Incredibles 2 and Pixar’s “intensified mise-en-scène”

My contribution to this blog will stress the animated more than the fantastical because I am here more concerned with the resemblance certain animated films – specifically Pixar’s CG animated features – possess to the solidity and concreteness of the so called “classical” style of live action cinema [1]. Yet my choice of case study, Incredibles 2 (2018), is set in a fantasy world familiar from superhero movies. I will gesture towards the tension between the rooted solidity of the mise-en-scène in certain scenes and the flights of “impossible” spatiality that might be considered more intrinsic to the genres of both superhero and computer animated films [2].

My initial impetus to do some exploratory work on the Pixar films was based in a feeling – nothing more – that the quality of these films lay in some way in their relationship to a certain idea of the classical. I felt instinctively that a resemblance resided in four main factors: run-time; the emphasis on character and story; highly expressive décor and spatial relationships; and finally, an investment in the “pro-filmic”. The last of these may jump out immediately as quite daft. However, the great mise-en-scène filmmaking particularly of classical Hollywood, as celebrated by the great mise-en-scène critics (such as VF Perkins), was rooted in studio filmmaking in its most literal sense – i.e. the films were shot predominantly on studio sets. To arguably somewhat similar effects, photorealist CG animated films invest enormous effort in creating elaborate and spatially coherent “sets” on which their characters move and are made to (inter)act. This contrasts with what is generally considered typical of “post-classical” live action cinema where (to follow particularly David Bordwell, 2006), there has been a shift in emphasis from pre-production planning and the careful organisation of the pro-filmic (studio) space towards shooting “coverage” and a concomitant emphasis on post-production and editing as the site of primary creative construction. Unlike this idea of the post-classical, in Pixar (and related animated filmmaking), all the “editing” is intensely pre-planned. (One might wonder, half seriously, whether Pixar films best resemble Hitchcock’s caricature of his own practice – i.e. the shooting is an animating of everything that was already there in the storyboard, and actors are “cattle” in a rigidly pre-determined mise-en-scène?)

Fig. 1 - Lord of the Rings Return of the King (2003).

Fig. 2 - Toy Story 3 (2010).

Run-time is perhaps the most superficial of resemblances. However, the narrative concentration this implies is not incidental and connects with the investment in story and character that is central to Pixar’s brand identity (to a “quasi-religious” extent – Burkeman, 2004). These values are invoked as their inverse is mocked in the openings of both Toy Story 2 and 3 (1999 & 2010) – respectively, the ill-disciplined storytelling of video games and, ironically, young children’s playtime are parodied by way of the excessive spectacle associated with the post-classical “live action” cinema (see Figures 1-4). The Toy Story 2 & 3 prologues act as ironic counterpoint to the more rooted “classicism” of their subsequent style.

My primary focus here is the quasi-classical emphasis on highly expressive décor and spatial relationships; I want to tentatively label the style of the Pixar films from Toy Story (1995) on as possessing “intensified mise-en-scène”. This echoes David Bordwell’s (2006) much cited analysis of post-classical Hollywood visual storytelling as characterised by “intensified continuity”. Though “continuity” relates primarily to editing, Bordwell’s concerns encompass staging and other visual elements. “Intensified mise-en-scène” aims simply to place the stress on characters in space and seeks to capture something certainly not unique to the films under discussion but particularly true of them.

Fig. 3 - Toy Story 2 (1999).

Fig. 4 - Toy Story 3.

Technical-stylistic departures emphasised by Bordwell as “post” the classical reside in the shortening of average shot lengths (ASLs), the use of fewer fixed two- and three-shots and a shift away from “deeper focus” 50mm to longer lenses (2006: 138). Admittedly, fixed long-takes are equally rare or non-existent in the Pixar films. Bordwell’s statistics (2006: 123) and those on cinemetrics.lv/ put various Pixar features at typically pacey 21st century ASLs of 3-4 seconds. However, their baseline photorealism sees a staging in depth that resembles classical 50mm-type photography and a concomitant style that, I contend, encourages greater spectatorial attention to the character-in-space within and across single shots than is typical of modern live-action cinema. I hope analysis of a scene in Incredibles 2 will serve as example.

Fig. 5 - Incredibles 2 (2018).

