Brad Bird told The McKinsey Quarterly in 2008, “The Incredibles was everything that computer-generated animation had trouble doing. It had human characters. It had hair. It had fire. It had a massive number of sets. The technical team took one look and thought, ‘This will take ten years and cost $500 million. How are we possibly going to do this?’
“So I said, ‘Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door’. A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well.
“We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here (at Pixar). For less money per minute than was spent on the previous film, Finding Nemo, we did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do. All this because the heads of Pixar gave us leave to try crazy ideas. [x]
