This post contains MILD SPOILERS for Incredibles 2
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Incredibles 2 director Brad Bird and his creative team didn’t have many limits when it came to designing Jack-Jack’s powers. At the end of the first film, audiences learned the Parr’s youngest child had abilities of his own, but that remained a secret from the family until the sequel. With Mr. Incredible already overwhelmed by Violet’s dating problems and Dash’s new math homework, he found himself way over his head when he discovered Jack-Jack is a special case known as a polymorph. This means the baby has a wide variety of powers he can call upon for any situation.
At various points in the film, we see Jack-Jack walk through walls, teleport to another dimension, transform into a demon baby, and multiply - just to name a few. There’s no denying there was great comedy in seeing Bob Parr completely flummoxed by his toddler, but some might have been concerned that Pixar took things a bit too far with Jack-Jack. Initially, Bird wanted to keep things under control a bit, but found that very hard to do as Incredibles 2 progressed through development.
Back in April, Screen Rant had the opportunity to visit Pixar for an Incredibles 2 press day, where we attended a press conference with Bird. The director was asked about creating Jack-Jack’s cornucopia of powers, admitting that there weren’t too many limits with what they could do:
It’s hard to argue against the results from Bird’s approach. Not only was Incredibles 2 another critically acclaimed Pixar offering, it soared past its box office expectations and shattered records in its opening. Jack-Jack definitely was a scene-stealer and a huge part of the film’s success. Sometimes, giving a character virtually unlimited powers runs the risk of becoming boring, but that was far from the case here. Because Jack-Jack is a baby with no real control over his abilities, there were plenty of laughs to be had as audiences relished in something that hasn’t been seen in many mainstream superhero films. Besides Baby Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, there aren’t many toddlers running amuck in these movies, so Jack-Jack was a fresh and exciting element.
Really, the first limitations would go to the story team. When I was saying, “Here’s this scene, here’s this scene. Now, let’s explore it visually.” And I didn’t put a lot of limits on them initially, so they started doing everything. I think that we started to go, “Alright, we gotta settle down a little bit towards act three. We don’t want to have any new powers in act three.” And then we got into act three and there were a few points where, “Oh, it’d be really cool if we had one more new power here.” So, we kinda told ourselves to stay strictly on our diet and we kinda broke it a couple of times. We didn’t have a lot of limitations. We tried to treat this very unrealistic world, tried to pepper in realism in terms of what people think, how they react to having powers.
Bird famously prefers original programming to sequels, so it’ll be interesting to see if an Incredibles 3 ever comes to light. If Pixar decides to move forth on another installment in this series, Jack-Jack will almost certainly come back so the filmmakers can further explore his development as a super. A time jump would probably best serve the character, especially since we’ve already seen what the super baby is capable of. Presenting Jack-Jack with a new set of challenges could be interesting, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
