Incredibles 3’s new director raises some early concerns about where Pixar is headed

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news Tuesday that Pixar Animation Studios is going through with a new sequel to 2004’s The Incredibles, but that Incredibles and Incredibles 2 writer-director Brad Bird won’t be at the helm. The movie, first announced at Disney’s D23 expo in 2024, will instead be directed by Peter Sohn, a Pixar animation and voice veteran who made his directorial debut with the short “Partly Cloudy” in 2009, and went on to head up 2015’s The Good Dinosaur and 2023’s Elemental.

It’s unclear whether or how Bird will be involved with the film. At D23, Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter (director of Up, Inside Out, and Soul) said Bird was “developing” the movie, but the THR report had no further information about his current involvement. It did note that Bird is currently busy with pre-production on the science fiction movie Ray Gunn at Skydance Animation, the company where Pixar chief John Lasseter landed after sexual misconduct accusations led to him leaving Pixar.

Sohn heading up The Incredibles 3 isn’t inherently a problem. The Good Dinosaur is arguably Pixar’s least emotionally satisfying and evocative movie, but that may have been inevitable after its significant mid-production retreads, with Sohn promoted to take over from original director Bob Peterson. Elemental, for its part, is a crowded movie that may be trying to do too much. But both movies are gorgeous, featuring some of Pixar’s most evocative and impressive animation, and Elemental in particular found its audience over time, lingering in theaters for four months and becoming a stealth hit. Also, I’m a big fan of not wildly speculating about or getting outraged over possible directions for movies that no one’s seen yet — or in this case, that hasn’t been made yet.

That said, there’s something just a little dispiriting about Sohn’s next project being a sequel to Bird’s signature series, and how that reflects on both directors, and on the current state of Pixar itself. One of the things that most defined Pixar Animation in the days of its ascendance over all other animation studios was the mandate for directors to find personal angles into their work: Andrew Stanton based Finding Nemo on his own overprotective urges toward his son. Docter made Inside Out to reflect his experiences with his own daughter. Bird based The Incredibles on his own struggles with middle age and balancing artistic ambition and his family life.

Dig into most Pixar movies, and you’ll find stories like these, all the way up to recent releases like Turning Red (very much a personal story for director Domee Shi) and Sohn’s Elemental, inspired by his parents’ immigration story. Personal investment and personal storytelling has been a major part of Pixar movies for decades. One of my all-time favorite Pixar interviews was talking to Sanjay’s Super Team! director Sanjay Patel about how Lasseter in particular pushed him to overcome his shyness and put his own family history and relationship with his father into that short.

So learning that one of Pixar’s brain trust is going to take over another member’s signature series is just the smallest bit deflating, because I have to wonder: How is Sohn going to make this story his own, particularly if he’s directing from someone else’s script? One of the primary things that makes the original Incredibles so powerful is the deep, understandable well of frustration and dissatisfaction Mr. Incredible is navigating over the collapse of his superhero career — emotions Bird took from his own life. One of the primary things that makes Elemental land is Sohn’s sensitivity in exploring what his own parents went through in navigating prejudice, culture shock, and assimilation. Putting Bird’s series into someone else’s hands just to get a sequel out faster doesn’t seem like a recipe for that kind of personal engagement.

There may well be ways for Sohn to relate to the Incredibles series and own it; there may be a way for Bird or other members of the brain trust to put themselves into Incredibles 3 in a meaningful way. Pixar has navigated these waters recently with Inside Out 2, with director Kelsey Mann taking over from Docter as a writer-director, and not only drawing on personal family experience, but also bringing in a team of teenage girls to vet the film for emotional and factual authenticity.

But given that the best things at Pixar always seem to happen when creators are allowed to find fantastical, imaginative ways to tell their own personal stories, it’s just a little discomfiting to see their visions packed off into other hands. There’s certainly plenty of time for the studio to develop Incredibles 3 and find an angle that feels meaningful for it; the release doesn’t even have a projected date yet. Let’s hope Pixar — and Sohn, and Bird if he’s still involved — use that time to find a new Incredibles story that feels like it really belongs to the person who’s now assigned to make it.

And if nothing else, let’s hope Brad Bird comes back to continue his role as the voice of endlessly snippy superhero costume designer Edna Mode. Where would an Incredibles movie be without a word from Edna?