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“But I had a blast doing the first Incredibles and I always intended to come back.”

Before the Parr family makes their return to theatres this Friday, we caught up with Bird to talk about his decision not to age-up his heroes, movie magic and how long we’ll have to wait for TheIncredibles 3.

The Incredibles 2 kicks off shortly after the end of part one. We’ve all aged 14 years, why didn’t you want to have the Parrs age too?

One of the notions of the first film was I wasn’t interested in superpowers as superpowers, I was using them to comment on the family and the different parts of your life that you go through. Men are expected to be strong, so I had dad be super strong. Mothers are pulled in 10 different directions at once, so I had her be elastic. Teenagers are defensive and insecure, so I had Violent be invisible with force fields. Ten-year-old boys want to push every button and open every door that they see, and babies are unknowns. If you age them up, it just becomes superpowers and it’s no longer interesting to me.

In your real-world films, you’ve done some amazing sequences. How did directing Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible or George Clooney in Tomorrowland impact what you wanted to try in Incredibles 2?

Even before I did live-action, people were saying — I sound like Trump now, ‘Who are these people?’ (laughs) — some of my peers said that my animated films were staged more like live-action films. I took that as a compliment. It wasn’t hard for me to make the move from animation to live-action in the sense of imagining the shots. They’re still the same medium. Sets have to be designed, just as they do in a live-action film. You have all the same questions, it’s just how you answer them — the technique — is a little different.