
The Graphic Art of Incredibles 2 - yarapavan
http://joshholtsclaw.com/blog/2018/3/5/the-graphic-art-of-incredibles-2
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hnmonkey
This was so much more rich, detailed, and fantastic of a read than I initially
expected it to be. I assumed it would just be a short-ish blog post on the
style of the movie but it really goes into detail on so many aspects from the
behind-the-scenes. And I learned that some places in Palm Springs are like
some sort of time capsule oasis time traveling machine back to 50 years ago.
It's so cool that these houses haven't been renovated or torn down to be
replaced with something more modern in such a long span of time.

This must've taken a while to put together and Josh Holtsclaw did a great job
with it.

Is there a place that captures these types of details for lots of other
movies? If not, I think there's an opportunity to collect all of these types
of design analysis in one place. I can't imagine the audience would be huge,
but I would guess they're passionate and super interested in this type of
thing. I didn't think I would be going into this article but I came away
wanting more of these types of articles.

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beaconstudios
I don't know if it's what you're looking for (it's definitely more short-form
at least) but I loved browsing round this site when I first saw it:
[http://moviesincolor.com/](http://moviesincolor.com/)

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hnmonkey
This is not exactly the same in my mind as the original link, however it's
great in its own way! It's a very cool analysis.

Thank you for the link

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exodust
Very thorough piece, it's good seeing all the images that form the
inspiration. I'd like to see something similar for the original Incredibles.

The original Incredibles is one of my favorites. There's a simplicity, pace
and elegance to everything that makes it very tight and watchable.

I enjoyed Incredibles II but thought it suffered a little from "sequel ramp-
up" where everything is required to be "bigger" and "better". Story is
displaced by action, and then you end up rating the movie on the action scenes
and sequences rather than a unified whole with story, dialog and action in
balance. The visuals were excellent but even then, sometimes too much was
crammed in, and not easy to take in due to pace of story advancing quickly.

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w1nt3rmu4e
Action?

All I remember is the father -- a superhero -- unable to perform basic child
rearing tasks and I tuned out. I don't know what Bird's intention was, but I
felt it played into current gender politics rather than addressing them. The
first movie was a critique of culture, this was -- an attempt to please?

I don't get worked up about 'dumb men' stereotypes since I'm not dumb and take
an active role in raising my children but I felt the second needlessly
betrayed the first film. Elastigirl was a superhero. She and her husband may
have had somewhat gender-appropriate powers (brawn vs flexibility?) but she
was his equal in fighting bad guys. Her becoming a housewife was the satirical
part of the film.

So in the second we have a woman who never lived in her husband's shadow --
beyond their assumed identities -- but now the thrust of the story is her
outshining her husband?

You can argue that his was satire -- since in the story her taking center
stage was a plan driven by PR people and expected ratings -- but I really
don't think it hit the mark. Instead of backing it up with something
appropriate, Bird just gave us, _see, isn 't being a housewife hard!_ Again,
Mr Incredible is a superhero, I'm sure he can manage.

My wife felt the same way. Loved the first one, was disappointed by the gender
politics of the second.

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jl6
Bear in mind both films are set in 1962...

I’m a father who shares duties equally with my wife. Between us, we cope. When
one of us is away, all hell is prone to break loose. That’s what’s I
interpreted Mr Incredible’s struggles as - not incompetence, but being
overwhelmed by being the sole parent.

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mixmastamyk
Indeed, being a single parent is difficult for many reasons but the non
obvious one is sleep deprivation, or lack of rest.

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rbanffy
If it were not for the sleep deprivation and the subsequent memory loss, we'd
probably all stop at one kid and go extinct.

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coldcode
I appreciate how much work went into this, but what a fun job to have.
Compared to that writing code is dull and lifeless.

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gmueckl
Ah yes, the grass is always greener on the other side - what a common fallacy!
I'm also prone to thinking this. But the truth is that a job is a job: you are
under presssure to perform, no matter what you do. And in the case of
designing for a movie, you have to churn out dozens or hundreds of images of a
certain type and style and actually creating them can turn into a dull task.

Having said that, I find the sheer amount of work that has gone into
thendesign of the movie astounding. Having to design every aspect of an
imaginary world to that level of detail is hard.

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fipple
Incredible craftsmanship. Even when Pixar makes turds like The Good Dinosaur
they are a pleasure for the eyeballs.

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ericcholis
The environments in The Good Dinosaur were stunning....and then the characters
were less so. It's like they were designed by two completely different
studios.

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snowwrestler
Pixar really wants to stay out of the uncanny valley with their characters, so
they intentionally design them to look "cartoony"\--closer to the classic
hand-drawn animation of the past. They want their movies to look like animated
movies.

"Live action" movies try to make it to the other side of the uncanny valley.
Usually the most successful efforts cheat a bit by avoiding human characters.
Think Avatar, Gollum, Snoke, Thanoes, etc. They look so real! (If aliens or
ring-wracked wretches were real...)

Where movies looks weird is when there are elements on both sides of the
uncanny valley--in the case of The Good Dinosaur, the backgrounds look real
and the characters look like cartoons.

This was surprising because Pixar is usually careful to avoid this. The sea in
Finding Nemo looked amazing, but it didn't really look 100% real--it looked
like a beautiful stylized version of a sea. Same with the environments in The
Incredibles, as the top blog here details.

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WorldMaker
Good Dinosaur and Up are both interesting cases of Pixar's environment team
exploring if they could use Google Earth (and equivalents) for location
scouting, to the point where Good Dinosaur used a lot of direct satellite
imagery and terrain data to bootstrap the animation process. Which is
fascinating technically, but absolutely an interesting comparison to the less
realistic approaches of everything else in the film. Up they managed it quite
well because the real place they found as example is fantastic enough to
support the rest of the film and the pulp adventure storyline supported that
uncanny valley realism; The Good Dinosaur did not find something fantastic
enough nor did it really support the story near as well.

