The plot picks up mere moments after the last film’s conclusion, ignoring the public’s 14-year wait for a sequel. Bird has made the understandable decision to retain the wonderful dynamics of the Parr family unit by keeping everyone the same age. There’s Bob (Craig T. Nelson), the hulking, super-strong father; Helen (Holly Hunter), the ultra-stretchy mom; Violet (Sarah Vowell), the invisible teen daughter; Dash (Huck Milner), the super-fast youngster; and enigmatic baby Jack-Jack—all blessed with powers that have made them outcasts in the film’s ersatz-1960s universe, where superheroes are banned by law.
In the first movie, Bob rediscovered his love of crimefighting (like a Don Draper having a more wholesome mid-life crisis), while eventually realizing that home was where his heart was all along. In Incredibles 2, it’s Helen who becomes the careerist, as she’s recruited by the smooth-talking branding expert Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk) to become the face of his campaign to restore superheroes’ legal status. So Helen puts on her Elastigirl suit again, and the audience gets a plethora of beautifully choreographed action scenes as she uses her gifts of elongation to fight a mysterious villain called Screenslaver.
Here’s where things start to get more difficult to unpack. Screenslaver’s modus operandi is to hypnotize people through their television sets—he’s a broad metaphor for everyone being too addicted to their various screens, one that just about survives transplantation to the ’60s. Like many a villain, he’s fond of monologuing, and his screeds against Helen cast her and her superhero ilk as a lazy safety net for the rest of society, draining the citizenry of their free will. He’s the bad guy, yes, but like the angry fanboy villain of the first Incredibles (who sought to redistribute powers among everybody), Screenslaver has a very particular philosophy and goals more complex than “world domination.”
There’s so much to puzzle over that it makes Incredibles 2 worth a second viewing. Bird has plenty to say about this world of heroes and villains, where the elite live in public as a separate sort of species, both lionized and feared. The diminutive costume designer Edna Mode (voiced by Bird, and as much of a highlight here as she was in the first film) refers to Helen and her family as “gods,” and she’s not wrong. But while Bird wants to engage with the notion of deities living among us, he draws real pathos when he reminds viewers of the Parr family’s inherent humanity, all their super-gifts aside.
While the sequel doesn’t have an emotional arc quite as poignant as the first Incredibles did, its B-plot (which sees Bob playing stay-at-home dad while Helen goes off to save the world) is nonetheless consistently charming. Violet continues to wrestle with boy drama at school, Dash is still a bundle of unrestrained, teeming energy, and Jack-Jack begins to manifest his own powers, which include bursting into flames and transporting to other dimensions. If The Incredibles was a metaphor for finding the right balance between work and family, Incredibles 2 is an outsized satire about how much of an unpredictable adventure child-rearing can be, day to day.
I’ve never thought of Bird as a political filmmaker, but rather as a director who makes art about the creatively constrained, a man obsessed with the wrenching, soaring process of achieving one’s potential (which is why Pixar’s Ratatouille is his ultimate masterpiece). Incredibles 2 is the first work he’s made where his characters actually seem free, and while it takes time to build up steam and set up its plot mechanics, once everyone is in costume and letting loose, it’s an exhilarating ride.
Image: Disney
Director Brad Bird didn’t spend the full 14 years since the release of the first Incredibles making Incredibles 2, but he’s been thinking about it the whole time.
“I had the core idea about the role switch, that the mission would go to Helen, when we were promoting the first film,” Bird told io9 in Los Angeles last week. “I also knew I had the unexploded bomb of Jack Jack to play with... but the part I needed, to feel like I could make it, was the more superhero villainy plot.”
Even though he had a few rough notions of what the sequel could be, without a strong villain, Bird basically felt like he had nothing. So he went and made 2007's Ratatouille. Then 2011's Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. And finally 2015's Tomorrowland. All along the way, fans continually asked about Incredibles 2—but Bird didn’t yet have that one key ingredient. Then, finally, it hit him.
“I finally had an idea that I thought would be cool,” Bird said. “So I pitched it to Pixar and they said ‘Great.’ We got green lit. [Producers] John [Walker] and Nicole [Grindle] came on. Everything’s good. We got a crew and a potential release date and then... that idea doesn’t work.”
Bird wouldn’t say what specifically didn’t work about his idea except that “It involved A.I. and I don’t want to give it away because I might fix it one day.” But it put everything in flux. “Now I’m screwed because I’ve got a release date and everybody’s working and going ‘You know what you’re doing right?’ I’m like ‘Eeeee, I’ll be right back,’” Bird said.
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Image: Disney
And so Bird came up with another villain, but that didn’t work either. He created the character of Winston Deavor (voiced by Bob Odenkirk) who changed tones drastically throughout the process. At first Winston had a brother, then he had a sister, and on and on. “I just kept rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and every time I rewrote everybody had to adjust,” Bird said. “It kept the core idea of the role switch and all of that. Jack Jack being a featured player was still in there. But that other aspect was always changing.”
