn't a turkey among them. And with the films' stratospheric box-office numbers, they've made multi-millionaires of their founders.

Those bank balances will be further fattened with the worldwide release of The Incredibles, Pixar's latest offering and, in the opinion of your humble scribe, possibly its best.

"I'm something of a student of film history, and I can't think of another example of people having five hits in a row," says Incredibles director Brad Bird, acknowledging the pressure that comes with that record. "If you stop and think about that you'd just go into a corner and curl up into a ball and never come out of it. But Pixar is strong enough to realise there's no magic formula, and that every time you make a movie, you're starting from scratch - if you do them right. All you can do is the kind of movie you would like to see and hope other people agree with that."

Since The Incredibles hit US screens two weeks ago to spectacular audience response, there have been banal musings in the media about what it all means. The story of Bob Parr, aka Mr Incredible, his stretchable wife Elastigirl and their superhero kids, forced to live a suburban existence and keep their special powers secret, has been toted as an example of post-presidential election values. The Incredibles, it has been said, are a Red State family, close-knit, proud to be better and stronger than the rest, ready to fight against evil wrongdoers.

In contrast, Alfie, which has gone down like a lead balloon at the US box office, is a Blue State movie, with all its "sophisticated" urban promiscuity.

What an inverted pyramid of piffle. The simple fact is that audiences are not stupid: Alfie is a putrescent dog of a movie, while The Incredibles is one of the most exhilarating, effervescent and inventive films of the year. Pixar has reaped the benefit of bringing in an outsider in Bird, who was one of the key contributors to the towering work of genius that is The Simpsons, as well as director of the fine and criminally overlooked The Iron Giant.

In Bird's hands, the Pixar template is stretched in new ways. The Incredibles is longer (115 minutes, very unusual for animation) and slightly darker (as the director himself says, this is probably not a movie for four-year-olds), marking a shift in style for the studio. Fans of James Bond, 1960s sci-fi flicks and 1950s animation will recognise elements of that style in the retro-futurist settings, clean lines and hyper-kinetic energy.

"It started with the Bob character, a superhero who couldn't be a superhero," says Bird, himself a pretty kinetic character whose batteries seem only slightly dimmed by the demands of global media domination. (Two days ago he was in Los Angeles, now he's in Europe, tomorrow he's off to Japan.) "I think we can recognise that sort of person, someone who is successful early in life, like the star high school athlete who never has that moment in the sun again.

"It wasn't until years later that I realised what was going on in my real life was what was making me so interested in this. I was trying to get movies off the ground, and at the same time I had a new family and was worried that if I dedicated all my time to getting the chance to direct a movie, I would neglect my family. And if I was a really great father I would never get the chance to make a movie. That anxiety between trying to find meaningful work and being a good husband and father, that got into the film. But at the time, I just thought I was making a movie about superheroes."

Ah, yes, superheroes, those staples of the multiplex, especially in recent years. It never occurred to me before now, but isn't it strange that nobody has previously thought of transposing these comic strip stories into animation, where they most naturally belong, rather than live-action?

"The last time people took top-of-the-line animation values and applied them to superheroes was actually the first time they did it, which was the Fleischer Superman cartoons of the late Thirties and early Forties," says Bird. "I do wonder why nobody else has done it until now. There was this feeling that, if you were going to do that, then live action was the medium for it. Animation was for animal stuff, and how dare you think otherwise.

"Strangely, now that live action can do a lot of the things that were exclusive to animation before, like making animals talk in Babe, or presenting worlds like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, where magic is done in a very elaborate fashion, that is freeing animation to go into areas where it was discouraged from going before."

When Bird got into animation with Disney back in the early Eighties, "there was a rule that said if you can do it in live action, don't do it in animation. I never agreed with that, because I could see animation heading for extinction as all these things became possible in live action. That was never the reason to do things in animation. I don't think photography made portraiture obsolete. When you move something into another medium, you give the impression of something rather than the recreation of reality.

"In essence, caricature is the reason to do something in animation. When you see a great caricaturist's work, his drawing will often look more like the person than the person themselves does."

After more than two decades of working in hand-drawn animation, this is Bird's first foray into the computer-generated variety, which has swept all before it in recent years. "The difficulty was that at first I didn't know what the heck was going on," he says. "You're looking at blue voids. Or you're seeing a character walk through a scene, with a naked version of the same character impaled through its torso. Weird stuff like that, and they'll say 'pay no attention to the naked character impaled on itself; do you like the shoes?' So there's an Alice in Wonderland quality where nothing is quite as it seems.

"The difficulty is in building the world. Every single thing in each scene is designed and discussed ad nauseam. If we were animating this scene between us there'd be a meeting about this glass of water. How full should it be? How much light should refract through it? How will that light be reflected? It can go on for ever.

"The wonderful thing is the freedom you have to move the camera through space, the subtlety of the colours and the shading and the lighting. In terms of performance, you can do really subtle facial things that would be impossible in hand-drawn, because changing something tiny from one frame to the next, in hand-drawn, when it gets less than the width of a pencil line, you can't control it.

"In CG, you're dealing with pixels, which are a fraction of that pencil mark, so you can do tiny spasms around the eye or flicks of the pupil. You can push in for a close-up and really hit that sweet spot."

All that potential for subtlety is explored in The Incredibles, the first CGI animation to focus exclusively on human characters. As a fan of caricature, Bird is scornful of the obsession in some quarters with rendering an exact simulacrum of a human being through technology.

"If you go into CGI communities, there is a certain significant part of that which believes the Holy Grail is to create a completely believable, photorealistic human. To me that's the college term paper aspect of the CG world and I have no interest in it. It's like somebody coming to you saying, 'See this orange? It's made entirely out of dog poop. I spent 20 million dollars and look! You can peel back the skin, and it's just like an orange. Bite into it! It tastes kind of like an orange. . . not a very good orange, but isn't that amazing?'

"Sure, it's amazing, but I can get an orange for 25 cents and it'll be delicious. Why are we spending our time and money on this? It's a parlour trick."

However, Bird sees the Gollum character in The Lord of the Rings as a perfect example of the usefulness of something which can co-exist alongside human beings onscreen. But he wasn't happy with how the actor, Andy Serkis, who provided the voice and body motion for Gollum, was presented as its sole creator as part of a campaign for an Oscar nomination. "The part everyone forgets about is that animators were all over that, doing all the things that made the character what it was. Some of the most moving scenes were pure animation. It's because actors hate the idea that animators could ever do a performance as emotional as that."

So in his view, then, animators are actors? "They are! The problem occurs when people see animators purely as technicians and not as artists. They are artists, and when they're really good, they reach the condition of great actors."

Film in general, and animation in particular, is a deeply collaborative process which, paradoxically, depends on strong characters to implement their visions. Bird acknowledges he's known as a fighter. "I definitely have strong feelings about how I want to do things. Anyone I've dealt with will tell you that. Some people in Hollywood will say 'I can't work with this guy'. But other people understand it's not personal - I just want it to be good."

So, Bird is seen as difficult? "Yes, but I think it's a false impression. From my point of view, I've had people try to force bad ideas on me, and I will fight that. I will become very difficult if you try to force something on me that I don't believe in. Pixar never tried to do that, and they believe in the same things I do, so I got along very well with them.

"I'm collaborative if your criticism is valid. I think they were happily surprised."

The Incredibles is released next Friday