Went to the Disney preview/briefing today. The Incredibles looks quite good -- Holly Hunter sounds cool as Elastigirl (who has a great elastic setpiece involving evil henchmen, a long corridor and various sets of blast doors), and there's a great throwaway Cyclops reference via a superhero called "Gazerbeam". More than half the footage we saw was still in an animatic or untextured state, and was really interesting to watch, like the time I went to the Disney animation studios and saw bits of an unfinished feature film as pencil drawn animation, complete with soundtrack.
I was wrong about it being the last Disney Pixar film, though -- there's a John Lasseter film in the works called Cars that Disney are releasing in late 2005. What worries me about that project is its potential magnification of the usual Pixar anthropomorphism, but seemingly without any kind of angle or critical lens, which at least Toy Story and Monsters Inc attempted, with their musings on the subjectifying requirements of industrial civilization. But in Cars we have automobiles running tyre shops, a fancy that just doesn't wash with me. Just going on the premise (there wasn't any footage to see), it seems to be all the worst elements of Pixar -- the "whacky zany" Californianisms, the fetishisms, the conformism and the weakness for trite fables -- rolled into one picture.
Oh, and the non-Pixar stuff that Disney presented? Total tank-o-rama. Feh. Except for a fantastic short called Lorenzo, which was like some kind of Edgar Allan Poe story for cats.