The scene in question occurs as Mr Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson), staying with his children in the luxurious modernist mansion lent to the family by Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk), receives a phone call from his wife Elastigirl (Holly Hunter). Mr Incredible has just discovered his baby son Jack-Jack has superpowers, a fact he supresses from Elastigirl. He is defensive; she is fearful and over-eager to abandon her work trip rehabilitating the public image of superheroes. The scene deftly demonstrates the complex bonds of co-parenting and the co-presence of mutual distrust and dependence – we build to Mr Incredible’s largely self-interested and entirely begrudging celebration of his wife’s work successes (he needs her to rehabilitate “supers” so that he can be a super again); Elastigirl on the other hand is caught between her felt need to re-assume control of domestic life and her unfettered joy at her own heroic success saving a runaway train. In a mid-century American key (both Incredibles films reference 60s spy movies and contemporaneous representations of the nuclear family), the scene plays out familiar and ongoing tensions between traditional heterosexual family roles. The elements of mise-en-scène I wish to emphasise in the scene are lighting, décor and performance and their interaction with its structures of point of view.

In terms of lighting, the scene’s progress can be plotted from the bright but somewhat cold and yellowy palette of the corner of the kitchen where Mr Incredible answers the phone to the television area where the darkness is illuminated by the cold blue of the TV screen that reveals, to his visible shock, the extent of his partner’s success (Fig. 5). This contrasts with the warmth and brightness of Elastigirl’s hotel room, from where she is making the call. The contrast is indicative of both her much greater happiness but also Mr Incredible’s more serious dissimulation: Elastigirl lets rip her delight at her triumph (the tension and recoil in her gesture before she releases herself forwards in quasi-orgasmic delight – Fig. 6) while Mr Incredible maintains the lie that Violet, Jack-jack and Dash are all OK and we are subsequently placed to observe his painfully effortful celebration of her endeavours (Fig. 7).

Fig. 6 - “I saved a runaway train!”

Fig. 7 - That's fantastic, honey!”

While the takes are not very long, a virtue is made of staging in depth within single shots, particularly in the space occupied so heftily by Mr Incredible (his huge torso is the pivot around which the “camera” often turns). Camera movement reflects his looking at Violet, Jack-Jack and Dash. These moves are simultaneous to his words to Elastigirl, which each time are clearly contradicted by what he (and we) can see: for example, in the scene’s longest take, he responds to Elastigirl’s question about how Violet’s (Sarah Vowell) date went with “fine”, as he turns from the camera to observe his partially invisible daughter weeping and reaching for the ice cream from the freezer. This both centralises him as the primary point of view within the scene (as well as other details, the scene begins and ends with him) and further undergirds the contrast in states between the two parents. We are positioned to observe Mr Incredible and, to an extent, share his perspective, whereas we are primarily positioned only to observe Elastigirl. In the tradition of classical mise-en-scène, the way a character is shown in relationship to space is central to how spectators are invited to relate to or, more controversially, “identify” with them (see Pye 2000).

Fig. 8 - Incredibles 2.

Given the centrality of Mr Incredible’s perspective, it becomes relevant to consider alternative ways the action might have been presented, one of the most obvious being for the visuals to have stayed more rigidly on his side of the phone conversation. However, the points above about lighting underline what was achieved by the visual contrast between the spaces. Moreover, the cut between Mr Incredible and Elastigirl while he watches reports of her exploits on the television (on every channel he flicks through) points to the operativeness of other classic mise-en-scène elements, specifically décor. As was noted online,[3] the abstract painting in the background of many of Elastigirl’s shots (Fig. 8) can be seen as underlining her current separation from the family. Though the relationship of blocks to family members is not exact, certainly the thickest, heaviest block on the left could stand for Mr Incredible (there with his children), with Elastigirl as separate to the far right. This is an abstract figuration of and commentary on what the editing and filming strategies otherwise make apparent.

This way of filming the phone conversation also centralises performance (and performance within performance) as in a particularly expressive relation with the reality the camera otherwise presents to us. Clearly, “performance” within the field of animation is a particularly complex issue but the complexity of its layering here seems in perfect harmony with the scene’s concerns (in the best traditions of classical Hollywood mise-en-scène). When, for example, we see Mr Incredible prepare himself to say, “That’s fantastic, honey!” (Fig. 7 again), the extreme tension of his expression (eyes that bit too wide) is heard in his voice (one can hear the clenching of Craig T. Nelson’s jaw and the animators have the screen characters teeth clenched as he speaks), but to a degree that we can read it as perfectly credible that Elastigirl would not hear, without these visual cues, his disingenuousness.

