Violet Parr’s powers to disappear mirror her emotional state. © 2004 Disney Enterprises Inc./Pixar Animation Studios.

This is an important point and one that can add a great deal of animated value to a film but, in this case, I find it’s just another underdeveloped potential that adds to the feeling that The Incredibles could and should have been more at every level.

Now we turned to the key area of performance where, of course, I wanted to hear Landreth’s opinion about CG character animation, realism and classical technique.

The standard wisdom in commercial and educational circles, these days, is that the strongest foundation for creating believable characters in CG is still the 12 principles of 2D classical animation. These groundbreaking fundamentals, which include such concepts as stretch and squash, anticipation and the use of arcs, were developed by Disney animators in the 1930s to give their drawn animated characters more life. But is this really the best and only approach for CG?

Landreth, who came into animation through a side door instead of through the usual animation schools and studio apprenticeships, certainly challenges this idea and has been adamant about exploring other paths — ones that don’t follow the old rules to the letter. Up for re-examination are the use of gesture and exaggeration and the whole pose-to-pose approach.

Take, for example, the idea of ambiguity. Landreth explains that 2D classical technique is based on clarity of gesture and emotion from one pose to the next. So if a character is supposed to be sad, the face and body posture should convey a united front of sadness. But though emotionally clear, the end result of this approach is stagy and the lack of ambiguity actually gets in the way of creating realistic, original CG performance.

Are the principles the only problem here or do technical limitations also get in the way of creating subtle performance with CG characters?

“Look at a film like Final Fantasy,” Landreth says, “The problem there is not a lack of controls, in, say, the face. I’ve seen the rigs for a lot of these characters and they are immensely complex. It’s a relatively straightforward thing to add tons of controls, which can make anything happen to the face. If anything, a 3D animator has way more controls than he needs, rather than not enough.”

Where the 2D mentality sets in, then, is in how the animator chooses to use those controls and how he/she approaches them technically. For example, a lot of the animators on Ryan liked using dope sheets because they make it very easy to break down the individual motions in a character. But that is part of the posy approach, which Landreth was trying to get away from.

Ultimately, Landreth succeeded in weaning his animators off the dope sheets. Instead he encouraged them to use the graph editor — a more left-brain way to look at the animation — and from that to gain a better understanding of waveform. “People don’t move in curves,” says Landreth, “Their nerves impulsively fire off a muscle contraction and that means that motions begin with an abrupt twitch and then trail off. The pattern looks like a shark fin instead of a smooth arc.” And then, because there is also muscle, there is momentum, follow through, mass etc. to be accounted for.

He also encouraged his animators into giving individual characteristics to different parts of the body. And into working with straight ahead animation, rather than laying out timed poses and then defining where the inbetweens are, which tends to create a very cartoony acting style — one gesture per accent of dialogue, no ambiguity allowed.

The results of these changes were spectacular, exceeding even Landreth’s own expectations. But the roots of this success go back a few years, to the late `90s when Landreth immersed himself in a study of the human body: how it was structured, how it moved, how it expressed emotion. The key to this was the detail that Landreth went into. Interestingly, this was exactly the kind of detail that classical animators learned to leave out in order to make actions and emotions read more clearly in 2D.

So Landreth studied finger movements and noticed the shark fin patterns they created. And he studied the performances of great film actors to understand the role that tiny facial muscles play in expressing the subtleties of emotion. I’ll never forget the time he came out to a class I was teaching at Sheridan, in the midst of this study and had us all staring intently at Dustin Hoffman’s chin, watching how an almost invisible muscle would begin to pull downward as Hoffman’s tension increased.