We're only a week away from the opening of Pixar's latest animated extravaganza, The Incredibles [trailers: WM, Real, QuickTime].

Writer-director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant) and the Academy Award winning team behind Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo bring the story of an unusual family:

Once one of the world's top masked crimefighters, Bob Parr (AKA Mr. Incredible) fought evil and saved lives on a daily basis, but fifteen years later, he and his wife Helen (a famous former superhero in her own right) have been forced to take on civilian identities and retreat to the suburbs. Today they live as mere mortals and lead all-too-ordinary lives with their children, who go out of their way to appear "normal."

As a clock-punching insurance man, the only thing Bob fights these days is boredom and a bulging waistline. Itching for action, the sidelined superhero gets his chance when a mysterious communication summons him to a remote island for a top-secret assignment. Now, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the family must come together and once again find the "fantastic" in their family life, or something of that nature.

Writer-director Bird talks about the film, his first for Pixar:

Q: How did you hook up with Pixar?

A: They liked Iron Giant a lot and it worked out. I went up there and pitched them The Incredibles and they said, "lets make it." What was really surprising about the company was that ... instead of saying, "we got it all figured out, and if you want to come up, here are the ten things you have to put in your story, and dadadada, we have the formula down, we rock, you don't."

Instead of saying that they said "we are only afraid of one thing and that is becoming complacent, we always want to throw ourselves off base, off balance, because it will force us to continuously grow and we want to try different kinds of films." They were kind of inviting me to come in do it differently, which I thought was incredibly amazing when they had had nothing but success doing it the way they were doing it.

It was wonderful because I have been fired for shaking things up but I have never actually been hired for it, and this was with the full complicity with the heads of the company, John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, and Steve Jobs.

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