The Art of The Incredibles

The Art of The Incredibles #1

by Mark Cotta Vaz, Brad Bird, John Lasseter

From Pixar Animation Studios, the Academy Award winning studio that brought us such blockbusters as Toy Story , Monsters, Inc. , and Finding Nemo , comes The Incredibles , a hilarious, action-packed story of a family of superheroes living an underground suburban existence. The sleekly designed settings and characters were conceptualized and developed by writer/director Brad Bird and Pixar's creative team of artists, illustrators, and designers, resulting in a celluloid sensation rich with detail. The Art of The Incredibles celebrates their talent, featuring concept and character sketches, storyboards, and lighting studies, and invites readers into the elaborate creative process of animation through interviews with all the key players at Pixar. With an 8-page gatefold and fabulous color art, this stunning book the only movie tie-in book for adults will delight film-goers, artists, and animation fans alike.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Film, Media Tie In, Superheroes, Art Design, Comics

160 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 2004

About the author

Mark Cotta Vaz is the author of over twenty-one books, including four New York Times bestsellers. His recent works include Mythic Vision: The Making of Eragon, The Spirit: The Movie Visual Companion, and the biography Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller.

Reviews

[Gretel Hernández · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una de las películas más maduras y metafóricas de Pixar; me gustó mucho ver su arte.

[Heidi Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a *super* look at the making of The Incredibles. It included a bit of Brad Bird's history and how he came to develop the story, how they worked on the character design and fleshed out the story details, and of course, lots of great art – from sketches to sculptures. My favorite part was seeing how they made a lot of their artistic and plot/character development decisions.

[Kelly K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as interesting as some of the other "Art of Disney" books, but the art inside was pretty cool.

[Sonia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Segunda lectura que me termino durante el vuelo Sevilla-Colonia.

Libro del Arte de Disney/PIXAR no sé qué número y es que no me canso. Leer sobre los secretos y procesos creativos de estas películas me llena de alegría y tan solo quiero saber más y más.

Llevaba bastante tiempo queriendo leer sobre la creación de la familia Increíble, una vez más al tratarse de una de las producciones de PIXAR más antiguas la cantidad de información es bastante limitada aunque superior a otros libros como por ejemplo Monster INC.

Mi parte favorita ha sido sin duda la dedicada a Edna, mi personaje favorito. Me hubiese gustado saber más de la arquitectura doméstica y el vestuario elegido para los superhéroes, de lo cual tan sólo se mención brevemente y se muestran varios bocetos al respecto.

[Angeline Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

INCREDIBLE!!!!!

[Panda Incognito · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is delightful. The concept art is creative and engaging, and I enjoyed the different quotes and longer reflections on how the characters and story evolved over time, even as the creators still stayed faithful to their original concept. Because The Incredibles is pitch-perfect in every way, I experience it as an organic whole and rarely think about the creative process, but I found it fascinating to consider how different the movie could have been.

Edna Mode was originally going to be a tall, sexy, and mysterious character. Then one of the artists drew a gag image of her as three feet tall, and the idea stuck.

Syndrome made a small appearance by attacking the Parr family's home near the beginning of the movie, and the main villain was a completely different character. Then the creators decided that really, Syndrome was a lot more interesting!

On a historical note, a scene were Bob and Frozone relive the glory days together had to be scrapped and rewritten after 9/11, because it was no longer feasible for the movies to show a building's structure collapsing in the way that they had planned.

I'm so glad that I read this, because it gave me a glimpse behind the scenes and gives me a whole new appreciation of how well-crafted this favorite movie is. The text throughout the book is fairly minimal, so it's mostly just gorgeous, interesting, and dramatic concept artwork, but there is just the right amount of text to make this a fully informative and satisfying reading experience.

[Owen Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought for me some long-begotten Christmas of yore by my beloved this is one of the first "The Art of..." books that I've ever really sat down and read, let alone owned. I'm an almost embarrassingly enormous BirdFan and the Incredibles is one of my favourite films of all time. This sumptuously horizontal sort of a book is crammed with the doodles of the many folk who made the film. From the bizarre conceptual collages of Teddy Newton through to Lou Romano's brilliant little character vignettes (as well as his fold out "colour script") you get a really beautifully detailed exploration of that very particular type of retro-futurist 60's kitsch vibe that Incredibles so successfully mined (and is carried on to this day in Disney's Loki and suchlike). I've always been a fan of the old DVD special feature, crammed with concept art and propmaking and all of those beautiful seen-but-unseen arts. This book (and books like it) are like dipping your head in one of those special features for hours at a time, and it's really lovely to just sit with the images. A little more commentary from Bird might have pleased me more but the artwork does most of the talking. Anything where you walk away to look up an artist that you didn't know before (the spidery moebiuslike concept work of Ricardo Delgado, for instance) is a winner for me.

[Yagizhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harika bir filmdi ve gerçekten artbook olarak da çok güzel hazırlanmış. Olabildiğince öze odaklanması çok hoş ve tasarım süreci hakkında şaşırdığım şeyleri bulabildim. Belki eskizlerden, film karelerine gelişi gösteren bir geçiş olabilirdi ufak bi yerde, ama tamamen temelde kalmaları da hiç tatminsizlik hissi bırakmıyor.

[Sil_entre_libros · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es un libro súper chulo con un montón de información de esta increíble película llena de bocetos y de ideas, también te cuentan en quienes se basaron para crear a los personajes de la película y vienen bocetos de los escenarios que salen en la peli un libro lleno de información que se lee súper rápido

[Aditya Pandey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love The Incredibles, and reading about how it was made in this book added a new layer of appreciation. Witnessing the journey from a simple concept of a dysfunctional super-powered family to a fantastic animated film showcased the incredible (hehe I'm so funny) effort and thought put in by Pixar's animators.

[Sofía · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me ha gustado el diseño de los personajes y me ha sorprendido mucho la cantidad de villanos y héroes que iban a aparecer en un principio. Aunque el contenido escrito me ha parecido un poco repetitivo.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely enjoyed the insight into how they made this film. A very fun, educational read!

[Blank · Rating 5 out of 5]

WHOOOOOOOSH

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was really enjoyable and easy to read. I really enjoyed reading about the process of creating and experimenting with 3D animation since The Incredibles was near the beginning of the age.

[Felicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 -some superb gauche and collage works; wish there was more art and less text.

[Nehemiah Bekele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible

[Maria]

Learning Spanish so I read my favorite Disney movie in Spanish. Re-reading it now

[Alyssa DeLeon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was so good. Would make a great coffee table book because even a look at just one page is super interesting. Crazy to see how the movie progressed and what things changed.

[Marco Ruiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hòstia tu, eran otros tiempos però és que tot el que hi ha darrere d'Elastigirl huele a Carmen Machi.

[Serene]

Great art and insight, though nothing groundbreaking for me, personally.

[SarahEmily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn’t have tons of info, but fascinating.

[Nettles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely love this series

[Parka · Rating 5 out of 5]

(More pictures at parkablogs.com)

There's a lot of different artistic style in the book. When Brad Bird came to Pixar, he brought with him his team of artists, those that had worked with him on The Iron Giant.

Each artist produced concept art using different materials and style. There are collage, gouache, digital, marker, acrylic and pastel. Each drawing generates ideas and inspiration. You'll have no idea the movie was created for art so varied. There are no rendered stills from the movie.

The book touches mainly on character design and artistic direction of the movie.

If you want the process of creating The Incredibles, you'll want to grab the DVD instead. There are pretty comprehensive behind the scenes included in the DVD.

This review was first published on parkablogs.com. There are more pictures and videos on my blog.

[Thia Reads A Lot · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Art of The Incredibles - Mark Cotta Vaz, John Lasseter (Foreword), Brad Bird (Foreword)
Rating: ★★★★
One of the first CG animated movies to prominently feature human characters, The Incredibles combined stylistic character designs with realistic simulation of muscles and skin (using subsurface scattering), a pattern we see in basically any animated films nowadays but that was a real challenge back in 2004. I felt that this artbook was especially generous regarding the environments of the film (maybe because there are so many sets in it!), which were very interesting to me. I love how Syndrome upstaged the main villain after the prologue he was created to die in was cut and every bit about the fabulous Edna Mode was indeed fabulous.

[Ale Tosti · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a really interesting book that goes really deep into the process of creation of the animators and workers in Pizar and it also gives us a look into the history of Brad Bird’s.
The book shows you the development of the movie and all of the changes that it suffer, this being all said by the people that worked in the movie while they tell you curiosities and details about The Incredibles.
This books lacks with the character designs because they were decided from the very beginning but it gains with all the background designs of both interiors and exteriors, collages, and all the anecdotes that it has.
All in all is a really great book that shows you all the details of a movie making.

[Kevin Magpoc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though a lot of the book repeats what is already shown and told in the bonus materials of the DVD (and if you're fanatical enough to read The Art of The Incredibles, I imagine you're fanatical enough to have watched those special features), it's still beautifully presented and you really couldn't ask for anything more in an "Art of" book.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Y'know how concept art usually looks, like, infinitely better than the finished film? It still does here, because CG is awful, but not by much. It's straightforward, and rarely leaps off the page. The text is also unremarkable.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Typical Art Of book for a CG movie, but with some interesting things I wasn't expecting (like the large amount of collage in the concept work). Focuses on the work of Teddy Newton, Lou Romano and Tony Fucile.

[Cory B · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was cool. Reading character descriptions and looking at first draft artwork was very interesting. I liked it. Thank God for thrift store finds! :)

[Anita · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much work & love went into this movie.