The Incredibles at 20: 10 things you didn’t know about Pixar’s superhero classic

“No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again."

The Incredibles celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. Pixar has been a hit factory for the majority of the studio’s existence, pumping out classic after classic since the 1990s. There are countless rankings across the web to be passionately argued over (including this one), but you can be pretty sure The Incredibles will always be somewhere near the top.

It was Pixar’s sixth feature film, and the first to hire a director outside the company, Brad Bird. The film is set in a retro-futuristic fictional city in 1960s America and tells the story of a married couple of retired superheroes and their three children, trying to exist as regular civilians in a world that has rejected “Supers” and forced them to hide their powers.

The Incredibles is a loving homage to the comics and spy movies of the era and a cutting edge feat of computer animation. And it has more heart than most live action superhero films combined. The Incredibles feels as fresh today as it did back in the early 2000s, and to celebrate this landmark anniversary, we thought it would be fun to nerd out with 10 things you might not know about Pixar’s masterpiece.

1) It was the first Pixar film to put people front and centre

Prior to The Incredibles, Pixar films had mostly starred toys, insects and fish. While plenty of human characters appeared in the studio’s films, The Incredibles was its first movie with human protagonists and a human-led cast.

It remained a bit of an outlier in that sense for a while, too. The next three Pixar films were Cars, Ratatouille (plenty of humans in that one admittedly, but a rat was the star) and WALL-E. At the time, human beings were thought to be particularly difficult to convincingly animate using the emerging technology, which is probably why Pixar waited a while before making a film full of CGI superpeople.

2) Edna was voiced by the director

The Incredibles boasts no shortage of memorable characters, but none were so instantly iconic as Edna, the esteemed superhero stylist who designs costumes for the Parrs. Her eccentric personality and hilariously no-nonsense line delivery will have you reaching for your phone to find out who brought her to life.

Lily Tomlin was earmarked for the role, and several other actresses were reportedly in contention. But she didn’t end up lending her voice to the film. Edna was eventually played by none other than the film’s director, Brad Bird, after it became apparent during the auditioning process his co-workers wanted him to do it. And, in his own words, because he was cheap.

3) Despite the instant success of the film, we had to wait ages for a sequel

The Incredibles was not only a huge hit for Pixar, making more than $70m in its opening weekend, it also gave the superhero movie genre a much-needed shot in the arm. It remains one of the best original stories ever told about a group of people saving the world. You might be surprised to learn, then, the gap between the first film and its inevitable sequel was the largest in Pixar history.

Before The Incredibles came the first two Toy Story films, which were separated by just four years. Despite the commercial and critical success of The Incredibles, it would be 14 years until the arrival of Incredibles 2 — the follow-up that dropped the “The” for reasons we still don’t completely understand.

4) It was the first Pixar film to get a PG rating

The Incredibles was the first PG Pixar film, with the five that came before it all earning a G, or U in the UK, rating. That certificate was attributed to its “action violence”, and it was also definitely the first Pixar film to feature guns and some pretty weighty themes for what was ostensibly a kids movie. Since the end of the noughties more Pixar films have been PG-rated than not, but The Incredibles will always be the first.

5) It’s the only Pixar film that doesn’t feature the Pizza Planet truck

One of the best things about re-watching Pixar movies is hunting for the always plentiful Easter eggs the studio likes to sneak into its films. If you’re a dedicated Pixar-phile you’ll know the Toy Story Pizza Planet truck appears fleetingly in all but one Pixar flick, with that odd one out being The Incredibles.

As to as to why the iconic vehicle doesn’t show up, some fans speculate the film's 1960s setting means Pizza Planet does not exist yet. But it seems just as likely Brad Bird, understandably preoccupied with making a very expensive film for Pixar, simply forgot.

6) The actor who played Dash really committed to the bit

We’re not sure if Helen and Bob Parr were aware of their son’s powers when he was born, but if not, calling him Dash was one hell of a guess. The junior Incredible’s utilisation of his super speed makes for some of the film’s best moments. To really make it look and sound authentic, Brad Bird instructed Spencer Fox, who played Dash in the first film (the role was re-cast to Huckleberry Milner in Incredibles 2), to run real-life laps before recording his lines so he’d sound appropriately out of breath. It’s that kind of attention to detail that makes The Incredibles so great.

7) Brad Bird sat on the idea for years

Brad Bird’s feature film directorial debut, The Iron Giant, landed him his big gig with Pixar. While the 1999 animated classic tragically flopped at the box office, the critical reception was universally positive and the film’s reputation has only grown in the 25 years since.

In a 2005 IGN interview, Bird said he first had the idea for what would become The Incredibles long before The Iron Giant, as far back as 1993. He had to sit on it until he started talking to Pixar at the turn of the millennium. In the same interview, Bird also said he was initially told the film was too complicated and expensive to be made, due to requiring — in his own words — “too many characters, too many costume changes, too many effects, too many locations, too many sets.” Luckily, they got there in the end.

8) Bomb Voyage seemingly gave up a life of crime after the film

Despite his puntastic name, Bomb Voyage is not the main antagonist in The Incredibles, but he makes the most of his minimal screen time by playing a pretty major role in the plot of the film. As well as sharing a significant scene with the character who would go on to become the film’s big bad, Syndrome, the mime makeup-wearing explosives expert is also responsible for planting the bomb Mr. Incredible is unable to prevent from detonating, which ultimately leads to superheroes being outlawed.

Bomb Voyage doesn’t show up again in Incredibles 2, but he does appear fleetingly in Ratatouille (also directed by Brad Bird) a few years later as an actual street mime, in what is surely one of the best Pixar Easter eggs.

9) The Parr family’s appearance in Coco had us worried

Pixar has a long history of teasing its upcoming films in other movies, and the Parr family features in one of the more morbid examples. When Coco came out in 2017, we hadn’t seen nor heard from The Incredibles in years, but Pixar’s superpowered family can be seen on a poster in the Land of the Dead, implying that they also might be dead. As Incredibles 2 was the studio’s next film, this obviously turned out not to be true, but it was a cheeky (if grim) way to reintroduce them.

10) Its name-blending setting isn’t shy about its inspirations

Superman fans probably figured this one out years ago, but for everyone else, the fictional city of Metroville, where The Incredibles is set, appears to take its name from combining Metropolis and Smallville, the latter being the fictional Kansas-based hometown of Clark Kent, where he lives before becoming the Man of Steel and heading off to big city.

Unlike the DC locations that seemingly inspired it, Pixar never actually specifices where in America Metrovile is supposed to be, although the GPS location displayed on the homing device Edna plants in Bob’s suit - which his wife uses to locate and rescue him from Syndrome’s lair - looks a lot like San Fransisco’s Bay Area, near the real-life home of Pixar.