A great many people are hotly anticipating Brad Bird's return to the world of both animation and
The Incredibles this June. Some, however, were upset to learn that the upcoming sequel would begin directly after the end of the original 2004 PIXAR film. It was hoped that after the lengthy 14 years of wait time for a sequel, we would also be given an in-world time jump to a new comic book age aesthetic and to see Jack Jack as a teenager.
Speaking to
ScreenRant the
Tomorrowland director revealed that it is exactly for that latter point, that he chose not to jump ahead in time:
Men are always expected to be strong, so I had Bob have super strength. Mothers are always pulled in a million different directions, so I had her be elastic. Teenagers are insecure and defensive, so I had Violet have force fields and invisibility. Ten-year-olds are energy balls that can’t be stopped. And babies are unknowns. Maybe they have no powers, maybe they have all powers – we don’t know. That’s what Jack-Jack was; he was seemingly the most normal one in the family and then at the end of Incredibles, you find out he’s a wild card and he’s sort of the Swiss army knife of powers. And that reminds me of the way babies can grasp language really easily and adapt them easily. That idea changes if you age the characters up and the insight into those periods of your life and those particular perspectives disappear once you age them up. I’m not interested in a college-aged Jack Jack, I’m just not.
It's a fair enough point and is as always, a testament to Pixar storytelling that character and theme is at the forefront of creative decisions. What's more, with Brad Bird saying for years that the reason he didn't make a sequel was that he didn't have an interesting or worthy enough story, it bodes well that
The Incredibles 2 will live up to its name.
What do you think? Were you looking forward to a time-jump for the sequel? What do you think of Brad Bird's reasoning? Leave your thoughts below.