In the above, I have deliberately chosen a scene that, though at a modern pace (ASL = 3.4 seconds), is, in its domestic or everyday settings (a kitchen, a living and a hotel room), visually unassuming.  “Intensified mise-en-scène” might have more obvious rhetorical force when applied to certain moments where space and its scale are lent an almost thematic significance: for example, the seemingly infinite elevated conveyors of doors in Monsters Inc and the almost as overwhelming luggage conveyor belts at the climax of Toy Story 2; in the latter film, the distance between the high-rise apartment where Woody is being kept and Andy’s house is repeatedly emphasised in cuts and camera movements; in the original Toy Story, the distance between Sid and Andy’s homes is similarly dramatised (across the 4 Toy Story films, space has become noticeably expanded but individual spaces retain their dramatic importance – cf the antiques shop in the latest 2019 instalment); see also Sunnyside as an elaborately constructed prison camp in Toy Story 3, which grounds the film’s deft pastiching of prison break/POW movies. As an often “action-packed” superhero film, Incredibles 2 has scenes that expand space in highly dynamic and fantastical ways. I am thinking particularly of the fight between Violet and Voyd (Sophia Bush) while the latter is under the control of the villainous Screenslaver near the end of the film. Voyd’s superpower is the ability to create portals in space and the action scene makes use of animation’s capacity to easily manipulate the laws of physics – Voyd can move from one space to another at a whim. However, the great pleasures of the Incredibles films (and I take the original 2004 film to be more fully satisfactory in this) is the relationship and thematic tension between the familiar/mundane domestic drama and the global jeopardy and action of the world of “supers” played across and within shots and scenes.

By way of a final disclaimer, I should note that this exploratory work has made no engagement with debates about mise-en-scène within animation as a broader form. While I am certainly claiming to be saying something about this and these animated films, I am not making any claims about animated film more generally. Indeed, I might only be saying something broader about live-action films. Or, at least, what live-action films regularly lack. Because, arguably, what 21st century live action cinema may sometimes clumsily pastiche (see Bordwell 2006b, and I would add to Bordwell’s example the poor attempts to replicate classical Hollywood films within 2015’s Trumbo and 2016’s Hail, Caesar!), Pixar have thoroughly absorbed: at a modern pace but with a deftness and precision and intensity of expressive force, that scene from Incredibles 2 (and many other Pixar examples besides) makes “spatial relationships… human relationships in metaphor” (Durgnat quoted in Gibbs 2005: 63) in a way that reminds me of classical Hollywood mise-en-scène.

Thank you to the participants of my university’s “KCLose Analysis group”, especially Christopher Holliday.

**Article published: February 14, 2020**

Notes

[1] David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985) is the formative text in this area. See my reflection on this heritage in Spectacle in "Classical" Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s (2015).

[2] Adopting here Holliday’s (2018) definition of computer animated features as a “genre”.

[3] This was pointed out to me by Christopher Holliday during “KCLose Analysis”.

References

Bordwell, David & Janet Staiger & Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Bordwell, David. 2006a. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. London: University of California Press.

Bordwell, David. 2006b. “Not back to the future, but ahead to the past”, Observations on Film Art (2006b), available at: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2006/11/12/not-back-to-the-future-but-ahead-to-the-past/.

Brown, Tom. 2015. Spectacle in "Classical" Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s. New York: Routledge.

Burkeman, Oliver. 2004. “How Pixar Conquered the Planet”, The Guardian (November 12, 2004), available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/nov/12/3.

Gibbs John. 2002. Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation. London: Wallflower Press.

Holliday, Christopher. 2018. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Pye, Douglas. 2000. “Movies and Point of View,” Movie 36: 2-34.

Cinemetrics: cinemetrics.lv/ last accessed 07/11/2019.

Biography

Tom Brown is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London. His research focuses primarily on the rhetoric of mainstream and "classical" cinemas, including film spectacle, historical representation and performance. His most recent publication is "Don't Curb Your Enthusiasm: Visible Bonhomie and the Ontology of Improvisational Comedy" in Donaldson and Walters (eds), Television Performance (2019).