Showing off a 3D-animated human

was a groundbreaking achievement at the time,

but he clearly lacks details when compared to someone

like Dash from 2018's "Incredibles 2."

His freckles are way more prominent,

his long hair is less stiff,

and his expressions are more noticeable.

Humans have always been a challenging obstacle for Pixar,

and getting from 1995's Andy

to where we are today took its animators years

and countless simulations to master all the elements

that make up a person:

hair,

skin,

[Mr. Incredible grunting]

muscles,

and movement.

[Carl groaning]

When Pixar embarked on its first feature-length film,

it still had work to do to figure out

how to make 3D-animated human characters.

When animators tried,

some of their digital models came out stiff,

so they came up with some

creative solutions where they could.

Lighting was one clever way to hide those imperfections,

shrouding human characters in darkness,

like in this scene at Pizza Planet.

But in order to avoid showing bodies completely,

they staged many shots so you could only see feet and hands,

like this shot of Andy's mom walking in the room.

Creating a variety of different people

of all shapes and sizes,

and especially the clothes that they would wear,

was especially time consuming.

So instead of customizing every individual,

they Frankensteined it,

copying body parts from some humans

and creating new humans out of those parts,

while changing little bits and pieces

of their physical appearance.

But even in that first feature film,

they did have an early breakthrough.

Animators needed to distinguish between

the look of the toys and the look of the humans.

One way to do this was through movement.

Head animator Pete Docter observed, for example,

that Woody was floppy and loose.

Therefore, he would have quicker movements.

On the other hand, humans were bigger and heavier,

meaning they had to slow their movements down.

1997 "Geri's Game" was the first Pixar project

to feature a human character as its lead.

This four-and-a-half-minute short

was basically an experiment.

One of the most prominent features

to focus on for Geri was his skin.

Human skin needs to be smooth.

Prior to "Geri's Game," human models were built in patches.

Skin sometimes came out looking more plastic.

This is where math came to the rescue.

Enter the subdivision technique,

which is when an animator subdivides a hard-edged shape

enough times that it becomes a soft and smooth surface.

Thanks to subdivision, Geri's hand looks much smoother,

like a human hand should.

This method has been used on every Pixar movie since,

smoothing out everything from humans to bugs to buildings.

That work allowed Andy and the rest of the human characters

to spend less time in the shadows

in 1999's "Toy Story 2."

Another tool that pulled humans out of the shadows

was a RenderMan shader.

This let animators paint on details

to the basic character renderings

like pores, veins, and blotches.

There is no better example of this advance

than toy collector Al.

You can see the skin imperfections on his face

and even a 5 o'clock shadow.

And this shader tool would be used all the time.

It's how they made sure Mamá Coco

had such distinct facial details

compared to other characters in "Coco,"

but we didn't see that until 2017.

At the precipice of the new millennium,

Pixar was inching closer to giving animated humans

even more screen time.

[television crashes]

Boo: Uh-oh.

[Mike and Sulley screaming]

Narrator: There were still a few hoops to jump through,

which you can see in 2001's "Monsters, Inc."

One of the biggest issues with human characters

continued to be their clothes.

Boo, the movie's only human character,

wears a big flowy shirt.

Prior to "Monsters, Inc.," characters wore clothes

that moved automatically with them.

A new simulator called Fizt enabled them

to animate Boo and her shirt separately.

Look at how much more natural

the movement of Boo's shirt looks

compared to Sid's sister's shirt

in this moment from "Toy Story,"

where the shirt barely moves as she does.

And while Fizt allowed for both better clothing

and all the fur you see on Sulley,

it couldn't do everything.

Director Pete Docter wanted to give Boo long hair,

but to do that, the animators would have had to animate

in pieces instead of in one block.

So to save them the trouble, they gave her pigtails instead,

which were easier to manage.

Now that Pixar could create skin and make clothes move,

it was time to make a feature-length movie

entirely populated by human characters

in the form of 2004's "The Incredibles."

One of the first tasks?

Conquering long hair.

Director Brad Bird insisted Violet have the long hair

that Boo didn't have.

Animators already had to deal with a lot of hair collisions

on a normal head of hair,

so you can imagine how much they dealt with it for Violet,

especially with how many different situations

she finds herself in

and all the times she plays with her hair.

The team developed a core simulation engine

that handled all the collisions caused by long hair

while keeping it moving and flowing,

as well as the tools that gave animators more control

over the placement and velocity of her hair.

