The Incredibles

I loved The Incredibles.

It was completely unlike all of the other Pixar movies - it was grown up, had something resembling an original plot (Watchmen comparisons aside) and its production design was beautiful.

I picked up the DVD over the weekend. I still haven’t gotten around to watching the movie, because I’ve been spending my time over on the second disk, watching the ‘making of’ featurettes.

Even these are completely unlike the other Pixar ‘making of’ featurettes. ‘Finding Nemo’ gave us fluff - people like Lee Unkrich and Andrew Stanton telling us how fantastic it was to make this movie, and gee whizz, isn’t Pixar just great? On The Incredibles DVD, Brad Bird and various other Pixarians explaining how hard it was to make this movie. At one stage, they even show a fight between Brad Bird fighting with a producer to justify the cost of a particular scene: something I’d never seen on a DVD, let alone a Pixar DVD.

It’s a fascinating set of featurettes, but the highlight for me came in the form of a closeup of their tools. The idea of building a rampantly successful motion pictures using Makefiles makes my tiny nerd heart flutter.