Finally, Bird and his team came up with the ScreenSlaver, a villain who controls people’s minds by hijacking their screens, but getting to that point was not an easy process. “I’ve thrown out two and a half other Incredibles movies,” Bird said. “There’s two and a half movies worth of scenes, and several of them I still like a lot, but they just didn’t serve the central idea of what the family was going through.”
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Much of what the family is going through is perpetuated by ScreenSlaver. And though one might think a villain who controls people who look at screens is a direct reflection of today’s tech-happy society, that’s not entirely the case.
“In the universe of the film, people don’t have cell phones and that actually would have been useful for this movie,” Bird said. “But when I was a kid we were always accused of spending too much time staring into TV. So it seemed like a good, reliable thing to play on.”
Image: Disney
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Something that wasn’t reliable, though, was the superhero genre. When The Incredibles was released in 2004, Christopher Nolan had yet to reinvent Batman. There had only been one cinematic Spider-Man and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was still years away. But in 2018, Incredibles 2 is just one of many superheroes films being released. Bird admits the idea worried him.
“It actually made me very unenthusiastic about this movie for a brief moment in time,” Bird said. “[In 2016] I was going ‘There are too many superhero movies right now.’ In two years? People are going to be sick of them. Then we’ll be coming out going ‘More superheroes, anyone?’”
That’s when Bird realized no matter how many Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, or Iron Man movies are out there, the Incredibles stand alone. “That wasn’t what got me excited about the idea in the first place,” Bird said. “It was never the superhero part. It was that it was a way to exploit and explore the family dynamic and use superheroes as a lemon wedge to squeeze on top of this story.”
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Photo: Disney
That’s why, much like the first Incredibles, Incredibles 2 isn’t a typical superhero movie. It’s not just a team of good guys suiting up and fighting bad guys. That’s not the movie Bird wanted to make last time, it’s not the film he wanted to make this time, and, should Incredibles 3 happen, it’s not likely to be what that film would be either.
“I feel like we have that movie everywhere,” Bird said. “Maybe that shouldn’t be the thing that we do.”
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Incredibles 2 opens June 15.
The campaign appeared to lean in to audience goodwill for the original while also presenting a story that was rooted in a family dynamic.
Fourteen years after the The Incredibles hit theaters — a time before the Marvel Cinematic Universe when X-Men and Spider-Man stand-alone films were the comic book big-screen kings — a sequel to the Pixar breakout is now arriving.
To help sell the sequel, Disney/Pixar created a campaign that appeared to lean in to audience nostalgia for the original and the sense of wonder it created while also presenting a story that was rooted in a family dynamic.
And the story? It picks up just moments after the first one ended as Bob and Helen Parr (voiced by Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter) deal with the repercussions of having re-entered a world where their heroic identities as Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl make them criminals. Reviews are as good as the original, with Incredibles 2 boasting an identical 97 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes to the 2004 film.
Here's a closer look at Disney's rollout for The Incredibles 2:
The Posters
On Nov. 8, Disney unveiled the teaser image for the film: a simple poster with "II." Three more teasers took us through the laundry cycle, from the basket of dirty uniforms to the washing machine to Mr. Incredible ironing his outfit.
One showed a piece of toast with the team symbol sitting on what appears to be a table from the 1960s. One showed Edna in a very pop-art design, looking even more like Anna Wintour than usual — appropriate, since it was released to tie in to Fashion Week — in a black and white drawing with a pop of red on her lipstick. "It's been too long, dahlings."
In terms of ticket site or exhibitor exclusives: For Fandango, the whole family was shown in silhouette, art deco-style, standing atop a Roman numeral II, all looking very heroic. For Imax, the heroes are scattered around the points of a star-like explosion emanating out from the team and movie logo. For Cinemark, a more abstract approach was taken as each member's face is outlined in a single line doodled across the page.
The theatrical poster brings everyone more to the forefront, with the team running toward the camera, seemingly into battle. Behind them stands another team of heroes, their faces and identities obscured so you can't quite make them out, but seemingly there waiting for the Incredibles to do their thing. Screenslaver, the villain of the story, looms in the background, peeking out from behind the team's logo in an ominous way.
The Trailers
The first teaser (82.8 million views on YouTube) premiered shortly before Coco hit theaters in November. Jack Jack is the focus as he squeezes through some sort of hole and immediately starts shooting up the place with his laser eyes. Cut to Mr. Incredible holding him and being excited the baby has powers — that is, until those laser eyes burn a row through his hair.
The second teaser trailer (43.7 million views on YouTube) — which actually aired on TV during NBC's Olympics coverage in February — starts out by showing the whole family in costume as they take on a threat, with the kids frustrated that they're being told to sit this one out. "Superheroes are illegal," Helen says later, though that doesn't stop the kids from wanting to get in the game.
When the official trailer (29.8 million views on YouTube) opens, we're reintroduced to the family dynamic immediately as they discuss Helen's new job as a very public superhero. Her place in the spotlight doesn't sit well with Bob, who's stuck at home doing math homework he doesn't understand for the kids and taking on other parental responsibilities. Another teaser (1.5 million views on YouTube) offered many of the same points while also providing brief looks at some of the new supers we'll see in this movie.
