23 November 2004

Not the kind of design I do

I caught The Incredibles last week and it's as fun as everyone says.

It's strange to say this about a movie with no real props or sets, but one of my favorite parts of the picture is the production design, which an article in Design Observer describes delightfully.

Arriving at the estate of Edna Mode, visitors are led up a manicured hillside to an International Style house of uncertain provenance. Edna’s diminutive size (she admits to three-foot-eight) makes the scale of her minimally furnished home seem even more preposterous: from the Miesian lobby to the Bulthaup-inspired industrial kitchen (and let's not forget the George Nelson benches) it’s an aesthetic travesty: design beyond reach. Edna herself is a kind of cross between the diminutive actress Linda Hunt and the design impresario Murray Moss --- with dashes of Anna Wintour and Edith Head thrown in for good measure. In Edna’s domain, design manifests as a kind of Napoleonic obsession. A devout minimalist permanently clad in monochromatic shades of black and grey, she’s the ultimate cartoon embodiment of design.
Though it's strange that the article misses how much of Carrie Donovan there is Ms. Mode.

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