Also from Mark Cotta Vaz is an art-of book for the new blockbuster from Disney/Pixar, or is it Pixar/Disney, or maybe Costello/Abbott, or perhaps Allen/Burns? I keep thinking Pixar makes Pixarís films, but then that word order thing keeps tripping me up.

Brad Bird got screwed in 1999. He got screwed because he directed one of the best films that came out that year, The Iron Giant, and nobody went to see it, because Warner Bros. didn’t pay to promote it, because the animation division was in the toilet, because Quest for Camelot failed the previous year, because… and so on, following a line of great showbiz bummers going back to David and Goliath, which didn’t turn out the way the promoters expected at all.

Now, with Disney’s monster marketing machine beneath him and the talent and clout of the world’s hottest animation studio behind him, I am delighted to report that Brad Bird is guaranteed to kick ass all over the place thanks to his movie, The Incredibles, the latest passion project from Pixar. Meanwhile The Art of The Incredibles illuminates Bird’s computer-generated behemoth in the way it shows the two-dimensional origins of what was intended, in 1998, to be a traditionally-animated feature.

The Incredibles came to be in a three-dimensional idiom, not intending to simulate documentary reality but straddling a line between photorealism and cartoons. While you can sense from the film itself that these 3D figures are borne of cartoon archetypes, the actual evidence is here in the book: early drawings of Edna Mode, Bob Parr and Syndrome carry the textures and flourishes of the finished characters in the form of only of a few lines or snips of paper cut from magazines.

The book is dominated by collages from character designer Teddy Newton; gouache drawings by Lou Romano, production designer; and pencil and marker drawings by animation supervisor Tony Fucile. Highlights for fans will surely include a 1998 drawing by Lou Romano depicting the whole Parr family. What’s amazing about this unique image, drawn two years before the film went into production, is that four of five family members look virtually the same here as they do in the final film. Six years and a million story changes and yet these character designs haven’t budged. There is also a complete color script from the film in a giant double foldout at the center of the book.

With nearly all story references carefully eliminated, this becomes a picture book that, at least for those who haven’t seen the film, can veer in many different directions. Sketches of abandoned characters and scenes share spreads with finely rendered cartoons that you might mistakenly think have been licensed back from the pages of The New Yorker. All told, in a season overflowing with movie tie-in literature, for any serious student of the art form, The Art of The Incredibles is a must-have. (Full disclosure: I do occasional transcription for Buena Vista Pictures Marketing.)

The Art of The Polar Express by Mark Cotta Vaz and Steve Starkey with an introduction by Robert Zemeckis. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004. 144 pages. ISBN: 0-8118-4659-8. $40.00

The Art of The Incredibles by Mark Cotta Vaz with forewords by John Lasseter and Brad Bird. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004. 160 pages. ISBN: 0-8118-4433-1. $40.00.

Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. His column, Fresh from the Festivals appears monthly in Animation World Magazine. He is also an inventor, although his idea for a bleaching pen for highlighting on yellow legal pads didn’t work out and he has subsequently moved on to temporary iron-on nose tattoos.