Incredible Silhouette

In the immortal words of Syndrome, "Aw man, I'm STILL geeking out!"

As promised in last week's post, I searched the movie The Incredibles for a confusing shot, in order to test my theory on the clean-confusing-clean combination that worked for Kung Fu Panda's close combat fighting.

I thought the sequence of Mr. Incredible fighting the first version of the omnidroid would be a good sequence - it was a one-on-one fight, with two bulky characters with close combat fighting styles, much like Kung Fu Panda. However, the character design thwarted me at this point; while Mr. Incredible was fairly bulky, the long arms and claws on the omnidroid allowed it to keep it's round body away from the action, while still allowing a good grappling shape around Mr. Incredible's hulking form.


The next scene I thought of was where the four were reunited - surely with the four of them running about, with no colour-contrast to distinguish them, as well as tons of grey-clad grunts running around. All that chaos simply must clog up the scene, right?
Once again, shock and amazement! Clean and clear! The only shot where any two characters overlapped was still a clear shot, whereupon Elastagirl jumped into the scene to where Violet was standing, serving only to leave the scene just as balanced as it had been before.


But lo and behold! One shot in the movie jumped out as crowded! As the company run towards their home, in fear of JakJak's safety, the movie displays the sequencing that I had seen in Kung Fu Panda - a clear shot of them leaping from the car and across their front yard, followed by the lone crowded shot from behind as they all pile through the front door. Then they part, revealing a(once more) clean silhouetted shot of Syndrome holding JakJak, which cuts to a clearer shot establishing them, frozen by Syndrome's ring on one side of the room, and Syndrome and JakJak in the foreground.
This results in a shot organization like so:


To conclude, I should have known better than to question the storyboarding mastery of Pixar's geniuses.
And as a footnote, I'd like to apologize for the pun in the title. Sometimes I don't even know I'm doing it anymore!