With most animated films, studios create new worlds with
their own laws of physics in order to create a unique piece of entertainment. Some
worlds are based more on reality, whereas others go more along the lines of the
cartoon laws of physics. When it comes to Pixar Animation, the universe for
their films are a great hybrid between reality and cartoons, which makes their
films that much more appealing.
One
of the studio’s most iconic films is The
Incredibles, the story of a former superhero named Mr. Incredible and
his family who struggle adjusting to the normal lifestyle without being the
heroes they were born to be. Although this Pixar film presents a creative world of endless
possibilities, the physics found within The
Incredibles goes well beyond the natural laws, so that the audience invests itself
into the fantastic, yet believable, story about a family of superheroes.
Throughout
the film, many sequences present examples of exaggerated paths of action and
timing. At the start of the film, Mr. Incredible is at his peak as a hero where
he is called into duty to stop a bank robbery. A car chase ensues between Mr.
Incredible’s car and the bank robbers’ getaway car, but is soon interrupted
when a sweet, little old lady calls for his help to get her cat out of a tree.
As
Mr. Incredible stops and notices the old lady, going between shots in the
sequence shows the inconsistent timing of Mr. Incredible’s car. You notice in
the images below, the last frame of the first shot, when the old lady tries to
stop Mr. Incredible, has the car in the middle of the intersection, using the
traffic lights as a focal point for this example. In the next shot where Mr.
Incredible notices the old lady walking to the middle of the street, he is
about a good 20-30 feet away from the intersection.
01 Last Frame of Old Lady calling for Mr. Incredible:
02 First Frame of Mr. Incredibles POV:
The
speed of the car is also something to take notice of in this sequence. The shot
right before the old lady character is introduced shows Mr. Incredible pressing
a button that turns on the jet engine boosts in the back of his car, bringing
him to a dangerously fast speed for a city street environment. Then going back
to the introduction of the old lady shot, the car is travelling at a much
slower and inconsistent rate through the intersection. Travelling with Mr.
Incredible would be quite the bumpy ride, to say the least, if you were sitting
shotgun in his jet-engine car.
At
the end of this sequence, Mr. Incredible ends up stopping the two bank robbers
in their getaway car by using his massive strength to throw the tree that the
old lady’s cat was trapped in down in front of the car, causing the robbers to
crash violently and collide with the massive tree. If the natural laws of
physics were brought into play for this particular section of the film, the
robbers would have suffered much more graphic injuries as a result of the car
crash. At the rate the robbers are speeding away in their getaway car combined
with the force of the tree that crashes in front of them, the impact of the
crash would have easily sent the two robbers flying through the front of the
windshield. However, in the original film, the result is simply the upper
bodies of the two robbers lying out of their respective windows without a
scratch. What is even worse is that the robbers were not even wearing seat belts!
Another
sequence worth analyzing is where Mr. Incredible and his buddy, Frozone, are
caught in a jewelry store by police thinking they are robbers and Frozone uses
his ice powers to freeze a police officer in order to get away from the
situation. Frozone even freezes the police officer’s bullet in mid air. Although
the police officer’s body is completely frozen in the shot, the only body part
he can move are his eyeballs. If the police officer were truly frozen in ice,
he would not be able to move his eyeballs and the pure temperature of the ice
would most likely put him in critical condition since the temperature is cold
enough to freeze a bullet in mid air.
Frozone’s
main super power of generating ice out of the earth’s atmosphere also comes
into question in certain scenes of the film. Frozone will go onto generate
massive amounts of ice that he skates and glides on top of at high speed, but
when the ice melts immediately after there is no sign of water anywhere on the
environment.
Later
on in the film, Syndrome, the main villain is introduced where he is plotting
evil schemes to take over the world at his secret lair built inside of a
volcano. In a series of great action sequences, Syndrome sends his evil robots
to exterminate Mr. Incredible while he is on the island. In one of the
sequences, Mr. Incredible is being pushed by the robot to a rocky ledge where a
pool of hot lava seems to be his fate. However, with all of his strength, Mr.
Incredible jumps quickly out of the way which sends the robot falling into the
pool of lava.
When
analyzing this scene, the laws of physics crashes a bit with cartoon physics in
order to create better timing in the scene and more anticipation. The rate at which the robot hits the lava is
very cartoon like, where it falls and pops back up very fast, holds, and then
slowly sinks down into the lava. Falling and hitting the lava at that rate
would generate a big splash of lava, but only a small splash of lava is shown
in the aftermath of the shot and no small puddles of hot alive are show
anywhere on the rocks where Mr. Incredible is standing.
Although
the film breaks many of the rules concerning the natural laws of physics, that
is what makes The Incredibles such a successful film. The subtle
breaking of these natural laws is what makes Pixar’s films so appealing and
believable to audiences. It creates a world much like our own but with a bit of
cartoon elements here and there to remind audiences that they are in a
different world with familiar qualities to our own world outside of the movie
theatres.
