THE INCREDIBLES 2 is Gonna be AWESOME!!

For many, a sequel to Pixar’s much-beloved Incredibles seemed like a pipe dream. Out of all their films it’s the easiest to sequelize, but for one reason or another it’s eleven years on and a second one is only now just going through the motions. Thanks to the gift of hindsight, I’m not sure it necessarily would have been a good idea to pump out another one sooner, but on a more superficial level it’s kinda lame that we’ve had to wait so long – and will wait longer.

Director Brad Bird is at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) at the moment where he did a special screening of The Iron Giant; naturally, interviews turned to talk of his next animated movie. Chatting with Collider, Bird talks a little about the script and the nature of the modern superhero movie.

I have the story arc. I’m probably three-quarters through the script, first pass through the script, but we’re already boarding parts of it. I’ve got a lot of people that worked on the first one working on it, so we’re all having a good time with it.

WOO-HOO!

The news that the original team is also coming back alongside him is brilliant. Everybody wants to make sure that this sequel is gonna rock, and the way to do that is certainly bringing back the gang who helped make the magic happen the first time around.

One thing which obviously has to be talked about is the superhero genre itself, and Bird is definitely thinking about that.

But what’s changed is there were only two other superhero franchises at the time Incredibles came out. One of them was X-Men and the other was Spider-Man, and now there are 400 billion of them and there’s a new superhero movie every two weeks. What you don’t want to do is trot over the same turf in the same way everyone else is. So we’re trying to keep it focused in the area that our film was, which was a little bit more about characters and relationships and stuff like that, and see where that takes us. But we’re having a good time.

It is quite strange when you put it like that. It feels as if the first Spider-Man and X-Men movies were only a couple of years ago, when in fact it was over a decade, and the comic book movie industry and Hollywood in general has changed drastically since then. Ah, nostalgia.

That’s why The Incredibles 2 is coming at the right time. Unlike their other movies, Pixar has the opportunity to make a social statement with this in regards to the “400 billion” superhero franchises knocking about right now. The first movie was parodying and satirising elements of the comic books and posed some interesting “what if?” questions in regards to the subject matter. As Bird said, that was back when you could count the number of superhero flicks on one hand – now they’re everywhere! There’s a great opportunity here to bring some commentary of the genre in; what if the world has become overpopulated with superheroes in the time since Mr. Incredible and co’s defeat of Syndrome? If Pixar rushed out a sequel for 2007 or so then they couldn’t do any of that.

Just like Toy Story 3 involved the real-life time gap between movies through themes of growing up, I’m pretty damn certain The Incredibles 2 will do the same with superhero movies.