Figuring out how to properly animate and then render

Violet's signature hair took six months of work,

but Violet wasn't the only character pushing the way

Pixar physically builds humans.

Mr. Incredible is all muscle,

and none of Pixar's human characters resembled him.

For that reason, animators used a software called Goo,

which allows the skin to react

to moving and sliding muscles,

making a character's movement look a lot more natural.

While many of the developments created

for the making of "The Incredibles"

were specific for certain characters,

the studio wasn't done perfecting the look of human skin.

See, human skin is actually somewhat transparent.

Some light needs to go through the skin, scatter around,

and then reflect back.

If the skin looks too solid and no light gets in,

it won't look natural.

So animators used subsurface scattering to render skin.

With subsurface scattering applied,

skin no longer just looked like a rigid surface.

They actually found inspiration for the skin

in an unlikely place.

The tools used to make the "Finding Nemo" fish

look translucent were used to scatter light

off the skin of humans here.

But with these advancements, the studio never forgot

that the skin couldn't look too realistic,

despite the capabilities that the shader

and the subsurface scattering now allowed.

If a human were to look too real,

then they would enter into the realm

of the disturbing uncanny valley.

So while details like follicles and pores

could have been added, they were purposely left out.

Pixar has been able to build convincing humans

that don't follow all the basic rules of human anatomy

throughout the years.

For example, Carl Fredricksen from 2009's "Up."

His head was deliberately designed

to have massive, boxy proportions,

and instead of adding every tiny skin detail,

they focused on the most defining wrinkles

in an old man's face.

Skin and bone aren't the only things that make up a human.

Pixar constantly strived to make humans more expressive.

By the time "Ratatouille" was in the works,

Pixar would have 150 controls just on a character's face.

These controls allowed for the varying movement speeds

between toys and humans in "Toy Story"

and got even more sophisticated over the years,

granting animators the ability to slow down

and minimize the movements of an elderly character

like Carl in "Up."

Control points also allow for the complex expressions

of a character like Chef Skinner,

as well as more subtle and varied body motions,

like Linguini's slapstick movements.

Meanwhile, Violet's long hair paved the way for Colette,

who had 176,030 hairs on her head.

Advanced simulations had to be applied

to make sure strands would not merge into each other.

Despite the sophistication of Colette's hair,

Pixar still had hair challenges,

specifically mastering curly hair.

According to Pixar's chief technology officer, Steve May,

curly hair needs to be soft

while still holding a curly shape.

So in 2009, simulation supervisor Claudia Chung

and her team developed a new simulator

called Taz for 2012's "Brave,"

which built Merida's hair as coil-like locks

to imitate the movement of real curly hair.

But the curls would completely unwind,

so the animators added invisible core springs

underneath them, allowing the locks

to move with more control.

The better Pixar's animators got at creating humans,

the easier it was for them to play around with their form

and literally deconstruct them.

2017's "Coco" features a cast of skeleton characters

that were based on humans.

Animators were able to use the same rigs

they would use for humans covered in flesh and muscle,

but with some changes, as the bones needed to move

in ways that you wouldn't normally see

in human characters.

For one, the skeletons were able to detach their bones,

so the rigs were altered to allow for this.

A tool called Kingpin made the bones appear looser

by adding jiggle to them, which you can see here.

Pixar then put all the skin and muscle back on

for "Incredibles 2,"

a sequel 14 years in the making.

Even with all the strides made back in 2004

with the first "Incredibles,"

there was still so much more that Brad Bird

and the animation team wanted to improve on.

When the first movie came out,

they didn't have the ability to get every single detail

from the original clay sculpts of the characters.

Now they could.

Just look at the difference between Jack-Jack

in the two movies.

This is partially because for the first time ever,

Pixar was able to base the characters' eyes

off real human eyes.

Sure, the eyes are still bigger and more stylized

than normal, but just look at this shot of Dash.

The eyes are less circular

and more of an oval when opened wide.

Meanwhile, creating and rendering Violet's long hair

was easier now than it was in 2004,

and even more free-flowing here.

And speaking of hair,

there were further hair breakthroughs.

In the past, animators would only be able to work

with scant guide strands of hairs,

just guessing what the finalized hair would look like.

That would have made it tough to animate Elastigirl

on her motorcycle as her hair flows in the wind,