The Incredibles — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

The Pizza Planet truck from Toy Story has been smuggled into essentially every Pixar feature, and The Incredibles is the standing exception. Fans spent years theorising about why. Asked directly, Brad Bird gave the least mystical answer available: "I was busy making the movie. I didn't think about the Pizza Planet." The studio fixed it in the sequel — the truck is parked at the right of frame when Elastigirl and the Screenslaver crash out of a building in Incredibles 2, restyled to fit the mid-century look.

The film's most quotable character is voiced by Brad Bird himself. He had written the part with Lily Tomlin in mind and pitched it to her; after hearing him perform the voice while explaining the idea, Tomlin declined and told him he was already doing it better than she would. Directors voicing bit parts is common. Directors voicing the scene-stealer of their own film, at the recommendation of the actor they wanted, is not.

The mid-century spy sound of The Incredibles was meant to be the genuine article: John Barry, the composer of the classic Bond scores, was Pixar's first choice, and one trailer was cut to a re-recording of Barry's theme from On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Barry declined the film because he did not want to reproduce his own earlier work, and the job went to a then-little-known Michael Giacchino, whose score launched one of the biggest composing careers of the following two decades.

The most-quoted comic setpiece in the film is also its darkest piece of world-building. Edna's montage names Thunderhead, Stratogale, Meta Man, Dynaguy and Splashdown, each killed or trapped by their own cape — sucked into a turbine, caught in a lift, snagged on a missile fin. Five named superheroes die in about twenty seconds of comedy, which is how the film establishes that its universe has real casualties without ever staging a funeral.

Bomb Voyage, the French mime bank robber Mr. Incredible fights in the opening flashback, turns up three years later in Ratatouille — not as a criminal, but as an ordinary street mime performing in Paris. Both films are Brad Bird's, and moving a character between them without a word of acknowledgement is a director's private joke rather than a studio one. Fans have argued ever since about whether it is the same person retired, or simply the same face.

'The Incredits' were designed by Teddy Newton in the flat, geometric, hard-edged idiom of Saul Bass, the designer behind the titles for Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest. Newton has cited seeing Psycho's titles as formative. What makes the sequence more than pastiche is that it keeps building the world after the story has stopped: silhouetted supers pose through the credit roll, several of whom never appear in the film itself.

The street layout on the display in Mr. Incredible's car is drawn from the real roads around Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California — Park Avenue and its surroundings. Superhero cities are usually invented from scratch; putting the animators' own commute on the dashboard is the kind of detail that only exists to amuse the people who made it.