Advertising and Publicity Stunts
TV advertising started with a brief teaser spot that aired during the Olympics broadcast in February that promised the return of the super family but also was meant to promote a longer preview. Later spots offered more of a full look at the movie, including not only the whole family fighting crime but also the difficulty Mr. Incredible has in trying to be the stay-at-home dad to a bunch of super-powered kids.
Disney promoted the movie through the Noovie preshow package for National CineMedia with clips, behind-the-scenes footage and more. The studio also took advantage of a renewed agreement with McDonald's to put movie-themed toys in the fast food chain's Happy Meals.
The studio put together a long list of companies as brand partners:
► Chrysler, which used a tie-in with the movie to promote its Pacifica model in co-branded commercials.
► ADT, which ran a co-branded campaign including a TV spot that had Edna listing all the new safety features of the family's new home.
► Zillow, which put photos and details of the Parr family home up on its site for people to explore.
► Dole, which is partnering with the nonprofit Action for Healthy Kids on a campaign to encourage kids to eat healthy.
► Clorox, which partnered with Disney on a sweepstakes awarding winners a trip to New York City. That sweeps was supported by TV advertising.
► American Egg Board, which made movie promotions part of its "Incredible Egg" campaign. Co-branded TV spots helped promote the campaign.
► Frigo’s Cheeze Heads, which put the movie on product packages and ran a sweepstakes, with attendant social media and paid advertising support.
► Alaska Airlines, which decorated one of its planes with movie artwork, sponsored the movie's premiere and ran other promotions online.
► Best Western, which launched its "Incredibly Rewarding Summer" campaign to encourage family travel, a campaign supported by TV and online ads.
► Horizon Organic, which put characters on packages of milk and encouraged people to enter a sweepstakes.
► Juicy Juice, which offered a free movie ticket with the purchase of three select items, a promotion it supported with TV spots like this.
► Coppertone, which also offered a free movie ticket with select purchases.
Overall
Disney used fan- and industry-centric events to hype the film. One of the first efforts along this line came when the cast and crew appeared at Disney's annual D23 fan event in July to talk about returning to these characters. This April, it showed off footage to industry insiders at CinemaCon, the convention focused on appealing to exhibitors.
Tracking data indicates the movie is headed for a $140 million stateside opening, and the campaign appears to have embraced what many loved about the first movie — that the Parrs are still trying to figure out who they are as a family while also being superheroes — and promised the audience more of the same.
Chris Thilk is a freelance writer with 15 years of experience in the social media and content marketing industry.
Jack-Jack is the burbling, gurgling cherry on this confection whether he’s toddling through the house or tussling with a wily raccoon. (Mr. Bird’s nostalgic side is evident in the name Jack-Jack, which evokes the epithet John-John given to John F. Kennedy Jr. when he was a toddler in the White House.) It’s a blast when Jack-Jack spends time with a super-suit designer, Edna Mode (voiced by Mr. Bird) — this irresistible duo could easily spin into their own sequel nirvana — but it’s Jack-Jack’s kinetic dust-up with the raccoon that gives the movie its most delightful moments as baby and beast zip, zing and ping like Tom and Jerry in gloriously controlled chaos.
Part of what makes Jack-Jack’s scramble with the (conveniently clawless) raccoon so pleasurable is its playfulness and relatively small scale. The scene reveals much about Jack-Jack’s abilities, but crucially, it doesn’t directly advance the larger story and isn’t weighted down by the big-bigger-biggest blockbuster-action imperative that often finds directors (Mr. Bird included) trying to top not only other movies but also, scene to scene, themselves. Jack-Jack’s raccoon time is pure play, which is something that “Incredibles 2” — with its self-aware political comments, its Bruckheimer-esque fireballs and all its locked, loaded guns — could use more of.
Too often Mr. Bird seems to think that he needs to say something to the adults in the room, including those critics who have sniffed notes of Ayn Rand perfuming his work. (At least one plot point seems like a direct refutation of that reading.) In “Incredibles 2,” the government can’t be relied on, but it also, until recently, had been footing the bill for the Incredibles. And while the family certainly is special, as the movie underscores, the Incredibles don’t want to withdraw from the world. They want to save it and, importantly, save it together. It’s a hot mess, populated by looters and the usual moochers, but its un-incredibles also give the Incredibles purpose.
The family that fights together remains the steadily throbbing, unbreakable heart of “Incredibles 2,” even when Bob and Helen swap traditional roles. There’s something too self-conscious — overcompensating much? — about Bob’s taking on the part of the stay-at-home father and Helen’s embarking on her solo adventures. Mr. Bird even throws in a line about strong women. Plunking the Incredibles down in the early 1960s informed the first movie’s graphic midcentury cartoon style. It also allowed Mr. Bird to stick to a comfortably old-fashioned vision of the world, one that he is redrawing one baby superhero step at a time.
